Baptism: Mouy You Bautista

Matt 28: 16 – 20
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 14 Jan, 2007

I LIKE that Simpsons episode where the kids are picked up by Welfare and taken to a foster home. It turns out to be the place next door, Ned and Maude Flanders' place.
The Flanders are nice people, Christians, middle class, trying to do the right thing. They are sorry for the Simpson kids, whose parents are under an order not to contact or approach Bart, Lisa and Maggie. There is going to be a court hearing.
Ned tries to make life as pleasant as possible for the Simpson kids, so they are invited to join in family games with the Flanders kids. But the Flanders kids win all the Bible knowledge quizes and the Christian history games. Ned can’t understand why the Simpson kids know so little.

Eventually Ned asks the kids about their baptism.

What a shock!
Bart and Lisa haven't been baptised at all! Ned goes into panic. How could this be? What should he do? He rings the minister,
“Oh, Ned...” says the minister, with a sigh. He doesn’t want to quench Ned’s enthusiasm, but you can see that Rev Lovejoy wishes to the bottom of his heart that Ned wouldn’t be such a panic–merchant. This can be dealt with in the normal course of events.

But that’s not good enough for Ned. He rushes into the hallway, where he has a glass case wih an axe beside it. But it’s not an emergency fire kit: it’s an emergency baptismal kit. He smashes the glass, pulls out waders, a Bible and a large dipper for pouring water, and takes the kids off to the river to baptise them.

The kids are terrified. They don’t know what Ned plans to do.

But Homer comes to the rescue. The court has permitted them to get the kids back.. He hurries down to the river after them. Ned has the dipper of water poied above Bart’s head, ready to pour the water, but Homer does a flying tackle, pushes Bart out of the way, and the water falls, sizzling, onto Homer.
The family returns home, united in their love for one another.
I loved the episode, because I side with Homer. He did the right thing.
Mouy, you know that we don’t push people to be baptised. We never emphasise the ritual, because the aim is making disciples, and baptism is part of that process, but only part of it.

You said to me last week that you had been wondering if you should wait until you were more mature as a Christian, and that was a mature response. You aren’t someone who rushes in. You think things over. You analyse your feelings as well as your thoughts, and consider what factors might be influencing your decisions.
That is mature.
But, at the same time, you are still growing as a new Christian.
 

BAPTISM FOR BELIEVERS
So, what should we do about baptism?
Well, as I said, Homer had it right and Ned had it wrong. You don’t force baptism on anyone, and that was why I have prayed more for you than I have talked to you, when it comes to baptism, because you had to be ready.
Here‘s what Jesus said:

As you go, make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

When I was at theological college, I studied Greek. Some people say, “What is the point in studying a dead language? We have good translations of the New Testament. That will do.”
Well, here’s why.
In that passage there is only one active verb, one doing word. All the rest are what is called, participles. They are helpers to the main verb. They spell out what you are really being told to do.
And that main verb is, “Make disciples.”. That is one word in Greek.
How we make disciples is spelled out in the helper participles.

• We make disciples as we go
• We make disciples by baptising
• We make disciples by teaching.

Making disciples always comes first. When you start being a disciple, then you are baptised.
That is why we Baptists don’t baptise babies.
It is why the Churches of Christ and the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare and the Nazarene and the Brethren and the Vineyard churches and so many others don’t baptise babies — because baptism is not the main point.

On the first day of Pentecost, about 3000 people believed and they were baptised.

When Philip met the Ethiopian official down in the desert, he preached Christ to this official, and he believed and then was baptised in a pool of water near the road.

People hear, they believe, and they are baptised.

I was thinking about being a Christian as being like marriage.
You and Jay haven’t been married all that long, Mouy, so I imagine you can still remember everything that led up to that point very well.
You two met. You got to know each other. You decided that you could spend your lives together. Somewhere along the line, you decided to tie the knot, to get married to each other. And then you did get married.
You could have just drifted into a defacto relationship. I’ve known many people who do. They have sex, they stay together overnight, they go to their own homes, they come together again, and one day one of them doesn’t go home.
It works for some people — though the statistics are against it. From memory, about 75% of marriages which break up are between people who lved together first.

You chose to head into marriage, to commit yourselves before witnesses to each other.

The book of Revelation speaks of the Church as being the bride of Jesus, spotless and glorious. So you can see yourself as being, in a way, married to Jesus.
You find out about him, you get to know him, you come to the point where you are ready to spend your life with him, and, when it is appropriate, you get baptised, because that is like your wedding.

I have many friends who are Anglicans or Catholics who were sprinkled wih water when they were babies.
I am not going to argue about that. But I will say that our practice is that hearing comes first, that faith comes from hearing, and that faith leads to baptism and church membership.

