Saul had spent his life persecuting Jews who believed in Jesus, and so was the unlikeliest of disciples. He experienced Jesus, and everything changed. We are all unlikely disciples in need of conversion so we can live out our faith, and through the grace of God this becomes our way of life.

Vicar Meagan McLaughlin
   The Conversion of St. Paul
   Texts: Acts 9:1-22, Psalm 67, Galatians 1:11-24, Luke 21:10-19

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

By all counts, Saul was the last person anyone would have expected to carry the news of Jesus. Of course, God has always been inclined to call unlikely people to be prophets and leaders. Look at Moses–he murdered someone and ran away, and then God called him in the burning bush to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt. Esther was a young, unknown Jewish girl called to save her people from a plot to kill them. And Jesus called fishermen and tax collectors to be his disciples, not exactly people of means and authority and high reputation. But Saul. Saul, unlike Moses or Esther or the disciples, was not merely unknown or disreputable, he was far worse. He had put all of his passion and energy into seeking out, torturing, and killing the People of the Way, Jews who believed in Jesus. It kind of makes you wonder, what was God thinking, calling Saul to be a disciple?

Ananias certainly wondered, and he asked God if he was really being sent to Saul, the one who killed followers of Jesus. He must have felt that he was being sent into the lion’s den. Saul was said to have been breathing murder as he walked the road to Damascus, and Ananias was, after all, one of the troublemakers Saul was planning to arrest! It was an incredible act of grace, going to proclaim forgiveness and healing to someone who wanted to kill him.

So, why Saul? Well, why not Saul? Because here’s the thing: Saul wasn’t really evil, although he certainly did some evil things. He did not set out to fight God, or torture people for his own benefit. The truth is, in all the time before Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus, he was absolutely, passionately convinced that everything he was doing was essential to preserve the Jewish faith that he loved. Saul believed he was right, and was doing exactly what God wanted him to do, and he had no idea how wrong he was.

Saul needed conversion. He was heading the wrong way, and needed to be turned in the right direction. When Jesus came to Saul on the road to Damascus, he showed him the truth of his own sin and his need for forgiveness. Jesus changed his direction, telling him exactly where he had gone wrong, and what he needed to do next. Saul needed to follow Jesus, and just to make his point perfectly clear, Jesus struck Saul blind so he would understand that without God, he would never find his way.

We all need conversion. No matter how sure we may feel that we are on the right path, every one of us have our blind spots, and in that blindness we move away from God and hurt those around us. We serve meals to those who are hungry, and leave people in our family starving for attention and love. We treat co-workers with respect all day, and cut off the driver next to us on the way home. We come to worship on Sunday and pray for peace in our community, and ignore the web of violence, fear, and unjust treatment that is a part of daily life for so many. We really aren’t so different from Saul. We all need conversion. In the end, we are all unlikely disciples.

If conversion were as simple as making a statement of faith or belief, that would be easy. But conversion is more than that. Conversion, as Saul experienced it, is a process of seeing the truth, changing direction, and following Jesus. And, because we are human and will never be perfect, conversion is not a one-time deal. Seeing the truth, changing direction, and following Jesus needs to become a way of life, and it is not easy.

God told Ananias that Saul would learn that conversion involves suffering. Oscar Romero describes sin as sore spots that hurt when someone touches them, and tells us, “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.”  We see the truth, and it hurts. But as long as we stay in our blindness, refusing to see the truth and change, we will continue on the same path Saul was on before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, hurting ourselves and others without ever realizing it.

The invitation of Jesus is a call to believe that change, even though it is hard and painful, is possible. No matter how far off the path we may fall, God can show us our sin and bring us back. God does this work through this community of faith. Hearing the word of God in scripture and preaching and music in our worship can help us see where we have gone wrong, call us to follow Jesus, and remind us of the grace and love of God. We can share the joys and struggles of our lives with one another, and learn to be humble, acknowledging that we are all human and none of us are perfect. We can practice conversion as a way of life, admitting when we have harmed someone and becoming willing to change. And, as Ananias showed us, we can be supportive of one another, offering truth, forgiveness, and grace when others struggle.

