RESURRECTION SUNDAY & BAPTISM SERVICE |
- metroccbry
- Apr 20
- 12 min read
Speaker: Pastor Tristan Sherwin
‘But we, little fishes, after the example of our [ΙΧΘΥΣ] Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water…’ —Tertullian[i]
CRAZY
We are about to do a weird and wonderful thing to celebrate a weird and wonderful truth.
We are going to immerse people in water.
It’s an act retelling the events of Easter, symbolising what Jesus Christ has already done for us through His death, burial and bodily resurrection.
An act revelling in the power of God to conquer death and corruption.
An act representing our own death to self and new life in Christ.
An act declaring the hope of our own bodily resurrection and life forever with Jesus.
For sure, from a certain perspective, all of that sounds like crazy talk. At previous baptisms and easter services, I’ve attempted to explain bits of this.[ii] And there are several places I could read from to describe this crazy thing. But, this morning, I’m drawn to these particular words of the Apostle Paul’s, in 2 Corinthians:
‘If we are crazy, it’s for God’s sake …The love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: one died for the sake of all; therefore, all died. He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised. So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived! All of these new things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…, not counting people’s sins against them. We are begging you not to receive the grace of God in vain. Look, now is the right time! Look, now is the day of salvation!’ (2 Corinthians 5: 13a, 14-15, 17-18a, 19b; 6:1b, 2b (CEB))
STRANGE(RS)
Several decades before Paul wrote those words, there was a strange character called John doing this strange thing of immersing people in the waters of the River Jordan.
I say strange because John was a Jewish man calling his fellow Jews to be baptised and, for the people who first heard this summons, that would have seemed unusual. Afterall, Jewish people didn’t get baptised.
Yes, there were repeated ritual bathings and purification rites they would go through on a regular basis, which were generally private ceremonies. But a singular, public baptism, nuh uh.
The only people who were baptised were those who were non-Jewish by birth: Gentiles, as they were called. Whenever a gentile wished to join the Jewish community, one of the three rituals they would have to undergo would be an immersion in water.[iii]
By baptism, gentile converts re-enacted and participated in the Exodus story; when God rescued the Hebrews from the slavery they experienced in a death-dealing Egypt, bringing them through the sea and into the freedom of a new life.
In the same way Egyptian oppression got washed away and buried beneath the waves, so was the convert’s old life of bondage to the idols they worshipped. Like a funeral, baptism declared that the old life was dead and buried.
At the same time, baptism also marked being reborn with a new identity, as if passing through the waters of the birth canal. They were now part of a new and redeemed people, part of this epic story of God’s rescue of humanity and God’s restoration of creation.
But Jews themselves did not get baptised. Their ancestors had passed through those Exodus waters. While it may seem strange to us, when their ancestors passed through those waters the “seed” of all their future generations also passed through those waters, too. And so, because they were ‘in’ their ancestors, they had already passed through the waters all those years before.
To use words like we’ve just read in 2 Corinthians, when Moses and the people left Egypt, they did so for the sake of all; therefore, all left Egypt.
This deserves a longer conversation than what I am saying. But there was no need for baptism if you were ethnically Jewish. Instead, there was a representative inheritance. A claim that goes back beyond the Exodus, to Abraham. When God made the amazing promise to bless and heal the nations through Abraham and Sarah’s child, then they, too, like with the Exodus story, saw themselves as being ‘in’ that child of promise and receivers of that promise.
Baptism was for ‘outsiders’ not family, a way for ‘outsiders’ to become family.
To give a terrible analogy, and please don’t overthink this, but it’s like our doorbell at home. I don’t use the doorbell, I live there.
OUT WITH OLD …
But then John the Baptist comes along, and he is simply radical.
He is shouting that the old order of things is passing away, that a new era is dawning. And he is calling his own Jewish people to ready themselves for this new thing in the same way they had expected gentile proselytes to do so.
‘It’s not enough to say, “we’re safe”, that “we’re descendants of Abraham”’, John says. ‘If God wanted, he could change stones into children of Abraham.’[iv] ‘Even now’, John claimed, ‘an axe is poised, ready to sever our roots.’[v]
John wasn’t saying the past was unimportant, but it was just a prelude. What’s about to happen is greater than what has come before it. The great hope their own story had been a foreshadowing of was about to break in: God was going to snap all the bonds of evil, all the snares of sin, all the shackles of Sheol and birth his kingdom.[vi]
So, John encourages his people to get back into the water.
Unlike the dry road through the sea their ancestors had walked, they’re to enter the waters, getting wet, awaiting God’s new roadway and awaiting the One who would lead them on that road. John is clear with the crowds that his water baptism is not this new beginning.
‘I baptise in water’, John tells them. ‘But there’s One who is coming who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire’, with Divine life. ‘Someone who is greater than me and existed long before I did.’[vii]
Someone, we discover, who has been around longer than Moses and Abraham. Someone eternal.[viii]
John never claims to be this person, just a witness—someone who points away from himself and constantly points toward Jesus Christ.
