Read Genesis 1:1-5, Acts 19:1-7, Mark 1:4-11 (www.biblegateway.com)

Into what were you baptized (see the Acts passage)? What kind of a question is this? First we have to ask this: What does baptism mean?

When we look at these passages, we need first to get some background. The obvious focus for the second two lessons is baptism, and then we will see that the Genesis passage is related in a significant way as well. So let us start with some explanations about baptism.

Baptism was and is practiced in Judaism. They don’t call it that, but it is not something new to Christianity. There is a somewhat but not entirely different understanding as to what is happening, but we’ll get to that. In Judaism, if you want to become Jewish, you study, and then finally when the rabbi agrees, you dip yourself in the mikvah, the ritual bath, it’s complete immersion, and when you come up out of the water, you are different – sound familiar? And, there are other traditional Jewish uses for this ritual bath, for purification, for renewal, for repentance of sins, so John’s baptizing people in the Jordan for the repentance of sins was unusual, but it did not come out of nowhere either! He did make the connection about his baptizing people for repentance and the issue of being Jewish, saying that just because you were born Jewish did not mean you were automatically aligned with God’s will for your life. Therefore, it was important, he said, to make an examination of your life, and if things didn’t square up, then you should do something about that!

What he called for was a separation between the old you and the new you. That separation was symbolized by the event of baptism.

Then we have Paul going to Ephesus, finding believers, and asking them if they have been baptized – but then he finds out that the baptism is not the one he is expecting. Then we get this interesting question: Into what were you baptized? They know the answer to that – into John’s baptism, that is, the baptism for repentance of sins. Then it comes out, there is another baptism that they have never heard of, the baptism of the Spirit. Notice – this is not the baptism of Jesus! Isn’t that interesting?

As soon as they hear about this baptism of the Spirit, they want it, and Paul lays hands on them, and they receive the Spirit, and begin to talk in tongues and to prophesy. This sounds like it is totally new stuff, but no, we can find this in Judaism as well. There is a clear understanding in Judaism that the Spirit is the one involved in the renewal of life, and the laying on of hands is actually traditional for the ordination of rabbis, just like we lay hands on ordinands for priesthood. We also use the anointing of oil in our baptismal service, which was used for the consecration of kings. So the elements are all there, but they are now being used in both traditional and in new and creative ways.

One of the new understandings, as I talked about before Christmas, was the concept that all people could receive the Holy Spirit, not just Moses, not just the prophets, not just the priests, but all people. The prophecy and expectation for that comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, but it is Christianity that says, yes, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

But what I want to draw your attention to here is again, the separations. We have the separation that John the Baptizer talks about between the old you and the new you, and then Paul talks about the separation between the baptism of water for repentance of sins and the baptism of the Holy Spirit for empowering the people, all the people. Now let’s go to Genesis.

Here is a translation by a guy who translated the Hebrew directly – and since Hebrew is about as different from English as Japanese is from English, you can imagine that this sounds not very good, and then he played with it just enough to make sense in English, but it still has the “feel” of the Hebrew.

“At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,

when the earth was wild and waste, [God is bringing order out of chaos, not creation from nothingness]

darkness over the face of Ocean,

rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters – [hovering like an eagle protecting its young]

God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

God saw the light; that it was good.

God separated the light from the darkness. [separation points to the motif of order]

God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!

There was setting, there was dawning: one day.”

So here is what he says in the commentary:

“Gen. 1 is unmistakably reacting against prevailing Near Eastern cosmogonies of the time. Most of the cultures surrounding ancient Israel had elaborate creation stories, highlighting the birth, sexuality, and violent uprisings of the gods…the concept of God presented here militates against such ideas, arguing chiefly out of omission and silence…The Genesis narrative has taken such old mythological motifs as battles with the primeval (female) waters…and eliminated or neutralized them. What remains is both utterly simple and radical in its time.” (Fox, The Five Books of Moses, p. 120

What struck me in this was there are two more separations here, bringing order out of chaos at the deepest and most primeval level, and the first representation of that is the separation of darkness from light. Each time there is a separation, there is more order.

Thinking about bringing order out of chaos, I read an article recently that said that clutter is tied to depression. Of course the immediate responses came back citing geniuses who did not have things nice and tidy, but most of us are not geniuses! And most of us know that when things are “clean and orderly,” that we feel better. As long as we maintain the Anglican standard of allowing each person to state what the definition of clean and orderly is, I think that is a helpful assessment. In other words, I need to say what “clean and orderly” means to me, and then to look at my situation, and see whether or not it matches my definition of clean and orderly. If it matches, then it does not matter if it looks disorderly to you. If not, then I need to get to work! For example, someone from the city might look at a forest floor with trees fallen down here and there, and say it needed to be cleaned up. The person who understands forests knows that the fallen trees are necessary and should be left alone.

So I have a couple of questions for us to ponder this morning: where is the creation of more order for us today, and into what baptism are you baptized? The creation of more order out of chaos makes some of us afraid of our freedom. It is a logical fear on one hand. The separations that bring order mean that we set some things apart and release them. If you are going to live on dry land, the water must recede. If you are going to live in the light, the darkness must be separated from it. Things will change, and some of those things are life-changing. One of those things can be baptism.

We have so tamed baptism that it does not seem to us to be a thing of power. But if we go back and look at John the Baptist, his calls for baptism and the repentance of sin cost him his life. It was not a simple thing he preached – calling the oppressed to repent of their sins. It was not that the oppressors didn’t need to repent of their sins, that was a given. But it is easy, when one is being oppressed, to forget that all of us need to confess that we have fallen short. It takes a courageous leader to point out that all of us need to pay attention to this.

Our baptismal service conflates the two baptisms. If you look at our service, it talks a lot about repentance, and we baptize with water. This is John’s baptism, isn’t it? There is a very small part of the service that has to do with the oil, signifying the priesthood of all believers. Where is this baptism that Paul talks about, the one that clearly supersedes John’s baptism, the baptism of the Holy Spirit? It is there if you look for it, it is not hidden, but we don’t make a big deal out of it! It is a big deal, a really big deal. It is kind of mixed in with the water baptism. The result is that if you ask anyone in the Episcopal church, or most any Christian church about baptism, they will tell you about water baptism, and they may remember to say something about repentance of sins. As far as Paul was concerned, that was the “old” baptism of John. Nothing wrong with it, but it was not the baptism of power with the Holy Spirit that comes with calling on the name of Jesus. Jesus was willing to go through the baptism of John, to fulfill the old way of getting right with God. The result was that he was named by God as the beloved one. What we are promised, in our baptism, is that we too can call upon God, and that we too are named as the beloved one. And we are promised power. Do we want it?