On Baptist (The Tension is our Salvation)

On Baptist (The Tension is our Salvation)

Our “Words” Series

A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

By Griff Martin

Matthew 3:13-17 and Galatians 5:1

On August 19, 2018

Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Galatians 5:1

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Sermon: 

Incarnate and Resurrected God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing new reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God, for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

What is a baptist? 

Do you have all day?

The simple answer: a baptist is one who belongs to a baptist church. But surely it can’t be that simple, right? So let’s try a few others….what is a baptist?

It’s complicated because in our relatively short baptist history of 400 years there has been a lot of different kinds of baptist. Currently there are between 74 and 78 distinct types of baptist in our country. Just listen to these names: Central Baptist, Evangelical Free Baptist, New Testament Association of Independent Baptist, Old Regular Baptist, General Association of Baptist, General Association of Regular Baptist (don’t worry, there is no association of Irregular Baptist), Alliance of Baptist, Cooperative Baptist, Southern Baptist, General Six Principle Baptist, Full Gospel Baptist, National Baptist Evangelical Life and Soul Saving Assembly of the USA, Reformed Baptist, Baptist Fundamental Ministries for Jewish Evangelism, Primitive Baptist, Separate Baptist, Unregistered Baptist and Two Seed in the Spirit Baptist. And those are not names of churches, those are types of baptist. Each of those has a host of churches within them.

Unity is not our strength, so perhaps another way to introduce us….

Maybe our history. The history of Roger Williams and the First Baptist Church of America, really Providence, in 1638, to talk about Roger Williams’ history beginning with taking Holy Orders in the Church of England and then revolting against the power, coming here and establishing a free church, often being claimed as the first Baptist. But that is really a chicken and egg conversation because Roger Williams was baptized by Ezekiel Holliman and actually history will tell us they did not call themselves “baptist” for some time. But of course, a sermon on the history of baptist is why one of you saints emailed me this week upon learning the sermon topic and simply wrote, “Can’t you do a study of the book of Leviticus or that horrible story where Elisha sends the bears out to kill the children?”

Maybe we should start with our famous baptists, Martin Luther King and Jimmy Carter…but then you also have to include Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. I would rather not.

Maybe we start with some of the more recent history of churches, like ours and the Southern Baptist Convention and the great split…and the line I discovered this week from one of our favorites, Kinky Friedman, discussing his religious journey: “I even went to a Southern Baptist church for a while, until I discovered they didn’t hold them under [the water] nearly long enough.”

Or maybe we try to sum up distinct baptist doctrine and theology….Which is an impossible task since our distinct theology is that we can believe whatever we want, and our theological history is full of divine irony. Consider this: baptist began at two ends of the spectrum. Almost immediately we had General Baptist and Particular Baptist; the general being those who believed that salvation was for all, and the particular being those who believed that salvation was only for the elect. And that is our birth – at both ends of the spectrum (and hold onto this tension, it’s important; tension might be the most baptist thing)….Or the irony that the first Southern Baptist Convention President in 1846, his name was WB Johnson and one of his central life arguments was the ordination of men and women into the deaconate.

So maybe the best way to start this sermon on baptist is with drugs in Suriname – intrigued? It was my senior year of high school and we went on a mission trip to Suriname. It’s where I preached my first sermon (note: I did not use the adjective “good”). Obviously English is not the primary language, so all us preachers had translators. My youth pastor was preaching and he was trying to explain Gospel, grace, law and freedom to a group of students who did not speak his language – what could go wrong? He told them “You know, as a Christian I have a lot of freedom and I could do drugs, and I could have a lot of sex and I could drink a lot if I wanted to, but I choose not to because of my love to and for Jesus and the fact I want to obey Jesus.”  The translator’s eyes got real big and she did her translation, and all the youth in the room got really quiet. We later learned that this had translated, “as a Christian, I have a lot of sex with a lot of people and I do a lot of drugs and I drink a lot because I love and obey Jesus.” Biggest altar call ever. 

Translation matters.

How we define words and how we use them matters. 

I think baptist is a word that even in the English language and even in just a 400 year history has not translated well. I am not going to ask for a show of hands, but how many of you, when telling people about your faith and your church, avoid the baptist word as long as you can? Because I bet it’s more than just a few of us here. Even the discussion here about the name of our church shows that tension.

…Because baptist is often equated with being closed-minded. It implies unscientific readings of Scripture. It implies literal reading of Scripture. It implies following the right polity; making sure things are done the right way more than doing the right thing. It implies division. It implies a certain politics. It implies women in a subordinate role….When we all know it’s none of those things.

And that in itself it a real problem for us. Defining who baptist are, we can easily fall into a trap of reactionary against language. Just this week I was on a conference call with about a dozen pastors, all baptist, and as we did introductions I noted how many of them defined their church as what they stood against. I have fallen into this kind of trap trying to identify myself as a baptist who colors outside the lines, a Jimmy Carter Baptist or even the tagline at one church, “Not Your Grandmother’s Baptist” (but that was before I learned our history, because First Austin grandmothers were our kind of baptist back then). But the truth is that we need to learn that no one wants to hear all about who and what you are against; that conversation is not life giving. Tell me what you are for. Tell me who you are.