Conversion, then, is not a “way into the church.” It is a way of life that makes it possible for unlikely disciples like us to live out our faith in all areas of our lives. The faith that we share propels us into the community, calling for us to see the truth of how we have supported racism, poverty, and other forms of oppression, even if it is only by our silence. We are called to see the truth, hear the stories, and become willing to change and act so oppression ends.

As we go through our day, our faith opens our eyes to those that are too often invisible to us—the people in line with us at the grocery store, the server at the restaurant, the person checking us in at the doctor’s office. We see how easy it is to look through or past them, and offer only our frustrations and judgments, while never knowing their name. We respond to the call of our faith to treat everyone we encounter as children of God, first.

Our faith guides how we treat our parents, our siblings, our partners, our children. We open our hearts to see the truth of the ways we fall short in our relationships with the people we are closest to, and grow in our ability to love, support and forgive.

Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus changed everything for him, because it called him to act in new ways. As unlikely as it was that Saul should become a believer in Jesus, God made it possible. Our experience of Jesus should change us, too. It is not easy to see our weaknesses and acknowledge how we have hurt others, and become willing to follow God more closely, but this is what our faith is all about. We are not so different from Saul, after all. We all need conversion, so we can fulfill our call to live out our faith. The message of God’s grace, love, and forgiveness is much greater than our weaknesses, and in order to share that with the world, God uses even the unlikeliest of disciples.

Thanks be to God!

Life in Christ, discipleship following the Risen Lord, removes our fear both of taking the way of the cross ourselves and of telling by our words and our deeds “what we have seen and heard.”

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Confession of St. Peter
   texts:  Acts 4:(1-7) 8-13 (9-22); Matthew 16:13-19 (20-26)

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Jesus and the angels always say “Don’t be afraid.”  It’s not that easy.

We fear witnessing to what God has done in our lives and in the world.  We’re afraid of offending others, of risking being shut out, of being embarrassed.  We keep it to ourselves.

We fear walking the path of the cross.  We’re afraid of what it would be like to live where we didn’t always win.  What it would cost to be sacrificial in our loving.  Our culture teaches us to fear being taken advantage of, so we do.

We fear being open with those who don’t believe as we do.  We’re afraid that if we don’t fight for what we believe and defend what we say, we might lose salvation.  The Church has taken Jesus’ command to Peter, repeated a couple chapters later to all his disciples, to “bind” and “loose,” as our imperative to declare who’s in and who’s out, because we’re afraid of being out.

We should look at Simon Peter.  Something changed in him between these two confessions we heard today, something about his fear.  If we could do the same, we might see the path of discipleship much more clearly, and maybe even find courage to walk it.

There’s a huge difference between the Peter of the Gospel and the later Peter, the one in Acts.

Before the cross and resurrection, Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God.  But when Jesus described what that would mean – trial, suffering, death at the hands of the authorities – Peter rejected that path and rebuked Jesus.  That didn’t end well for Peter.  From Rock of the Church to Stumbling Block in record time.  Peter feared a path of loss and suffering, and on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, he fully turned from this path, vehemently denying his Lord.

But in Acts, after the resurrection, Peter and John stand before the very same council that condemned Jesus to death, not many weeks after those events.  Threatened and told to quit doing healings and preaching in Jesus’ name, they refuse.

In a short time, Peter has become willing to lose everything, even to die, to tell others of God’s love in Jesus, to preach the Good News.

Meeting his risen Lord transformed him.

After the resurrection, Peter met his Lord Jesus and was forgiven in a breakfast picnic and conversation on a beach in Galilee.  There he discovered three things.  First, he was forgiven and still loved forever by the one he had betrayed.  Second, he re-discovered that he loved his Lord very much.  Third, he was told if that was true, then he had lambs to feed and care for.