The way I look at it is that it is like how some cultures betroth a pair of babies to each other, and, when they grow up, their marriage is already arranged. Many such marriages have worked. But it doesn’t give the couple much choice in the most important relationships in life, the relationship with Christ.
We do marriage the other way, because our society believes that there has to be a lot of conscious decison making.
And baptism is the same. You have made a conscious decision to follow Jesus, and baptism as a believing adult expresses that decision most clearly.
We Baptists call it, “Believers’ baptism” because it is really for those who believe in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.
 

THE PLEASURES OF BAPTISM
You have been married to Jay for a short while now. But it is long enough for you to have discovered that there are some benefits and some costs in such a relationship.

I am not going to ask you to list these, because we don’t need to turn this morning into a marriage counselling session.

I think I can guess from my own experiences. There were many benefits, like not having to trip across town every time we planned to go out. It was just like,

"What do you want to do today?"
“I dunno. What do you want to do?”
“How about let’s go to the pictures?”
“OK — just wait until I comb my hair and check the plumbing. We can pick up some Pizza if we are too early for the session.”

Isn’t that simple?

On the other hand, you have to learn to adapt to a lot, don’t you? For me, one big issue was about owls and chooks. The world is divided into owls and chooks. I am an owl. I don’t like getting up in the morning, and I don’t particularly like going to bed, because I come to life at around 8 pm. And I married a chook, who jumped out of bed at sunrise and turned into a pumpkin at around 9 pm.

Getting into a relationship with Jesus also has its comfortable and its uncomfortable side.
Baptism is in part about the comfortable side of the relationship.
St Peter wrote,

...this water symbolises baptism that now saves you also — not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, ²² who has gone into heaven and is at God’s right hand--with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him.
This is good news. It is comforting. Baptism saves you, as the pledge of a good conscience towards God.

This is not an easy thing to understand. In a strictly literal sense, baptism doesn’t save you. It’s a symbol and, as Peter makes clear, it’s really the resurrection of Jesus that saves all who come to him in faith. But, in those days, everyone who came to trust in Jesus was baptised almost immediately. They didn’t have to be mature believers. They believed and were baptised. So, when Peter talks about baptism, he links baptism and faith. We can say, “Baptism is the outward expression of an inward belief.”

It’s not about what happens on the outside, the removal of dirt. It’s about being able to face God in good conscience, being able to say to him,
“I have sinned, I have been in rebellion against you; but I have come back, I have confessed, I know I am forgiven.”
Baptism is the formal declaration, it is the legal document which publicly states that you are washed, that you are cleansed, that you are saved and tied forever to the one who rules the entire universe.
 

BAPTISM FOR HARD TIMES
But there is so much more to it, Mouy. As a wise woman who knows how to deal with reality, you will already have discovered the reality that living in relationship with Jesus is not always easy.
Jesus said,

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

It”s not about wearing little gold decorations. It isn’t about bearing your sicknesses without complaint. It’s about facing death.
In Jesus’ day, the only people who took up crosses were people heading out of town to be crucified by just about the cruellest method possible.
Jesus is saying that we must daily choose to follow him,

“...even though it be a cross
That raises me...”

So Paul writes about Baptism in Romans 6, where he says,

 ³ Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death? ⁴ We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
⁵ If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.

Baptism is a symbol of sharing in Jesus’ death.

There would be no point in killing new converts. But if you think about it, in Biblical times, every Christian who was baptised was declaring his or her readiness to die, because it identified you. If you weren’t baptised, you could still claim you were just interested. But baptism says that you belong, and, every time there was a wave of persecution, guess who they looked for? Leaders first, baptised believers second.

In baptism, the new convert said, “Jesus died for me, and I belong to him, body and soul. When they come for me, I will not deny Jesus. I will not sacrifice to Caesar as a god and declare that he is my final, ultimate ruler. Jesus is God come in human form. I must declare that he is Lord, and, if that means dying for him, that’s what I will do!”

Baptism is your declaration: I belong to Jesus, and I am never turning back, no matter what the cost is!

Jesus said,

 LUKE 9:62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Mouy, you have declared your intention to follow Jesus all the days of your life.
You haven’t become perfect, nor do you claim that baptism will make you perfect.
You have come to belong to Jesus, who gave himself for you.
You have come to declare before these witnesses that you give yourself to him, for washing and salvation through his resurrection, and to live or die for him who died for you.

Someone once said,

“Christ didn’t come to make bad people good: he came to make dead people live.”

You have found life in him, and you are never going back.

Let’s go up to the baptistry, and complete this symbol of your new life, as you go down into the watery grave with Christ, and you rise again in his new and never ending life.

Let’s go now...

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)