Last Sunday was a two-sided holiday being both Pentecost and Mother’s Day. Between the English and the Spanish services, the pastors of First Baptist Church were able to cover the appropriate bases.
English Service- “The Dawning of a New Age” (Acts 2:1-21)
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Spanish Service- “Ser Madre” (Habacuc 3)
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Within the annals of Christian history there are a number of events and developments so significant that they form a framework into which other events can be placed. A short list of these major milestones would include such things as the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the split between the Eastern and the Western Church in the eleventh century, Luther’s publication of his ninety-five theses, and so on.
Among these watershed events, though, one must mention the development of the Nicene Creed–both its conception at the First Council of Nicea in AD 325 and its subsequent expansion at the First Council of Constantinople in AD 381. The Nicene Creed would come to be the most widely used statement of faith in all the Christian Church throughout time. And its popularity can still be seen today as it is recited or otherwise affirmed in the midst of worship by Roman Catholics, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and on and on.
But while the Nicene Creed is embraced by millions of Christians of virtually every denominational tradition, some feel a bit uncomfortable with its wording. Some Christians, particularly of a Baptist or otherwise Evangelical stripe, while wholeheartedly supporting the creed’s declaration of the Trinity, flinch at one of the final lines of the text which reads: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” To some these words just seem… well… off. Isn’t it our faith that justifies us? Doesn’t the heart-felt repentance and commitment we make to the Lord in prayer get the job done? Isn’t baptism supposed to be merely an outward expression of an inward and preexistent reality?
Those who feel this way often point to passages in the Bible that support what may be called a direct and immediate view of salvation, that is, a view which implies that justification can be had independent of any outward ritual. As the Apostle Paul declares, “with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.” (Romans 10:10) And as the Apostle Peter proclaims, we are now living in an age in which, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved!” (Acts 2:21) With these passages in mind Evangelicals generally and Baptists specifically sometimes just can’t bring themselves to embrace the creed– after all, the Bible is the prime authority in our lives and creeds (whether they be ancient or modern) are merely human documents liable to error.
But this kind of unease is simply unnecessary. While the Bible does indeed affirm that salvation comes through faith and repentance, it also affirms that baptism is the normal and God-ordained arena in which these sentiments find their appropriate expression. In the book of Acts whenever a man comes to faith in the Lord he is baptized immediately. One might say that his conversion and his baptism are thus so closely linked that they form a single, indistinguishable event. Therefore, while faith and repentance can be expressed simply through prayer, in the New Testament at least, they are always expressed through baptism as an acted prayer.
This understanding can be supported with verses of its own. For while Peter does declare that all who call on the Lord shall be saved, in that very same sermon, when specifically asked how one obtains this salvation, Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” (Acts 2:38) And later this same man tells us that “baptism now saves you–not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience.” (1 Peter 3:21) Paul too seems to have a somewhat nuanced view of baptism when he writes, “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that we too may live a new life.” (Romans 6:4) In all this we see that while the Apostles understood that salvation was something communicated to the individual through faith and repentance, those feelings were at least normally expressed to others (God included) through the act of baptism. That is to say, baptism served as the vehicle of repentance.
Of course, in many modern contexts, baptism is often separated from conversion by a lengthy stretch of time–sometimes even a span of years. And thus to the extent that modern Christians distance themselves from the Apostolic practice of baptism they are correct to also distance themselves from the Apostolic interpretation of baptism. A baptism that takes place immediately after one’s conversion can, in a sense, in a Petrine and Pauline sense, be said to save; a baptism that lingers until a decade after the fact cannot. But then again, the inverse is true as well: insofar as we administer baptism as the Apostles did, so too can we speak of it as the Apostles spoke.