If you look at Peter’s life before and after, it’s what he does with his fear that changes.  His fear kept him from following, from being faithful, from being courageous.  Not anymore.  Now he knows his risen Lord and has been filled by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Know this, though: it’s not a question of our having fear or not having fear. 

Peter and John in Acts today had to have been a little terrified standing before the same council that sent Jesus to the cross.  They sound really brave, refusing to stop teaching about Jesus.  But imagine the looks they exchanged with each other as they walked out of that council chamber, relief combined with terror.  “Can you believe what we just did?”

Peter always had fear; with the Spirit’s help he just learned it didn’t have to control him.

This can be our path as well.

There will always be a part of us that is afraid.  But does fear drive our lives, control our actions, keep us from our path?

Not since we’ve met our risen Lord.  Not since we’ve eaten at his Table each week, and heard that we are loved and forgiven, loving him in return.  Not since we’ve heard our call to feed his lambs and care for his sheep, and have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This relationship of faith in Christ that is ours is stronger than our fear, so it doesn’t control us.

When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can witness like Peter.

“Tell what we’ve seen and heard.”  That’s what they defiantly said they’d continue to do. Believers walked about with confidence in the love of God that destroys death and gives the power to live in the Spirit, and told about Jesus, his death and resurrection.  Thousands of people came to believe.

That could be us.  If our fear doesn’t control us we can tell what we’ve seen and heard, witness by our lives and our words about the love of the Triune God we have known, the forgiveness we have experienced, the life of the Spirit that fills us and changes us.  When our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we live lives that witness to what God is doing to save the world.

When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can risk like Peter.

When Peter rejected Jesus’ path in today’s Gospel, he was rejecting it for himself.  You don’t follow a Messiah with the understanding that might lead to death.

Yet after the resurrection, Peter willingly took the path of Christ, the path of the cross.  The disciples were willing to risk all for the sake of sharing God’s love in Christ, life and limb, friends and family.  They must have been afraid.  But in faith they walked the path.

That could be us.  The path of the cross means we will be changed by God, to be different.  That’s frightening; the idea that the Spirit might transform us is a huge unknown.  But when our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we can trust the love of the Triune God to change us into something better, something like our Lord.

The path of the cross can mean we will be taken advantage of by others, even by those closest to us.  If we seek not to win but to love, not to control but to serve, we risk a lot.  But when our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we learn that this path of self-giving and sacrifice is empowering, life-giving.  Instead of having empty victories over people we didn’t need to defeat, we find the joy of a shared life of love and grace.
 
When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can even be open to new things from the Spirit, like Peter.

Even after the resurrection, Peter sometimes let fear control him.  At first he wasn’t ready for Paul’s spreading of the Gospel to the Gentiles.  If he was supposed to “bind” and “loose,” he wasn’t ready to loose the requirements of circumcision and kosher foods.  Eventually his Lord helped him cope with those fears, too, and he became someone who saw God’s grace in Christ for all people, not just his own.

That could be us.  We remember that the heart of Christ, shown in Matthew 18, the very chapter when these commands are given to all the disciples, is that divine forgiveness and grace is limitless and astonishing.  Christ Jesus shows that the true keys to the kingdom are God’s breathtaking unwillingness to lose anyone, and the Church’s faithful living of such forgiving grace in the world.  When our faith in such love from God is stronger than our fear, we become people who live that love and forgiveness and insistent welcome in the world.

We’ll never fully be without fear, and that’s OK.  We belong to the Risen Christ who loves the world.

So we step forward anyway, in our fear and in our faith, remembering whose we are and what he has called us to be and do.

We step forward together as Christ’s people in the world, so that when any one of us is afraid, the others can help strengthen his knees or hold her hand.  We step forward with the grace and strength of the Holy Spirit in us, so that God’s love will calm our hearts and give us the courage to witness with our lives to the eternal love of God for this world and for all people.

