Sermon for January 10th

Have you got the Spirit? Is one baptism enough? Have you been baptized in the Spirit? As human beings, we always want more. More glory. More power. More gifts. More assurances. Sometimes we just KNOW that we must be missing something. As Christians, we wonder—maybe God is holding out on us—with all the suffering in the world, maybe there is something more that he could give us that would make life a lot more glorious.

The part of the Trinity that always seems to get co-opted into our schemes for glory is the Holy Spirit. God the Father always seems too in accessible. Jesus the Son is just a little too much like us, so the Holy Spirit seems like a good possibility. According to scripture, the spirit is the one who hands out the gifts such as healing or miracles, speaking in tongues and prophesy. But how do you get them? How can you find the Spirit? What must you do to become “spiritual” or “sanctified”? Or is it simply beyond your control?

In the second reading today from Acts, two apostles, Peter and John, visit some newly baptized Samaritans, but, once they arrive, they find out something strange, “as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of these Samaritans; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” the text says. So, Peter and John lay their hands on them, and they receive the Holy Spirit. You see, a baptism without the Holy Spirit is really no baptism at all, is it? Two out of three ain’t bad, as the pop star Meatloaf famously put it, but when it comes to your salvation, it seems pretty important to have all of the Trinity working on your side. The question that always comes up after reading this text from Acts is: why wasn’t that one baptism enough? Is there something else needed? Some Christian groups have maintained that, yes, something else is needed. They say that if you’ve only been baptized with water, in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, then you may have been forgiven your sins, you are still missing something.

According to R.A. Torrey, second president of the Moody Bible Institute, “The Baptism with the Holy Spirit is an experience connected with and primarily for the purpose of service . . . It is not primarily intended to make believers happy or holy, but to make them useful. It has no direct reference to cleansing from sin. It has to do with gifts for service rather than graces of character.” According to Francis MacNutt, “John the Baptist’s prophecy about the coming of Jesus indicates the primary purpose and significance of Jesus’ time on Earth: to baptize us in the Holy Spirit.”

Scripture talks about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, but not all Christians have even heard of it. Why might that be? Perhaps it is because we don’t really believe anymore in miracles, or healing, or prophecy or speaking in tongues and all those things come through the power of the Holy Spirit. In the early church, these activities were commonplace. Both Peter and Paul even raised people from the dead in the name of Jesus. But now, we figure those times are past.

Being baptized in the Holy Spirit is for the purpose of God showing his power through you. If we stop talking about the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and stop expecting that powerful event to take place, we forget about the power that God has to work in our lives, we stop praying because we stop believing our prayers could ever be answered. To put it simply, we lose our faith in the power of God and in God’s promise to use us as His witnesses.

However, there is also a great danger that Christians have created in their explanations of this baptism in the Holy Spirit. By emphasizing the importance of this event it is very easy to set it up in opposition to a baptism with water. Then, rather than expecting the Holy Spirit to fill a child or an adult with spiritual gifts to be used throughout their life, we start wondering if they might be missing something. We end up trying to separate the Holy Spirit from Jesus Christ.

Have you got the Spirit? Have you been baptized in the Spirit? Saint Paul says, “Yes, you have.” In his first letter to the Corinthian church he points out that all believers in Jesus Christ have been baptized in the Spirit for spiritual gifts don't come naturally, but come only through the Holy Spirit. Paul writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” You don’t need to be re-baptized in order to use your spiritual gifts, God has already empowered you to use them.

As R.A. Torrey puts its, while baptism with water is a onetime deal, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, being filled with the Holy Spirit, can happen numerous times, as many times as God has need for “each new emergency of Christian service.” In the book of Acts, the apostle Peter was filled with the Spirit three times. Baptism in the Holy Spirit is not a sacrament, it is just a description about how God works in our lives so that he might serve the needs of others through us.

In today’s reading from the gospel of Luke, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in bodily form like a dove. Does that mean that the Holy Spirit wasn’t truly a part of Jesus before this moment? Of course not! Not if we truly believe that Jesus was born God in the flesh. God cannot be separated into divisible parts or else he is no longer one God. The Holy Spirit can never be separate from Jesus Christ just as the Holy Spirit can never be separate from God.

So what does it mean then when the text today says, “they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.”? Did God suddenly separate himself so that, for these people, the first baptism didn’t take? Could the same thing have happened at your baptism? This text tends to create doubt in all of us about our baptisms. But the most important words in this little section come at the beginning of verse 17, “for as yet the Spirit had not come.” Instead of saying that the Holy Spirit DID NOT COME when they were baptized, the text says that the Holy Spirit DID NOT YET COME—in other words, it was expected to come. Why? Because where Jesus goes there goes the Holy Spirit.

The biblical scholar Andrew Das explains that, in the book of Acts, baptism with water and being baptized in the Holy Spirit, are always connected. The baptism of the Spirit usually takes place at the same time as the baptism with water as the apostle Peter points out in Acts 2:38, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” However, there are two times in Acts when the Holy Spirit surprises us.

The first is in our text today when the Samaritans have, as yet, not received the Holy Spirit after being baptized. The second is in chapter 10 when the Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit first and then are baptized. Jesus promised his disciples that they would be His witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria , and to the ends of the earth. The book of Acts explains how the Holy Spirit accomplishes God’s missionary activity.

In each case where the Holy Spirit either is delayed or presumes water baptism, the spirit ends up bringing two separate groups together who were once hostile toward one another. In the first instance, the spirit reunites two separate bodies, orthodox Jews and Samaritans, and brings them together into one new Christian community. In the second instance, the Holy Spirit overcomes the human prejudice of Jews against Gentiles by having some Gentiles speak in tongues before they were ever baptized. As Peter says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have? So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.” Why? Because baptism in the Holy Spirit and water baptism are expected to be connected.

Have you been baptized with the Holy Spirit? Yes. It happened when you were named and claimed by God himself in the waters of baptism. In those same waters you were forgiven for your sins, even though you hear the forgiveness again each week in the absolution. So, also, you were filled with the Holy Spirit even though you can expect to be filled again with that same Spirit whenever you have need to use your spiritual gifts. You are not “missing” anything for God has given you all that He has, withholding nothing. What does this mean for you? You received the Holy Spirit once at your baptism and God has promised to fill you with that same Spirit again and again as you live out your vocations in service to others. You are free to go forth today in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.