‘Look!’, John says one day, as he points out Jesus to the soggy crowds, ‘There’s the one I’ve been telling you about, the one we’ve been waiting for. There is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’[ix]
As with water, Lamb of God is another important way that John name drops the original Exodus story.
‘Just as God brought the people of Israel out of Egypt, so God was now bringing a new people out of an even older and darker slavery’ to sin, death and evil.[x]As with the Passover lamb, this new Exodus would happen through Jesus’ own sacrificial, self-giving death. And this new people wouldn’t just be of a certain ethnicity, but that this taking away of sin is for all people, for all time.
In his own death, burial, and his resurrection, Jesus leads the ultimate Exodus, out of sin and death and into a new beginning, a new life, for all humanity.
THE NOT-SO SUBTLE DEFEAT
I’m reminded of Philip Pullman’s book series, His Dark Materials. They’re great books, but Pullman, as an atheist, wrote this trilogy to undermine the Christian worldview as he had understood it and sadly, how he had often heard it. In his stories, God, or The Authority, as Pullman condescendingly calls him, seeks to imprison people in death eternally. But this is not the scriptural story at all. Rather, the story of the Bible is that God acts to liberate us from death.
Tellingly, as much a Pullman wants to mock the Christian version and tell an atheist alternative, he really ends up retelling the Jesus story, in a way. His main character, Lyra, more or less acts how God has acted through his son, Jesus.
In Pullman’s books, Lyra, seeks to break the power of death and release its captives. So, voluntarily, she chooses to enter the grave and, with a special 'subtle knife', she cuts herself out of death's domain and shows those enslaved in darkness how to escape.[xi]
It all sounds strangely familiar.
In a similar way, the One who is the origin of all humanity voluntarily becomes flesh, enters our experience and existence, and then, voluntarily, carries our sin and suffering, enters our death, and proceeds to make a way out for us through His own resurrection.
Except, when Jesus exits death, he doesn’t merely ‘cut’ his way out. When Jesus rose again, he didn’t ‘cheat death’, he beats it, fair and square. His resurrection is the signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. Jesus has destroyed death’s hold on and death’s power over humanity and creation and showed us the way to everlasting life. [xii]
To put that another way, to use the ancient language of Isaiah, Divinity has swallowed up death forever.[xiii]
As one writer in the 8th century put it, ‘Now all things have been filled with light, both heaven and earth and those beneath the earth; so let all creation sing of Christ’s rising, by which this has been established.’[xiv]
Or, as another 4th century preacher put it, ‘A few drops of blood renewed the whole world…’[xv]
IN THE NEW
There's another author i'm reminded of: C. S. Lewis.
C. S. Lewis wrote the famous Narnia stories; stories that echo with what Jesus has achieved for us and our world. They also happen to be the stories Philip Pullman attempted to parody and replace.
Unlike Pullman, Lewis rediscovered the truth of Jesus in his early thirties, and it revolutionised him from an ardent atheist into someone who began to see everything through Jesus.[xvi]
He wrote prolifically about the Christian story, and not only within his tales of Narnia. In one of his non-Narnia books, a great book called Mere Christianity he talks about how these sacred drops of blood have renewed the world. He describes what Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection has achieved as being like ‘dropping into a glass of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or new colour to the whole lot.’[xvii]
He writes this for a very important reason: One day we will experience our own resurrection. One day, as the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 8, all creation itself will know and experience its ultimate release from death and decay—a new and renewed creation.[xviii] But, our current experience is not a matter of simply waiting for this ‘restoration of all things’.[xix] This new creation has also already come, God’s Spirit has been poured out, into the old, changing, renewing and transforming it into something new. This ‘new creation’ is something we can taste and experience now, today. Today is the day of salvation.
Lewis goes on to remind us that this business of becoming a new creation has already been done for us. In principle, humanity is already ‘saved’, in that the tough work has already been carried out for us and on behalf of us by God in Jesus. It’s not that we did anything or can add anything; God has done it all and offered it all freely to us. The rescue has happened—it happened two thousand years ago. All we need do is take possession of it; to trust what Jesus has achieved and live in the light of it.
To use language mentioned earlier, all we need do is claim the inheritance and identity that our representative has obtained for us.
When Paul wrote the words we read earlier, in 2 Corinthians, it’s this (and more) that he is capturing.
Because Jesus died for the sake of all, all have died. And anyone who is in Christ, is (present tense) a new creation. We could even say, an embodiment of that new creation in our present day.
Before writing these words, Paul had already reminded the Corinthians of their own future bodily resurrection. At the same time, Paul talked about how this new life is already presently available; that the Holy Spirit has been given now as a renewing experience and as a guarantee—a downpayment, if you prefer—of what is most definitely to come.[xx]
In other places where Paul talks about this new life that has come, he urges his readers to appropriate it, to participate in this renewal because we are, already, a new creation.