We might be afraid at times, but we are in the loving hands of the Triune God, and nothing can take that from us.  So let’s step forward together and see what God will do.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

Life in Christ, discipleship following the Risen Lord, removes our fear both of taking the way of the cross ourselves and of telling by our words and our deeds “what we have seen and heard.”

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Confession of St. Peter
   texts:  Acts 4:(1-7) 8-13 (9-22); Matthew 16:13-19 (20-26)

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Jesus and the angels always say “Don’t be afraid.”  It’s not that easy.

We fear witnessing to what God has done in our lives and in the world.  We’re afraid of offending others, of risking being shut out, of being embarrassed.  We keep it to ourselves.

We fear walking the path of the cross.  We’re afraid of what it would be like to live where we didn’t always win.  What it would cost to be sacrificial in our loving.  Our culture teaches us to fear being taken advantage of, so we do.

We fear being open with those who don’t believe as we do.  We’re afraid that if we don’t fight for what we believe and defend what we say, we might lose salvation.  The Church has taken Jesus’ command to Peter, repeated a couple chapters later to all his disciples, to “bind” and “loose,” as our imperative to declare who’s in and who’s out, because we’re afraid of being out.

We should look at Simon Peter.  Something changed in him between these two confessions we heard today, something about his fear.  If we could do the same, we might see the path of discipleship much more clearly, and maybe even find courage to walk it.

There’s a huge difference between the Peter of the Gospel and the later Peter, the one in Acts.

Before the cross and resurrection, Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God.  But when Jesus described what that would mean – trial, suffering, death at the hands of the authorities – Peter rejected that path and rebuked Jesus.  That didn’t end well for Peter.  From Rock of the Church to Stumbling Block in record time.  Peter feared a path of loss and suffering, and on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, he fully turned from this path, vehemently denying his Lord.

But in Acts, after the resurrection, Peter and John stand before the very same council that condemned Jesus to death, not many weeks after those events.  Threatened and told to quit doing healings and preaching in Jesus’ name, they refuse.

In a short time, Peter has become willing to lose everything, even to die, to tell others of God’s love in Jesus, to preach the Good News.

Meeting his risen Lord transformed him.

After the resurrection, Peter met his Lord Jesus and was forgiven in a breakfast picnic and conversation on a beach in Galilee.  There he discovered three things.  First, he was forgiven and still loved forever by the one he had betrayed.  Second, he re-discovered that he loved his Lord very much.  Third, he was told if that was true, then he had lambs to feed and care for.

If you look at Peter’s life before and after, it’s what he does with his fear that changes.  His fear kept him from following, from being faithful, from being courageous.  Not anymore.  Now he knows his risen Lord and has been filled by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Know this, though: it’s not a question of our having fear or not having fear. 

Peter and John in Acts today had to have been a little terrified standing before the same council that sent Jesus to the cross.  They sound really brave, refusing to stop teaching about Jesus.  But imagine the looks they exchanged with each other as they walked out of that council chamber, relief combined with terror.  “Can you believe what we just did?”

Peter always had fear; with the Spirit’s help he just learned it didn’t have to control him.

This can be our path as well.

There will always be a part of us that is afraid.  But does fear drive our lives, control our actions, keep us from our path?

Not since we’ve met our risen Lord.  Not since we’ve eaten at his Table each week, and heard that we are loved and forgiven, loving him in return.  Not since we’ve heard our call to feed his lambs and care for his sheep, and have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This relationship of faith in Christ that is ours is stronger than our fear, so it doesn’t control us.

When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can witness like Peter.

“Tell what we’ve seen and heard.”  That’s what they defiantly said they’d continue to do. Believers walked about with confidence in the love of God that destroys death and gives the power to live in the Spirit, and told about Jesus, his death and resurrection.  Thousands of people came to believe.

That could be us.  If our fear doesn’t control us we can tell what we’ve seen and heard, witness by our lives and our words about the love of the Triune God we have known, the forgiveness we have experienced, the life of the Spirit that fills us and changes us.  When our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we live lives that witness to what God is doing to save the world.

