Good morning, Friends! Today we’re going to roll up our sleeves and talk about a big subject – baptism.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that Quakers don’t baptize people. We don’t take people down to the creek. We don’t have a baptismal pool up here behind me. We don’t sprinkle babies. We just don’t do that thing.
A lot of people ask me why. Even people who are lifelong Quakers. A lot of our Christian neighbors. A lot of people who are looking for a new church to join. So, we all need to be able to explain it.
Let’s start by reading one of the basic stories about baptism in the gospel. You’ll find it in all four gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This version is from Luke.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, when Herod was king of Galilee, his brother Philip was king of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias was king of Abilene, when Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests in the Temple, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
John went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet:
“A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
And all people will see God’s salvation.’”John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You nest of poisonous snakes! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.
Don’t start saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that God can raise up children for Abraham out of these stones around you. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts, share with whoever has none, and anyone who has food, do the same.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”
“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.
Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”
The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah.
John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Luke 3:1-16
So, you’ve got four gospel writers, all telling this same story. Before Jesus even started teaching, his cousin John the Baptist was making a big splash. People came from all over to hear John preach. They thought he was one of the old-time prophets, come back to life again.
John said people needed to change their lives. John wasn’t afraid to call out sins, and tell people they needed to turn around. He said it wasn’t enough to feel sorry or guilty. People needed to change.
He called selfishness a sin. He called violence a sin. He called out corruption by government officials. He even called out the king, King Herod, and told people where Herod was going to.
John called a spade a spade. He didn’t hold back. And people were convicted by John’s message, and took it to heart. John said they had to change their lives, and do it NOW.
People came by the hundreds and thousands to listen to John. And as a symbol that they wanted to turn their lives around, John dipped them in the Jordan River.
The Jordan was the river you had to cross in order to get into the Holy Land. So, John’s baptism was a symbol that you wanted your old life to be washed away, and it was also a symbol that you were crossing from one country into another.
You were crossing from the kingdoms of this world, into the kingdom of God. You were crossing from the country of death into life. Your old life was being drowned and washed away. Your new life was on the other side.
John’s baptism wasn’t magic. You didn’t magically become a new person by being baptized. It was a symbol, a public sign, that you wanted to change, with all your heart, and live a new life, forever.
It was a really big deal. It was something people did with their eyes wide open. Mostly, adults were baptized, not children. It was a really serious thing.
One of the definitions of baptism – you’ll find this in almost every book of church discipline – is that it’s “an outward, physical symbol of an inward, spiritual reality.”
Baptism is something you can see. It’s something you can do. But it’s really about inward change. It’s about a change of life, a change of heart. Baptism is physical, but really, deep down, it’s spiritual.
If you don’t change your heart, if you don’t change your life, if your thinking doesn’t change, then is baptism real at all? If it doesn’t make a change inside a person, then it hasn’t made much of a difference, has it?
This seems so obvious. Unless our lives change, unless we change inside, baptism is just getting wet. You might just as well take a shower, or go jump in the pool. It’s a waste of time.
And what’s interesting, is that Jesus didn’t baptize people. I invite you, I encourage you, to read the gospels. Look for yourself.
Jesus didn’t baptize people. He never said it was a requirement. Jesus healed people. He forgave people. He fed people, by the thousands.
Jesus forgave sinners. He welcomed all kinds of people to be his friends. He told people they could enter God’s kingdom. But he never said you had to be baptized first.
Even John said – John the Baptist, J the Big B said that he was baptizing people with water. “But the one who is coming after me,” John said, “ the one who is more powerful than I will come – I’m not worthy to untie his shoes! – he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Real baptism has to do with the Holy Spirit, not just water. The Holy Spirit is like a mighty, rolling river, but it’s also like fire. Early Christian art shows people drowning and battered by storms, but early Christian art also shows people walking through fire, coming safely through the fire of persecution.
Even John said that baptism isn’t a ceremony. It’s a total change of life.
Now, people have argued about baptism just about forever. It’s a lot easier to argue about it, than it is to change your life. The arguments over baptism didn’t start yesterday. There have always been people who wanted to make it into a formal ceremony, not just a change of heart.
People argued about who could do it – did you have to have a bishop or a priest?
People argued about what age you had to be in order to be baptized. Some churches, it’s only adults. Other churches, babies get baptized. How come? Babies are beautiful, and babies are innocent. They’ve never done anything wrong. They don’t have sins that need to be washed away.
The thing is, some people started saying that everyone has some kind of a sin or stain that’s almost genetic. It’s inherited from our earliest ancestors. This kind of original sin, from Adam and Eve, people said, had to be washed away by baptism, along with all the other sins we do on our own.
Jesus never talked about original sin. Which is why Quakers don’t usually believe in it.
