Sermon preached at St Margaret’s Newlands
Acts 10.44-48
1 John 5.1-6
John 15.9-17
“Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
In these weeks that lead us from Easter to Pentecost, Sunday by Sunday we have a series of readings from the book of Acts. It is a book which offers a lot of insights into how the earliest Christians started to form themselves into a community and a movement. Today’s short reading highlights the importance of baptism. In it, Peter recognises a close link between baptism and the reception of the Holy Spirit.
This passage is the culmination of Peter’s wrestling with the question of whether or not those who are not Jews can become Christians without taking on the Jewish law. Cornelius, who was a Roman citizen, probably Greek speaking, and certainly not a Jew, had asked Peter to proclaim the gospel to him and his household, and Peter had not been sure what to do. He was granted a vision which encouraged him to do what Cornelius had asked. Peter told Cornelius, “‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came.” What Peter witnessed in Cornelius and his household was a movement of the Holy Spirit that leads him to conclude that they and all those who had gathered there to hear Peter preach should be baptized. And that leads us to those words we’ve just heard: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”
Acts tells the story of the time after Pentecost, when the gift of the Holy Spirit had been given to the disciples. The author of Acts, whom we otherwise know as Luke, recognises that the gift of the gospel is not for an insider group but – at least potentially – for everyone. Two weeks today, we will celebrate the festival Pentecost ourselves, affirming the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is often seen as the birth of the church. Peter’s words in Acts invite us to reflect on the inclusivity of the community of those who have received the Holy Spirit, and to ponder too how that inclusivity should be mirrored in the community of those who have received baptism. This is not an exclusive group: The story of Peter and Cornelius reminds us of the radical inclusivity of the Holy Spirit and therefore of God’s love. Paul will write to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). The church can and should include anyone. And as Peter recognises, baptism offers a means of affirming and including all whom the Holy Spirit has touched.
Baptism is the fundamental marker of our life in Christ. I wonder how much we think of ourselves as people who have been baptized? One of Luther’s complaints early in the Reformation was that “now there are scarcely any who call to mind their own baptism, and still fewer who glory in it.”[1] I sometimes think that not much has changed in this respect: some years ago I was running a weekend on living your baptism, and as we gathered people kept asking me “Is this about our children’s baptism?” They were disconcerted when I said: “No, it is about your own baptism, about you as a baptized person, about your ministry as a baptized person.” Reflecting on baptism Timothy Radcliffe writes: “Whatever form our Christian life takes, the pledge of baptism should surely turn it upside down, or at least shake it about a bit.”[2] Baptism, “invites us to have the courage to become entangled with God and be led beyond all that we know.”[3] Our lives as the baptized people of God should be a lives transformed by the Holy Spirit who calls us and accompanies us.
So how do we live out our baptism? How do we respond to the call of the Holy Spirit? The Convocation of (American) Episcopal Churches in Europe has a programme called the Commission on the Ministry of the Baptized, which is charged with helping everyone to explore the ministry to which they are called. As its flyer reminds us: “the vast majority of ministries in the life of the Church and in the world are those of the laity. Taking care of your family, looking after people in your workplace, reaching out to people in need — all are ministries that we are called to.”[4] This is hopefully part of what you are thinking about as part of the stewardship campaign: how is God calling you to use the gifts the Holy Spirit has imparted to you? That is, how is God calling you to live out your baptism?
This is not only about our own relationship with God, or about our role in the church, but also about the proclamation of the gospel in the world. Our other readings today remind us that the fundamental gift of the Holy Spirit is love. Love of God, which spills over into love of neighbour. Love of neighbour, which spills over into love of God. They are intimately entwined. Becoming entangled with God means being drawn into God’s radical love for the world. As the church, we are the community of those whom God loves, and that calls us in turn to love others. Christ calls us to be “not servants but friends,” as he says to the disciples in today’s gospel, but again this is friendship with a wider perspective: “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” What fruit do we bear?
Reflecting on the readings for this Sunday, David Lose focused on that theme of God’s love. “Just preach the Gospel,” he exhorted. “The good news that God chose us. That God loves us. That God plans to use us to make this world God loves a better place.”[5] Lose recognises that God’s love can be hard to recognise, especially as we look at the dark places of the world and hear the depressing news. Lose sees God’s love as encouragement, and as strength:
“Not that God’s choosing us is a panacea, as if none of the difficulties of this life matter. Rather, knowing that God has chosen us, loves us, and will use us gives us the courage to face the challenges and renews our strength to do something about them. Ultimately, we cannot fix, let alone redeem, this world. That’s why that’s God’s work. But knowing that God has promised to do so can provide us with the strength and energy to work to make the little corner of the world we live in a better place.”[6]
There are important resonances here with the questions asked of the candidates and sponsors at the beginning of the SEC 2006 baptism service:
“Will you proclaim the good news by word and deed, serving Christ in all people?
Will you work for justice and peace, honouring God in all Creation?”
Baptism involves a commitment to participate in God’s mission, which is another way of talking about God’s love for the world.
This is not just about growing the church, although such lived-out love is an important marker of who we are as the Church. Rather it’s about recognising the love of God and the gifts of the Spirit even in those places where we might not expect to see them (as Peter had to with Cornelius) and about articulating the love of God in places which seem to have been abandoned to their fate. The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches is currently thinking about how baptism unites (or divides) us, and it is important to me in that discussion to recognise baptism as a response to the radical movement of the Holy Spirit, as we’ve seen in our reading from Acts. It’s also important too to recognise the call that this entails for each of us. At the World Council of Churches Assembly in Karlsruhe in 2022, I was part of the group that worked on finalising the unity statement. A key theme of the statement was what it called “ecumenism of the heart”.
“Ecumenism of the heart,” that statement said, recognises a sense of shared Christian identity rooted in and inspired by the love of God. “The love of Christ … moves us to walk together, compels us to pray together, and urges us to respond to Christ’s invitation to be of one spirit and one mind.”[7] And it calls us to live out that love together in explicit practical ways: “The practice of love that turns a stranger into a neighbour and a neighbour into a sister or brother calls us to make space for one another, to be patient, kind, humble, generous, and truthful with one another.”[8] That is a call to us as individuals and as congregations as well as to us as churches. And it is in and through our baptism that we are tasked by God with this living out of love.
And so let us close with a prayer that ended the Unity Statement, which seems to me to encapsulate the call to us all in baptism:
Where your people are broken, may love mend.
When hatred shouts in the world,
let love bring peace with justice.
As creation groans, may redemption come to all the earth.
Come with your divine love, and enter our hearts.
Move your church, and move the world
to reconciliation and unity. Amen.
[1] Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s Works, vol. 36: Word and Sacrament II (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1959), 58.
[2] Timothy Radcliffe, Take the Plunge: Living Baptism and Confirmation (Bloomsbury: London 2012), p. 151.
[3] Ibid.
[4] „The Baptismal Covenant: ‚I will, with God’s help‘ Your call to Ministry in God’s Church,“ online at: https://8468b3ef30f2e10280bd-2259648c08869db4c2b896b90f294d17.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/uploaded/i/0e2698031_1386256912_i-will-with-gods-help-your-call-to-ministry-in-gods-church.pdf
[5] See https://www.davidlose.net/2015/05/easter-6-b-on-being-chosen/.
[6] Ibid.
[7] WCC Assembly 2022, Unity Statement, paragraph 18.
[8] Ibid., paragraph 24.
Wings of the Morning 