This week I have been thinking a lot about our identity and the question has naturally come up, do we even want to be baptist anymore? Do I want to identify as a baptist? And I have to confess that I do. I love baptist identity and I think there is something salvific in being a baptist today. I am energized when I see our baptist roots and foundations and what we were built on. I am still amazed at how radical and true it is, and personally I think we need more baptist in our world today.

And as I have explored our baptist identity this week, I have realized it’s not so much who we have been and our history that is the question, as much as it is how we live into it this day.

How do we live into the tension of being baptist? Because that is our biggest hope, diving deep into the tension of being baptist. It’s very promising.

It begins with a celebration of freedom. Our freedom is the event that defines us. As baptist, we stood up to say we are not going to have someone tell us what we have to believe, what creed we have to hold, what hymns we have to sing and prayers we have to pray. We respect the individual mind and faith journey and the community with which that journey takes place. 

And these freedoms have continually defined us. It was Buddy Sherdan that best summed this up with the Four Fragile Freedoms of baptist – a list that he developed by studying the sermons and theology of key baptist churches and leadership from 1965-1980. And even though we do not profess to holding a creed, Buddy Sherdan did a pretty good job of finding the four common themes that define us: bible, soul, church and religious freedom.

Bible freedom: That we have the freedom to read it and interpret it as we see fit, as we are lead to interpret it and understand it on our own and with the help of the Holy Spirit; that we believe the words of Scripture can guide us and center us, in particular the Gospel stories.

Soul freedom: That it is up to individuals on their own to deal with God on their own. Yes we are in community together and that matters, but my relationship to and with God and your relationship to and with God are mine and yours to tend to. You don’t even need clergy for this task (but let’s not dwell there).

Church freedom: We get to do what we want to do. If we decide we want to dance, we dance, and if we decide we want to be welcoming and affirming, we are welcoming and affirming, and if we decide that we think that God is calling us to do something that is new and different, well, we get to do that. 

Religious freedom: Freedom of religion, freedom for religion, freedom from religion. With this, of course, comes separation of church and state, meaning that we believe those in power will not tell us what we have to believe and we will not promote partisan politics (but that does not mean we will not talk about political issues in church, we need to talk about these things). It’s the words of Gospel: Caesar is not Lord and Christ is not Caesar. 

And those are our central freedoms. These are freedoms which are increasingly relevant and needed in our world. These freedoms are quite prophetic in the days in which we live. These are freedoms that we as a congregation take very seriously. I work really hard (despite what you might have heard) to keep church and state separate, to speak Gospel truth to issues but avoid partisan politics, to remind us as individuals and us as a community to interpret Scripture with the Spirit and with our hearts and minds and then to do what Scripture calls us to do. As we saw with some of our denominational conflicts, we don’t deal well with being told what to do and what not to do. This is a church where these four freedoms are central to being baptist. We do really well holding these four freedoms.

However, being baptist is about much more than just freedom. To go back to Suriname, it is not sex, drugs and booze because we love Jesus. Freedom is not enough. If freedom were all we needed, we would live in a world that looks like Burning Man all the time.

And it’s that tension I mentioned earlier. It’s freedom from a lot of things in religious history that we did not find life in, but it’s freedom to something. This freedom is also about being bound. After all, this religious movement and group that claims freedom as its core identity has chosen for its name the sacramental act of baptism; the event that defines our life by claiming our life. The event when we give up who we are; the moment we die to our self. Think about that.

As baptist, we are defined by our freedom and the first thing we do in the freedom is to bind ourselves to Jesus Christ through his baptism; to take our freedom and to use it to pledge our allegiance to Jesus Christ and the kingdom that he set up for; to take our freedom and to bind our identity to the one we follow.

It’s following Jesus Christ who I believe spends the first thirty or so years figuring out his identity, and then in his first public appearance, takes his freedom and gives it away. It’s about this. It’s about Kingdom, it’s about Gospel, it’s about building the world that has always been possible if only we would all follow.

It’s quite a calling, to use our freedom not for self service but to use our freedom to choose to follow Christ and to finish the mission that he began.

To find our freedom and to immediately give it away.

It is for freedom that Christ set us free and called us straight to the waters of baptism, to commit our freedom to the greater freedom of all.

That’s the kind of baptist I want to be. And I believe if churches like ours would do so, we could live our way into reclaiming baptist as a word we could utter with deep joy and with no exception. To be those who are held in the tension of being free and bound, and that tension being the very fulcrum of a new era of faithfulness as baptist, yes – but more importantly, as Christ followers. 

*artwork: Baptism, Painting by Geoffrey Holder, http://101artgallery.com/holderG.html