When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can risk like Peter.

When Peter rejected Jesus’ path in today’s Gospel, he was rejecting it for himself.  You don’t follow a Messiah with the understanding that might lead to death.

Yet after the resurrection, Peter willingly took the path of Christ, the path of the cross.  The disciples were willing to risk all for the sake of sharing God’s love in Christ, life and limb, friends and family.  They must have been afraid.  But in faith they walked the path.

That could be us.  The path of the cross means we will be changed by God, to be different.  That’s frightening; the idea that the Spirit might transform us is a huge unknown.  But when our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we can trust the love of the Triune God to change us into something better, something like our Lord.

The path of the cross can mean we will be taken advantage of by others, even by those closest to us.  If we seek not to win but to love, not to control but to serve, we risk a lot.  But when our faith in Christ is stronger than our fear, we learn that this path of self-giving and sacrifice is empowering, life-giving.  Instead of having empty victories over people we didn’t need to defeat, we find the joy of a shared life of love and grace.
 
When we aren’t controlled by our fear, we can even be open to new things from the Spirit, like Peter.

Even after the resurrection, Peter sometimes let fear control him.  At first he wasn’t ready for Paul’s spreading of the Gospel to the Gentiles.  If he was supposed to “bind” and “loose,” he wasn’t ready to loose the requirements of circumcision and kosher foods.  Eventually his Lord helped him cope with those fears, too, and he became someone who saw God’s grace in Christ for all people, not just his own.

That could be us.  We remember that the heart of Christ, shown in Matthew 18, the very chapter when these commands are given to all the disciples, is that divine forgiveness and grace is limitless and astonishing.  Christ Jesus shows that the true keys to the kingdom are God’s breathtaking unwillingness to lose anyone, and the Church’s faithful living of such forgiving grace in the world.  When our faith in such love from God is stronger than our fear, we become people who live that love and forgiveness and insistent welcome in the world.

We’ll never fully be without fear, and that’s OK.  We belong to the Risen Christ who loves the world.

So we step forward anyway, in our fear and in our faith, remembering whose we are and what he has called us to be and do.

We step forward together as Christ’s people in the world, so that when any one of us is afraid, the others can help strengthen his knees or hold her hand.  We step forward with the grace and strength of the Holy Spirit in us, so that God’s love will calm our hearts and give us the courage to witness with our lives to the eternal love of God for this world and for all people.

We might be afraid at times, but we are in the loving hands of the Triune God, and nothing can take that from us.  So let’s step forward together and see what God will do.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The gift of our Baptism into Christ is primarily the entrance of the Holy Spirit into us, growing faith and calling us into our ministry and service in the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Baptism of Our Lord, year B
   texts:  Mark 1:4-11; Acts 19:1-7

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

“We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

What a strange thing for these Ephesian believers to admit.  Clearly getting doctrines straight before baptism was not a high priority for the disciples of John the Baptizer who made it all the way to Greece.  It’s hard to know which is more surprising: that John still had disciples going around as far as Ephesus proclaiming a baptism of repentance, well after he completed his task to prepare people for the Messiah; or that these evangelists didn’t even bother to tell the people much about Jesus.

We can’t know what they told.  But since one of the few things John actually said about Jesus’ ministry was that Jesus would baptize believers with the Holy Spirit, one wonders: if they didn’t get to that part of John’s teachings, what, if anything, did these wandering preachers preach?

“We haven’t even heard there is a Holy Spirit.”  This seems critical for us.  Do we understand our baptism as connected to what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives?  Or do we live as if we’ve never heard there is a Holy Spirit?

We sometimes focus on the wrong things when it comes to baptism.

When we talk about baptism we seem to most often talk about rules.  Who should be baptized?  How much should they know before they are?  Is it OK to baptize babies?  Is the baptism of other communions of the Church as valid as ours?  Is the Table of the Lord only for those who are baptized, or can others come?  What of those who aren’t baptized, are they in danger of not being saved?