Here’s the rub: given all this it would seem that Baptists, more so than any other group, ought to be able to recite the Nicene Creed with a straight face. Among Baptists baptism has retained its position as an act of conversion and dedication which every baptizand ought to approach with both personal faith in and repentance before their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Thus, at least ideally, Baptists may legitimately describe their baptisms, as the Apostles did, as baptisms for the forgiveness of sins. Other groups, specifically those that baptize infants who by virtue of their age are psychologically incapable of repentance and informed faith, cannot. It is these Christians who separate baptism from repentance as a matter of policy who ought to stutter at the last lines of the creed; for to characterize the baptism of an infant as something done “for the forgiveness of sins” is, given the diversity of paedobaptist baptismal theologies, at best, wildly proleptic, or, at worst, flatly erroneous.
As part of an on-going effort to make FBCGH’s online presence as streamlined and user-friendly as possible, our podcast has been merged with the blog. As such the Sunday sermons will now appear here on a fairly regular basis.
Sermons from April 27, 2008
English Service- “Peace” (John 14:15-27)
Spanish Service- “La Soberana de Dios” (Habacuc 3)
Every so often some group of researchers conducts a survey of the religious beliefs of Americans. Generally speaking the results are predictable: most people identify with either Catholicism or one of the thirty-one flavors of Protestantism, a smaller percentage are Jewish, and a handful of people hold to other, generally Eastern, faiths. But over the last generation or two a new demographic has arisen, a group which apparently warrants its own category: “spiritual but not religious”.
Those who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious” generally feel that life is a wonderful and somewhat mysterious thing. This sense of wonder and mystery is such that flat, mechanistic explanations of the world simply fail to convince. As such the minds of these individuals are open to the spiritual, that is, to phenomena and orientations which seem to participate in a larger reality than mere matter in motion.
At the same time, people of this sort often feel that there is something of an inherent antagonism between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is free, it’s open-ended, it’s intensely personally, and largely private. Religion, on the other hand, is seen as dogmatic, institutional, stale, and authoritarian. To put it more simply: spirituality is positive while religion is largely negative.
As a clergyman I confess that I find the above dichotomy rather misses the mark. The difference between religion and spirituality is not one of kind but of degree. As such the difference between the two is analogous to the difference between genuine mathematics and a vague appreciation of numbers: the former is simply a refinement, an integration, and even an advance of the latter. Religion is merely what happens when people come together to discuss spirituality, to bring their experiences and thoughts into relationship with one another. Religion is where the world-weary pessimism of Ecclesiastes is put into dialogue with the bright-eyed optimism of Proverbs; it’s where the cautiousness of St. James is brought into contact with the freedom of St. Paul; it’s where the fleeting glimpses of that “larger reality” are pieced together to produce a fuller and more reliable picture than any one person could hope to manage alone.
Of course, there is still the matter of religion’s authoritarian flavor. But given the above, is that really surprising? Indeed, is it even necessarily undesirable? If religion is the piecing together of a definite puzzle then certainly there are better and worse ways to assemble that puzzle. Or, to continue the mathematics analogy, while all numbers may be equally valid, all equations are not: 2+2=4 certainly seems more reasonable than 2+2=5; would we really want to study under a teacher blind to the distinction?
With all this said, I’d encourage the “spiritual but not religious” to reconsider institutional faith, to even give it a first-hand investigation. Perhaps the chapels of your neighborhoods and the well-worn books they preach contain something of worth after all. Perhaps you’ll find their ministers less overbearing than you assumed. Who knows, perhaps you’ll even find a home.
March has past us by and, this year, that means that Easter has come and gone as well. But while Easter Sunday may be just a memory brought to mind by the now drastically discounted chocolate bunnies and swiftly disappearing Cadbury Crème Eggs, the reality at which that day hinted still lingers. Thus, for centuries, the Church has recognized Easter not just as a single day which points back to a singular historical event (the first Easter) but as the beginning of a new season that mirrors the new era into which the first Easter ushered our world.
