Sermon - January 7, 2024 (Acts 19:1-7)

How many of you in this room grew up Lutheran? As for the rest of you, where are you coming from?

Lutheran or not, every Christian congregation and denomination sort of have their own recipe for faith development that they follow, don’t they? We’re all working more or less from the same basic ingredients list, but some do things this way and others do things that way. Then there are those who choose not to belong to any house of worship while still claiming Jesus is their Savior and homeboy. 

All these different ways to believe and worship in Jesus’s name has got to make a person wonder: does it matter which way a person follows Jesus? Can you get it wrong? Is there a superior or right way to do this?

The Recipe for Faith

Is there a recipe for faith, and if so, what is it? Whether you like to cook or bake or not, everyone who hasn’t been through culinary school or born in Greece knows that to put something of good taste together needs a recipe—and a recipe needs ingredients.

Story: Several years ago, we were at my mom’s house and my younger brother Dave was baking beer bread for us. What started out as excitement faded to curiosity and then to total befuddlement. The bread was not rising. He was back and forth into the kitchen…and each time he grew more and more frustrated. “What is taking so long? And why is it oozing all over?” Finally, he pulled out the pans of bread, which had become a terrible, burnt smelling mess. We all inspected his creation and knew something wasn’t right. He was adamant he followed the recipe correctly. But he was wrong. Instead of using flour, he had mistakenly substituted powdered sugar, thinking it was flour.

Have you ever thought or been told that you can screw up our salvation by believing or thinking or doing the wrong religious thing? Are we really in trouble with God if we put the incorrect ingredient, or doctrine, into practice? When I was in college, I was pretty sure that was the case. I remember being in an ultra-religious group and looking down upon those who didn’t believe like we did and condemning those without any belief at all, convinced they were wrong and we were right. I remember being told my baptism didn’t count as a baby, and that those who weren’t baptized at all qualified as “those people” who were lost and were gonna be in for a rude awakening when they died.

The further removed I am from those insecure days of my youth, the more convinced I am of something else: that Christians are more likely the ones who are prone to get lost. Does the God of love, truth, and grace really care which type of baptism a person has? Would the Supreme Intelligence and The All in All really place that much control into our hands? Do we really need to remember to use our metaphorical flour instead of powdered sugar in order to avoid falling out of favor?

Sermon Text

The Apostle Paul sure seemed to think so. In this passage of Acts, we eavesdrop in on the Apostle as he hears that (gasp!) someone has only received a baptism of John’s, not Jesus’s.

Who’s baptism was right, the way John did it or the way Paul preferred? John’s baptism of repentance was intended to help the baptized change their life by recognizing what no longer served their best interests. Paul baptizing in Jesus’s name was intended to be that AND meant to go all the way to the soul level. Paul, after all, had been encountered by the Risen Jesus’s eternal, transforming, words of promise. Baptizing in his name through the power of the Holy Spirit was to do so through the same Holy Spirit who was present for Jesus’s baptism in the river Jordan by John AND in Jesus’s resurrection. I don’t know if Paul believed that John’s baptism was bad for them, but he sure seemed to think that it wasn’t enough.

This isn’t the only time I find myself doubting or in disagreement with the Christian scriptures—but I am sensitive that wrestling with such a concept as baptism is a very important one to Lutherans. But the truth of the matter is that the Book of Acts was written several decades after Jesus taught his disciples and that the Institution of Christianity was forming right around the time these words would have been penned. So I am having a hard time falling in line with what the author of Acts writes about here, especially in the presumption that what John had to say is somehow superceded in importance to what Paul thinks, even though what John represented to Jesus in the Gospels was pretty dang important. We know what the Apostle Paul thinks, but is that what matters most to Jesus? I don’t know. In the Christian faith, baptism is one of those sacramental doctrines that stresses its promised ability in keeping one in eternal life. Is it true that what we believe and practice about baptism seals our fate for eternity? Is what we do in baptism the key ingredient to our life with Jesus?

Conclusion

In matters of Faith, it can be all too easy to get wrapped up into thinking it’s all on us to use the right ingredients. Maybe our spiritual and religious choices are super important. Then again, maybe they aren’t; In keeping with why we pray the way we do in worship here, what you think and believe, in my opinion, is just as important as what the Apostle Paul thinks and believes.

I like to think and believe that when it comes to something like baptism, what matters most are our intentions—the why behind what we choose to for ourselves or others. I like to think and believe that the God of love would above all consider our motivations in such matters. I’d like to think that no matter how messy, or orthodox we go about things like religious faith and spiritual beliefs, that God would be more than a little forgiving and compassionate if we tend to get a little mixed up from time to time.

It is, after all, the unseen Spirit of the Universe who gives the heat and causes the ingredients to merge and rise, not us. That mysterious heat in baking is what we theologians call GRACE in matters of faith. There’s nothing you can believe, say, or even do that will make God’s inexplicable existence begin or end nor God’s uncontainable love lessen for you.

So relax. I don’t know if we can screw this up, I honestly don’t have a clue how any of this Christian gig works. I could be wrong, but if I am going to err, I am going to err on the side of love and grace. My brother proved to be a terrible baker that night, but thanks be to God, his salvation isn’t tied to his ability to follow a recipe, nor are we tied to follow a recipe for faith—the Apostle Paul’s recipe or John’s or anyone else’s. It’s Grace that saves us, not flour, not water, and not what we say or think. So let’s gather around the table as God’s beloved, because there’s little in life and faith as messy and fun as mixing the ingredients of our lives with others’ and seeing what God creates….In Christ’s loving name. Amen.