Sometimes, by way of analogy, he talks about it like clothing, encouraging his readers to remove the old clothing and to put on the new.[xxi]
In another letter, to a man called Titus, Paul says it like this:
‘Once we, too, were foolish and disobedient. We were misled and became slaves to many lusts and pleasures. Our lives were full of evil and envy, and we hated each other. But, when God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. He generously poured out the Spirit upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior. Because of his grace he made us right in his sight and gave us confidence that we will inherit eternal life.’
And…
‘For the grace of God has been revealed, bringing salvation to all people. And we are instructed to turn from godless living and sinful pleasures. We should live in this evil world with wisdom, righteousness, and devotion to God, while we look forward with hope to that wonderful day when the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, will be revealed. He gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us, and to make us his very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds.’[xxii]
That’s what these baptisms are about today.
Like John’s baptisms, water is heavily involved. But unlike John’s baptism, it’s not because we are waiting for something. It’s a modelled embrace of what has come.
When we immerse people into the waters, it is not some vain attempt to earn this new identity or an attempt to drag God towards us. It’s simply an acting out of the new identity that Jesus has already purchased for us.
It’s a heartfelt acknowledgement, a dramatic sharing in and acting out that, in Christ’s death, that old person, dominated by sin and death, was dead and buried.
It’s an acting out that, in Christ’s resurrection, they are not only now dead to the tyranny of sin, but also now alive to God, choosing to live for the One who died and rose again for them.
This water baptism is not a symbol of their perfection or cleanliness. It’s an expression of having one’s identity tethered to Christ’s, of being ‘immersed’, ‘submerged’, ‘marinated’ in him; that, more than water, they have been baptised in God’s Spirit, God’s divine life.
It’s a soggy shout of allegiance to His Kingdom, to His life and His way.
Those being baptised have recognised the One that John the Baptist pointed out all those years ago and they have chosen to follow Him, as he leads us from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from death to life in all its fulness.
However, I’m aware that there may be people here this morning (or who are now reading this) who haven’t recognised this yet.
As such, I would strongly encourage you, like Paul does, to not take the grace of God in vain. Open your eyes, understand what God has done for you and poured out upon us, and live your life for the One who died and was raised for you.
Amen.
‘Let us offer ourselves, the possession most precious to God, and most fitting; let us give back to the Image what is made after the Image. Let us recognize our Dignity; let us honour our Archetype; let us know the power of the Mystery, and for what Christ died. Let us become like Christ, since Christ became like us. Let us become God’s for His sake, since He for ours became Man. … He died that He might save us; He ascended that He might draw to Himself us, who were lying low in the Fall of sin.’ -- Gregory of Nazianzus [xxiii]
ENDNOTES AND REFERENCES
[i] Tertullian (c. 160-240 AD), On Baptism, Chapter I.
[iii] The other two being circumcision (if a male proselyte) and the offering of a sacrifice. See, Craig S. Keener, Galatians: A Commentary (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2019), pp. 298-301; Harold Henry Rowley (1890-1969), The Origin and Meaning of Baptism (Baptist Quarterly 11.12-13, Jan-April 1945), pp. 309-320
[iv] John uses a play on words, here. In Hebrew, stone (eben) sounds a lot like the word son (ben)
[v] Matthew 3:1-12; Luke 3:1-18
[vi] Generations before John, the prophet Isaiah had already spoken to God’s people, reminding them that God had brought them out of slavery and bondage in Egypt. But, Isaiah proclaimed, God is saying ‘forget that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do. For I am about to do a new thing… .’ (Isaiah 43:16-19)
[vii] John 1:15, 30
[viii] John 8:58
[ix] John 1:29, 36
[x] Tom Wright, John for Everyone: Part 1 (SPCK, London, 2012), p. 11
[xi] Admittedly, in Pullman’s conception of the cosmos, this way out doesn’t lead to anything at all. It’s a doorway from an eternal death into a non-existent state. This is hardly a hopeful perspective on things. This non-existence, this ceasing to be, ceasing to exist at all, is just another, deeper, darker, despairing state of being from my point of view. An erasure of life altogether. If only there was a term for the erasure and ceasing of self-awareness and being. Oh wait, we call that death. In Pullman’s model, death still reigns. Death still wins. In the Christian story, as with the Exodus, the way out leads not to non-existence, but to life eternal and resurrection life. Death is defeated by God, not state sponsored.
[xii] 2 Timothy 1:9-10
[xiii] Isaiah 25:8
[xiv] John of Damascus, Paschal Canon
[xv] Gregory of Nazianzus, also know as Gregory the Theologian (330-389 AD), On the Holy Pasch, Oration 45.1
[xvi] You can read about Lewis’ journey in his book Surprised by Joy
[xvii] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 2001), p. 181
[xviii] Romans 8:18-25
[xix] Acts 3:20-21
[xx] 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:5
[xxi] Ephesians 4:17-24; Colossians 3:5-12
[xxii] Titus 3:3-7; 2:11-14 (NLT)
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