The Easter season, also called Eastertide by those with an antiquarian bent, is a time in which Christians focus on those painfully few weeks between the resurrection of Jesus and His subsequent ascension into heaven. For the first disciples this was no doubt a time of joy mixed with confusion: What exactly does the empty tomb imply? What are we to make of the fact that Jesus, a man we saw die, has appeared to us, even eaten with us? How does this change things—our faith, the way we see the world, our very lives? We might imagine that all of these questions buzzed through the minds of the Apostles between their fleeting encounters with the risen Jesus. And as such the Easter season is an opportunity for us to ask ourselves the very same questions: essentially, what does Easter mean for us?
For starters it means hope, confident hope. The Hebrew scriptures contain a number of brief and oblique references to some kind of life after death, even some kind of resurrection. But in the experiences of Jesus these glimmering sparks were fanned into full flame; the abstract and plausibly deniable promises of the prophets and others were represented and enacted in a physical example. And thus our hopes, as people living in the great Eastertide of history, that the grave need not conquer and that death need not be the end are nourished and strengthened.
Further, this season means clarity of purpose. Just as Jesus’ empty tomb confirms that life extends beyond death, indeed triumphs over death through Him, so that triumph stands arrayed like an invincible army against the despair and nihilistic dissolution that characterizes so many modern lives. Far from a trivial and absurd respite before “the inevitable”, life takes on a vastly more significant character. For if death is merely a temporary imposition prior to the beginning of a far fuller and longer-lasting existence then those elements of our life that insinuate their importance to our spirits—our relationships with God, our families, our duties, and so on—acquire a significance they would not otherwise have.
Easter comes early this year. It’s only March and already I’m considering the themes of the Easter sunrise sermon. In a few short weeks Christians around the world will gather together in their cathedrals and churches, on hilltops, and in local parks to celebrate Jesus’ glorious victory over death and hell. Preachers will lift up the memory of Christ and His first disciples; they will proclaim the miracle and invite their hearers to live in the glorious light of this all-informing event. God will be honored, believers will be uplifted, and sinners will be saved.
But in addition to the overtly religious elements of Easter, many of us will also participate in other events which are less inherently spiritual: the giving of baskets filled with candy and stuffed bunnies, feverish hunts for colorful eggs (both real and plastic) hidden among bushes and lawn chairs, and so on. And in the midst of this pastel-hued fun the overwhelming majority of revelers will sally forth completely lost in the moment, both unconcerned and unaware of the history of the less Christocentric elements of the holiday. But for a number of families the bliss of ignorance will be impossible. For these informed and unfortunate few (think Ecclesiastes 1:18) the dubious realities of the past will intrude in on the merriment and cast an uncomfortable shadow over the day.
Just as we inherit of our ancestors’ genes, so too have we inherited elements of our ancestors’ culture and this unavoidable principle can be seen quite clearly in Easter. The very word “Easter” comes from “Eostre”, a pagan fertility goddess worshipped by the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons. What’s more, eggs and rabbits (symbols of fertility for obvious reasons) were associated with the goddess in ancient times. It is precisely this history which makes some Christians uncomfortable with the marginalia of Easter Sunday.
Here at First Baptist, we’re currently working through a study on the Book of Judges and we recently focused on a passage which seems apropos here. In the story of Gideon one finds that the Lord called His servant to a particularly provocative task: “Take your father’s bull and a second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal which belongs to your father, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it; and build an altar to the LORD your God on the top of this stronghold in an orderly manner, and take a second bull and offer a burnt offering with the wood of the Asherah which you shall cut down” (Judges 6:25-26). God essentially told Gideon to utterly destroy the sacred site of Baalism in his community and then to use the rubble to facilitate the worship the one true God. Think of that, Gideon, at God’s command, used stones and wood once consecrated to spiritual error in the construction of an altar dedicated to the Lord. The wood and the stones were not contaminated by their former use, they weren’t made somehow “unclean”; they were simply raw material, raw material which was recycled and used to glorify God.
