Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11

I love that story read to us this morning as our epistle lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, telling of Paul’s visit to Ephesus. The first people that he happens to run into are Christians. He asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?” They said, “We never even heard of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul must have slapped his forehead in despair, saying, “Do I have to do everything myself to get it right.” Then he asks, “What about when you were baptized?” Which is the clue that in the early Church, receiving the Holy Spirit was a part of the original act of baptism in the Church. So he says, “What about when you were baptized?” They said, “Well, we were baptized into John’s baptism.” Paul says, “Aha, that’s the problem. John’s baptism was for repentance.” Whereupon he laid hands upon them, and gave them what must have been a double dose of the Holy Spirit, considering their response, which was to prophesy and to speak in tongues.

Now I suppose that most of us are like those Ephesians. The idea of the Holy Spirit being with us is strange to us. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit?” “We haven’t even heard of the Holy Spirit.”

The fact that Paul links the gift of the Spirit to baptism means that baptism should include something about the Spirit. Here is the reason. We heard it in the gospel lesson read to us this morning from the Gospel of Mark, the story of the baptism of Jesus.

Jesus comes to the River Jordan where John is baptizing for the repentance of sins. Jesus goes into the water and is baptized. As he is coming out of the water, onto the shore, the heavens open and the Spirit descends like a dove. That doesn’t mean that the Spirit is a bird. It’s a metaphor, meaning as a dove descends quietly, gently, softly, so the Spirit came upon Jesus. And a voice said, “You are my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”

There you have it. The baptism of repentance by water; then the baptism of the Spirit, with the Spirit descending upon Jesus, and a voice saying, “This is my Son.” From the very beginning Christian baptism was to contain both. That is why Paul asked the Ephesians, “Didn’t you receive the Spirit when you were baptized?” because it was part of the sacrament of baptism from the very beginning.

But somebody is doing it wrong in Ephesus. They said, “We were baptized only in John’s baptism, the baptism of repentance.” So some people, even to this day, think that baptism is like John’s baptism, it’s just a baptism of repentance. That is why they think Christianity is essentially about judgment, trying to get people to shape up. Which is what John’s vocation was. John the Baptist came to get people to repent.

I had a call some years ago from a woman who said that she was having trouble with her son, and she just wanted to give me warning that she had told her son that if he doesn’t shape up, she is going to send him to Rev. Trotter. I asked, “What am I supposed to do with him?” What she expected was that the function of religion is to get people to shape up, to repent. She thinks, they must have their ways of doing that.

So one of the hardest things I have to do as a pastor is to convince people that Christian faith is not bad news, it’s supposed to be good news. And it is not essentially about judgment, it’s about grace. And certainly it is not about what we must do in order to make ourselves acceptable to God, it’s news about what God has already done for us out of God’s grace.

I tell you, it is very, very hard to get people to see that. To see that God wants you to have life in abundance, and he has taken the initiative in your life to make it possible for that to happen. And that is what baptism is really about. That is what baptism is trying to say. To preserve that meaning, we must baptize both by water and by the Holy Spirit.

We don’t know what happened at Ephesus, but we know what happened after that. How these two acts of the baptism, water and the Spirit, got separated. Baptism in time became associated with water alone. The Spirit’s blessing became the private possession of what are called “sectarian” churches, such as Pentecostals and Charismatics. It is a complicated history. But the important thing is that history is past. In our ritual now, and in all the rituals of the major churches in Christendom, the two are now united.

Baptism is done now the way Jesus instructed us to do it. I believe that he instructed us to do it this way because it replicated his own experience of baptism. Which was the water baptism followed by the Spirit’s blessing and a voice saying, “This is my Son; with whom I am well pleased.” And Jesus wants all of us to experience what he experienced. He wants all of us to experience the presence of the Spirit in our own lives.

It wasn’t until the 60’s that the Church rediscovered the importance of all of this in a very important ecumenical endeavor, including even Roman Catholics. It was a wonderful experience for the Church to rediscover that baptism was the initiation into the Church, and the foundation for understanding Christian life. But it wasn’t until the 1960’s that that was rediscovered.

Do you realize we have to say now that that was in the last century? The last century is where most of us lived our lives. The last century for me was always some dead guy’s century. The last century is now my century.

But in the 1960’s the change was made in the liturgy for baptism so that symbolically now we are baptized by water and by the Spirit. I want to say something this morning about the meaning of each of those acts.

First, we have been baptized by water. That means that by God’s grace we have been forgiven, and given a new beginning in our life.