But if you believe in original sin, you start to worry about what’s going to happen if you have a baby who dies before they can be baptized. Up until pretty recently, there was a whole lot of infant mortality, and families were terrified that their child wouldn’t go to heaven if they didn’t get baptized when they were a few days old.
It all gets really tangled up sometimes.
For many Christians, being baptized is the greatest moment of their entire lives. That’s OK. No one wants to take that away from them.
But for other people, it’s more like a social thing. It’s like graduating from school, or getting your driver’s license, or something like that. For some people, there’s no real awareness of sin, and no real change in their heart, mind or way of life. They just go on after they’re baptized and do whatever else they were doing.
One of my teachers once told our class, that a really important question is, “What do people need to be saved from?” The way people answer this, he said, says a lot about the way they understand things.
In a group like this, most people don’t need to be saved from dancing naked around a gold statue of some pagan god. At least, I hope not.
But people need to be saved from all kinds of things which destroy lives.
There are uncounted millions of people who need to be saved from drinking, gambling, drugs or other self-destructive behavior. They may not be bad people, but by any worthwhile definition, they need to be saved.
There are people who need to be saved from committing violence. And there are people who need to be saved from receiving violence, or tolerating violence.
There are people who need to be saved from laziness, greed or a desire for power.
I know plenty of people who need to be saved from thinking and acting as though they’re better than everyone else. A lot of us need to be saved from being judgmental. That’s actually something Jesus talked about.
People need to be saved from dishonesty, from telling lies, from evading the truth or denying the truth. We are at an epidemic level of lies and fake news today, and it’s destroying us.
We all need to be saved from destroying God’s beautiful world, with all the amazing and incredible life that God created. We are polluting God’s world, setting fire to God’s world, making it likely that our own children will suffer because of the things we’re doing today.
So, “What do we need to be saved from?” is a really important question. It’s way more important that whatever tradition of baptism your church or my church happens to have.
You know the old saying, “If I don’t know what’s wrong, I can’t fix it”? If we don’t know what’s wrong with us, if we don’t change our lives, baptism isn’t going to help.
Quakers have always said – for close to 400 years now – that changing our lives is what matters, not whatever religious ritual people do or don’t do. For 400 years, Quakers have said, “You all can argue about baptism all you want. But we’re not going to be a dog in that fight.”
We don’t believe that baptism gets people into heaven. It’s an outward symbol, and to some people it may be deeply meaningful. But Quakers believe it’s the inward reality that matters. It’s the change in mind, heart and daily life that shows that we’re trying to live in God’s kingdom, already.
And we’re not going to tell you, what you have to do to be saved. That’s between you, and your soul. It’s between you, and Jesus.
Many years ago, Paul had the same argument with almost every church he started. For thousands of years – no exaggeration! – if you wanted to become a Jew, you had to be circumcised.
People believed it was God’s will. It was God’s commandment, going all the way back to Abraham. No exceptions — every man and boy had to be circumcised.
That seems kind of weird to me. For one thing, it feels like it ignores half the human race. It’s like, religion is only for men.
But then along comes the Christian movement, and people said, “If you want to be a Christian, you have to be a Jew first. So, all Christians have to be circumcised!”
And Paul said – and this made him really unpopular, many people wanted to stone him to death, Paul risked his life for religious freedom – Paul said, “Real circumcision is something that happens in the heart, not in the flesh. We’re not tied down by the old laws here. There’s only the new law, to love one another. Whoever loves their neighbor, has fulfilled the whole law. They’ve done everything that God requires.”
Paul said that Christians who were circumcised were on the same level as people who weren’t circumcised. They could eat together, and be in fellowship together.
Paul’s message – and as I said, it nearly got him killed, more than once, by religious fanatics who thought they were being loyal to God – Paul’s message opened the door for the church to grow.
None of us would be here today, if it weren’t for Paul. He was circumcised at birth, and he always remained faithful to the Jewish laws he’d been brought up with. But he opened the door for people like you and me. And that’s something that’s always worth remembering.
Paul got it right when it came to circumcision. Paul may have gotten it wrong when it came to baptism.
Paul made the point, that he himself hardly ever baptized anyone. He said he’d only baptized a couple of people in his whole career. But he still felt it was essential.
Quakers are kind of out on the fringe where baptism is concerned. There are two or three other churches which feel the same way as we do.
Quakers got started right in the middle of a civil war in England, when Catholics and Protestants fought to death on battlefields, because of their different ideas about religion.
Quakers said, “Whoa! We’re not going to take part in this bloodshed. Whatever baptism means, it doesn’t mean killing people.”
So we stepped back, completely. And we came up with our own understanding of baptism, which is grounded in the gospel, which makes sense to us, and which demands much more of us.
We accept people who are baptized, and people who aren’t baptized. We don’t baptize children, and we don’t baptize adults, either. We believe it’s a matter of the spirit, not water.
Now you can explain it to anyone else.