All such questions focus on baptism as status and seem to consider this Sacrament our chance to sort who’s in and who’s out, to control the gate, keep the room free of riffraff.  The absolute monstrosity of centuries of the Church declaring that those who died unbaptized could not be brought to eternal life, in defiance of anything the Scriptures say, is only one example of how we consider baptism as a means of control: of the Church, of others, even of the Triune God.  It is ridiculously arrogant to believe we have any say over whom God loves, saves, blesses, or raises from the dead.  God will do whatever God wants to do.

But this odd story from Ephesus points out another reason why these questions distract us from a really important thing.  Ephesus reminds us that Baptism is really all about the Holy Spirit.

That’s the experience of Baptism in the early Church: the presence of the Spirit was central.

The pattern of baptism in the early life in Acts was that evangelists would baptize “in the name of Jesus” – it’s not clear if the Triune Name was being used yet.  Then the apostles would come, lay hands on them, and pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the believers, as Paul did today.

So in Acts 8, Philip preaches to Samaritans who “accept the word of God,” and baptizes them.  Later, Peter and John come and lay hands on them so they receive the Holy Spirit.  All of this we do at once in our baptisms today.

Sometimes it didn’t work that way, though.  In Acts 10, the Holy Spirit fills a group of Gentiles before anybody does anything.  Peter wisely recognizes that if the Holy Spirit has come, there is no reason to withhold baptism.  For the early Church, the presence of the Spirit of God was so deeply connected to their understanding of Baptism, they sometimes needed to baptize after the Spirit got there, to catch up.  The same thing happened at Pentecost.

Likewise, Jesus’ baptism is when we see the Spirit of God come upon him.

We don’t know why Jesus needed to be baptized, certainly not for repentance and new life.  We do know what happened, though: the Holy Spirit came upon him and his Father’s voice called him beloved, one in whom he was well pleased.

As he walked out of the waters of the Jordan, filled with the Spirit of God, he had an understanding that he was God’s anointed, God’s beloved Son.  With hair and clothes dripping, he kept on walking out into the desert to meditate and fast and pray for 40 days on this new life ahead of him, this ministry.  From his baptism, and the inflowing Holy Spirit, it all began, the teaching, the healing, the calling, and the path to the cross and resurrection.

This is the only thing that matters for us, too, because that same Spirit is poured into us.

We don’t need Baptism to protect us from God’s impotence or carelessness; Christ Jesus has shown us the Triune God is neither.  If anyone will be saved, God will do it, and nothing we do or don’t do will change that.  Baptism is never a question of our safety.

Baptism is, however, a clear place where we proclaim the Holy Spirit comes upon us and we are changed.  Like Jesus.  Sent into ministry.  Like Jesus.

Let us be clear also: the Holy Spirit is not limited by our ritual, our actions, not even by this commanded Baptism we do as Christ’s Church.  The Holy Spirit can and does go wherever she wills to go, and moves in and with people far beyond our reach and knowledge and control.

But we are promised by our Lord that the Holy Spirit will in fact come to us in baptism and change our lives.  We see that happen to Jesus, and that’s what we should be expecting for ourselves, and for Sophia today.

Baptism for us, like Jesus, is our time of in-Spiration, when we are Spirited by God to live our lives of discipleship.

John baptized a baptism of repentance, inviting people to turn from their old ways and follow in God’s path.  Baptism into the name of the Triune God is far more than that, it is the Holy Spirit joining us to the life of the Triune God, giving birth to us as children of God.

But the life after both kinds of baptism is the same: a new beginning going in God’s direction instead of our own.  It’s no accident that when we baptize, or affirm our baptism, we begin by turning away from evil and the powers of evil that are against God.  In Christian baptism we understand John’s call to turn around and start new.