Now that bothers a lot of people, and it did me, too, for a long time, that we baptize babies with that understanding of baptism. Little babies have not sinned. Nor do I believe that there is some taint transmitted by genetics that has to be removed by the miracle of holy water. I don’t believe that.

Nevertheless, when we baptize, in the prayer over the water, we pray for God “to bless this water, and those who receive it, to wash away their sins and to clothe them in righteousness all their days.” We can pray that because we believe that that is given to us as a promise. That is why baptism is called a covenant, because “covenant” means “promise.” It is God’s promise that he will forgive our sins and give us grace to begin our lives over again.

Now you may think that this sweet little baby will grow up to be as sweet and innocent at sixteen as she is now. But I tell you, something will happen. In fact her parents may discover that something happens long before she reaches sixteen.

To define baptism as “covenant” means that it is a promise of forgiveness to each one of us, before we have sinned. That is what is so wonderful about infant baptism, it illustrates dramatically that God takes the initiative in offering grace. God’s forgiveness is not based on something that we do, not on our repentance. God’s grace is given to us freely. Before we shape up, God has promised that he will forgive us and never stop loving us, and his love will bring us to repentance, to his forgiveness, and to new life.

That is why we don’t practice rebaptism. Because baptism is not something that we do. Baptism is God’s promise of forgiveness. It is a covenant of faithfulness, and God doesn’t break his promise. We break ours. We forget good resolutions. We yield to temptations. We slip back into bad habits. We do dumb and hurtful things. So we need to repent. But we don’t need to be baptized over again, because baptism is God’s promise to us that he will forgive us. So we need to remember our baptism and be thankful, and then renew our vows and receive his grace to begin again.

That is one half of the meaning of baptism. The other half is the confirmation of the Spirit, which is symbolized by the laying on of hands. The model again is our Lord’s baptism, who received the Spirit at the time of his baptism, and for whom receiving the Spirit meant empowerment and presence. That promise is as much a part of the covenant of baptism as forgiveness is. Christian faith is not only the promise of forgiveness of sins, it is the promise of God’s presence with us.

Most of us, I suspect, never expect to experience anything like that. That is because we have this thoroughly modern idea of ourselves. We think of ourselves as being alone, the creator of our own lives, and the re-creator of our lives whenever we want to. All this, we believe, is done by our own effort. This has been called the “heroic ego.” It means that my efforts got me all of this. My intelligence made all of this possible. The wonderfulness of myself is the reason that I am such a successful person.

Well there is a different understanding of human existence, and it is called “Providence.” It says that there is a power beyond our power, a reality beyond my existence, and there is a grace greater than my stumbling that guides me and continues to lead me. To be baptized by the Spirit is to believe that God not only grants me life in the first place, in creation, and gives me life over again repeatedly, but God is always with me, empowering me to live the kind of life God wants me to live.

There is a wonderful testimony to this in the writings of Reynolds Price, the North Carolina novelist, and professor at Duke. He wrote the special Christmas issue for Time Magazine last December. They asked him to write the story of Jesus using the latest archaeological and literary evidence, and his own imagination.

Reynolds Price contracted cancer of the spine some years ago. I remember when that happened, it was ten or fifteen years ago, a rare form of cancer. The prognosis was for a lot of pain and a short life. He was going to die soon. That was years ago now, and if anything, though in a wheel chair, he has had a renewal of life. He concluded the article in Time Magazine with his own personal testimony of the Spirit. He went through a spiritual experience during this illness.

At the conclusion of the article he wrote that the Christians claim that the resurrected Christ is with us. Which is another way of talking about the Spirit. The Spirit is the resurrected Christ with us. The Spirit is the same Spirit that was in Jesus. He says that he experienced the resurrected Christ. It happened to him this way. It was if he had been transported as in a dream back to the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He found himself on the shore asleep with the other disciples. Jesus appeared. He invited Reynolds to come into the waters of the lake, which means, this is going to be a baptism scene. Waist deep, he said he felt handfuls of water running down his spine, along where the wound was, where the surgeons had opened his body. Jesus said, “You sins are forgiven.” Disappointed, Price said, “That’s the last thing I need.” He asked Jesus, “Am I also cured?” He said, “That too.” Then Jesus turned and headed up the shore.

Price wrote that there had been many surgeries since then, and there has been a continuous life of pain, but the cancer has not returned. He said, “My life is more rewarding and productive than before that [baptism] in Galilee.”

He doesn’t fully understand what has happened to him, but he cannot deny it. It’s in his memory indelibly now, the unstinting mercy in Jesus’ face and in his eyes. Now, he said, he can understand the perennial appeal of Jesus’ words, “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. For I am lowly and meek in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

So, have you received the Holy Spirit?