Now if God can be glorified with rocks and wood once associated with a false god, why not eggs and rabbits? For while Eostre may have had a lock on these things in the first few centuries of the Christian era in the English speaking world, the same simply cannot be said today. When Westerners see the Cadbury Bunny on TV hocking its delicious cream-filled chocolate eggs we think of Easter, and when we think of Easter we think of Jesus’ triumphant rise from the grave. And thus, these potent symbols of fertility and life have come, in a sense, to be symbols of the resurrection and the new life that we can receive through that event. For however much a sham goddess may have represented vitality to the ancient English, her claims were as nothing compared against the Savior that St. Augustine and his companions preached—that One who came that we may have life, and have it abundantly.
Easter is a wonderful holiday. As a kid I remember the excitement I felt when my Sunday School class would finish its lesson on the Resurrection and head outside for the church’s Easter egg hunt. To quote another little boy, “Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen!” Not a bad combination by any stretch.
But as we slowly approach the Easter season all Christians should be reminded that, Biblically speaking, the road to Easter inevitably passes under the shadow of the Cross. It is precisely this awareness that has kept the high holy day of the Christian calendar really part of a set, a matching set even: a parity in which the riotous joy of Easter is placed in relationship with the far more sobering sentiments of Good Friday. For how can Jesus rise from death without first descending into it? And how can the people of God rightfully celebrate the enormity of Jesus’ victory unless we first take full stock of the enormity of His opponents: namely sin, Satan, and finally, death itself.
As we move towards Easter let’s remember to meditate not only upon the glorious end of that story but also its darksome penultimate points. Let us allow our eyes to adjust to the fearsome twilight of Calvary that when the awesome dawn of the empty tomb flashes upon us it might seem all the brighter for it.
January is a time of renewed commitment and resolutions. Each year millions of people promise themselves that they will lose weight, travel more, quit smoking, fix the shed, learn French or pursue some other equally noble goal. In the weeks following New Year’s Day we often ask one another, “What’s your resolution for the new year?” And all too often the question is met with something like the following: “Well, I made a resolution, but…” Firm commitments made at the beginning of January have a disappointing way of fizzling out by the month’s end. And thus our waistlines continue to bulge, cigarettes still appear on our shopping lists, and those French tapes will have to wait until next year.
Perhaps one of the reasons that our New Year’s resolutions so commonly fail is because they tend to focus on relatively trivial matters. Sure, finally visiting the Grand Canyon is a great goal, but is it the greatest goal? Perhaps our dedication to change would benefit from a desire to change not merely our appearances or even our lifestyles but our very selves, that indivisible core of our personal identity: our souls. Perhaps this year we ought to resolve to reconnect with our God through prayer. Maybe it’s time to give that dusty Bible hidden away on the book shelf another look. Maybe it’s time to get reacquainted with a pew at your local church.
Of course, the benefits of a robust connection with the Lord, greater Biblical literacy, and meaningful involvement in a community of faith don’t lend themselves to bragging quite as easily as a newly painted shed (though, sadly, some have tried). But while immaculate lawns and healthy lungs eventually surrender to the inevitability of time, the rewards of a genuine relationship with God are a bit longer lasting.
Those careers that are part of what may broadly be construed as the “service sector” often involve some means of identification. Policemen sport badges, salesclerks wear tee-shirts of a particular color, waiters don aprons, and nurses wear scrubs. The idea is that such telltale signs allow the proverbial “man on the street” to identify these people and seek out their assistance—whether that takes the form of a refill of one’s soda or lawful intervention in some transpiring crime.
Traditionally clergymen have also worn some token of their profession. In times past most ministers wore large robes, called cassocks, to identify themselves as representatives of the Church. Today cassocks are still worn by some clergymen, but their use is rather limited to the most formal of settings and to the most formalistic of ministers. In contrast, the clerical collar has enjoyed a significantly wider and longer lasting use among pastors. By way of example, a clerical collar is still a fairly common symbol of the ministry in popular culture and can be seen sported by such divergent figures as the Rev. Timothy Lovejoy of the animated comedy The Simpsons, the mysterious Preacher from Clint Eastwood’s gritty Western Pale Rider, the Rev. