Repent and be Baptized

“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Acts 2

Dear Cooper:

Confession – uncertainty and mystery inspires me. I love going to the Bible and imagining all the ways we can read a text. What if the emphasis of the sentence is different? What if the emotion of the speaker is different? What about punctuation – it is assumed – so what if it is changed? What I love is how these questions will reveal the multi-leveled, multi-directional, multi-faceted and magnificent way God moves in creation. What is sad is how ‘christians’ try to impose their certainty where God chose to leave questions.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that somehow, someway a symptom of being Christian is being baptized. We see examples in Scripture of people hearing about Jesus, believing, repenting of their sin, and then being baptized. So, using these narratives folks have presumed a Baptismal formula – essentially this formula is called the "believers baptism.” As we have said, if someone comes to hear, believe, and repent then by all means Baptize!! Baptize and let every Christian celebrate and give thanks for a newborn Christian! Did you know that Great Grandma and Grandpa Edwards were both Baptized long after they were considered ‘infants’. Now that I think about it, Matt, Zach, Adda and Callum were all older as well. True story.

But there is a problem with creating a formula from word order in the Bible - sometimes words are inconveniently out of order or missing. In Greek (the language the New Testament was mostly written in) syntax (that is word order) is less linear than English. And, like it or not, the Bible is not rigorously consistent in Baptism narratives. We have to be careful then not to read into the text things that may not be there. Read Acts 10 for a good example of everything getting out of order – people have received the Holy Spirit without any water baptism at all! None of this variance is biblical error – but it demands that we be very careful drawing our conclusions and creating our formulae.

Here is something else. You were born into a family and a home who profess Jesus to be Lord and Saviour and who stand now within the confessing Church. Nobody, absolutely nobody we read about in the Book of Acts makes this claim. Why? Because the Church of Christ was brand new! – all members were converts to Christianity. If we read Acts really closely we have to concede that this ‘context of conversion’ might impact (perhaps should impact?) our understanding. So at the very least we have a question to ponder about the setting for these baptism stories in relation to the setting of your baptism story – your great grandparents, your grandparents, your mom and dad, your God-parents and your great uncle are professing Christians – so that story, your story is very different. All I am saying here is the "pattern" of your baptism is set differently than the pattern of the Book of Acts baptisms. Does this effect the process of baptism. Maybe, maybe not?

So, think about that for a bit. Your baptism is not writing a new story in Christ's Church, it is the continuation of a very old story told in the faith of your fathers …

t HE

Saturday, January 14, 2017