What is different is that our baptism has the same gift given Jesus in his baptism, the coming of the Holy Spirit.  The presence of the Holy Spirit empowers our beginning, our repentance, our new life.  The Holy Spirit gives us the grace and strength to walk in God’s ways and not our own.

We begin to look different to others, and even to ourselves, because the Spirit is transforming us, creating fruit and life in us that others can see.

That’s our grace and gift in our baptism.  We go from the font Spirited to live new lives in the world, part of God’s grace and healing of the world begun in Christ and continued in us.

When we come to the font now, placing water on ourselves in remembrance of our first washing, we want to keep our eyes open for this Spirit of God.

Our baptism is our Pentecost, as it was for Jesus, and our remembrance and living into our baptism is our constant joy in the grace of the Holy Spirit working in our lives and in the world.

We not only have heard there is a Holy Spirit, we live as children of God who expect that having the Spirit fill us will change us, and like Jesus, send us out into our service and ministry.  We not only have heard there is a Holy Spirit, we expect to see signs of the Spirit’s work in us everywhere we look.  The more we expect this, talk of this, look for this, the more we will see it.

So let’s keep our eyes open to the work of the Spirit, be unafraid to tell each other what we have seen.  For the Holy Spirit has given us new birth, and the Father has called us beloved children, and our whole ministry and service in Christ now lies before us.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

The gift of our Baptism into Christ is primarily the entrance of the Holy Spirit into us, growing faith and calling us into our ministry and service in the world.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
   The Baptism of Our Lord, year B
   texts:  Mark 1:4-11; Acts 19:1-7

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

“We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

What a strange thing for these Ephesian believers to admit.  Clearly getting doctrines straight before baptism was not a high priority for the disciples of John the Baptizer who made it all the way to Greece.  It’s hard to know which is more surprising: that John still had disciples going around as far as Ephesus proclaiming a baptism of repentance, well after he completed his task to prepare people for the Messiah; or that these evangelists didn’t even bother to tell the people much about Jesus.

We can’t know what they told.  But since one of the few things John actually said about Jesus’ ministry was that Jesus would baptize believers with the Holy Spirit, one wonders: if they didn’t get to that part of John’s teachings, what, if anything, did these wandering preachers preach?

“We haven’t even heard there is a Holy Spirit.”  This seems critical for us.  Do we understand our baptism as connected to what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives?  Or do we live as if we’ve never heard there is a Holy Spirit?

We sometimes focus on the wrong things when it comes to baptism.

When we talk about baptism we seem to most often talk about rules.  Who should be baptized?  How much should they know before they are?  Is it OK to baptize babies?  Is the baptism of other communions of the Church as valid as ours?  Is the Table of the Lord only for those who are baptized, or can others come?  What of those who aren’t baptized, are they in danger of not being saved?

All such questions focus on baptism as status and seem to consider this Sacrament our chance to sort who’s in and who’s out, to control the gate, keep the room free of riffraff.  The absolute monstrosity of centuries of the Church declaring that those who died unbaptized could not be brought to eternal life, in defiance of anything the Scriptures say, is only one example of how we consider baptism as a means of control: of the Church, of others, even of the Triune God.  It is ridiculously arrogant to believe we have any say over whom God loves, saves, blesses, or raises from the dead.  God will do whatever God wants to do.

But this odd story from Ephesus points out another reason why these questions distract us from a really important thing.  Ephesus reminds us that Baptism is really all about the Holy Spirit.

That’s the experience of Baptism in the early Church: the presence of the Spirit was central.

The pattern of baptism in the early life in Acts was that evangelists would baptize “in the name of Jesus” – it’s not clear if the Triune Name was being used yet.  Then the apostles would come, lay hands on them, and pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the believers, as Paul did today.

So in Acts 8, Philip preaches to Samaritans who “accept the word of God,” and baptizes them.  Later, Peter and John come and lay hands on them so they receive the Holy Spirit.  All of this we do at once in our baptisms today.

Sometimes it didn’t work that way, though.  In Acts 10, the Holy Spirit fills a group of Gentiles before anybody does anything.  Peter wisely recognizes that if the Holy Spirit has come, there is no reason to withhold baptism.  For the early Church, the presence of the Spirit of God was so deeply connected to their understanding of Baptism, they sometimes needed to baptize after the Spirit got there, to catch up.  The same thing happened at Pentecost.

Likewise, Jesus’ baptism is when we see the Spirit of God come upon him.

We don’t know why Jesus needed to be baptized, certainly not for repentance and new life.  We do know what happened, though: the Holy Spirit came upon him and his Father’s voice called him beloved, one in whom he was well pleased.

As he walked out of the waters of the Jordan, filled with the Spirit of God, he had an understanding that he was God’s anointed, God’s beloved Son.  With hair and clothes dripping, he kept on walking out into the desert to meditate and fast and pray for 40 days on this new life ahead of him, this ministry.  From his baptism, and the inflowing Holy Spirit, it all began, the teaching, the healing, the calling, and the path to the cross and resurrection.

This is the only thing that matters for us, too, because that same Spirit is poured into us.

We don’t need Baptism to protect us from God’s impotence or carelessness; Christ Jesus has shown us the Triune God is neither.  If anyone will be saved, God will do it, and nothing we do or don’t do will change that.  Baptism is never a question of our safety.

Baptism is, however, a clear place where we proclaim the Holy Spirit comes upon us and we are changed.  Like Jesus.  Sent into ministry.  Like Jesus.

Let us be clear also: the Holy Spirit is not limited by our ritual, our actions, not even by this commanded Baptism we do as Christ’s Church.  The Holy Spirit can and does go wherever she wills to go, and moves in and with people far beyond our reach and knowledge and control.

But we are promised by our Lord that the Holy Spirit will in fact come to us in baptism and change our lives.  We see that happen to Jesus, and that’s what we should be expecting for ourselves, and for Sophia today.

Baptism for us, like Jesus, is our time of in-Spiration, when we are Spirited by God to live our lives of discipleship.

John baptized a baptism of repentance, inviting people to turn from their old ways and follow in God’s path.  Baptism into the name of the Triune God is far more than that, it is the Holy Spirit joining us to the life of the Triune God, giving birth to us as children of God.

But the life after both kinds of baptism is the same: a new beginning going in God’s direction instead of our own.  It’s no accident that when we baptize, or affirm our baptism, we begin by turning away from evil and the powers of evil that are against God.  In Christian baptism we understand John’s call to turn around and start new.

What is different is that our baptism has the same gift given Jesus in his baptism, the coming of the Holy Spirit.  The presence of the Holy Spirit empowers our beginning, our repentance, our new life.  The Holy Spirit gives us the grace and strength to walk in God’s ways and not our own.

We begin to look different to others, and even to ourselves, because the Spirit is transforming us, creating fruit and life in us that others can see.

That’s our grace and gift in our baptism.  We go from the font Spirited to live new lives in the world, part of God’s grace and healing of the world begun in Christ and continued in us.

When we come to the font now, placing water on ourselves in remembrance of our first washing, we want to keep our eyes open for this Spirit of God.

Our baptism is our Pentecost, as it was for Jesus, and our remembrance and living into our baptism is our constant joy in the grace of the Holy Spirit working in our lives and in the world.

We not only have heard there is a Holy Spirit, we live as children of God who expect that having the Spirit fill us will change us, and like Jesus, send us out into our service and ministry.  We not only have heard there is a Holy Spirit, we expect to see signs of the Spirit’s work in us everywhere we look.  The more we expect this, talk of this, look for this, the more we will see it.

So let’s keep our eyes open to the work of the Spirit, be unafraid to tell each other what we have seen.  For the Holy Spirit has given us new birth, and the Father has called us beloved children, and our whole ministry and service in Christ now lies before us.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen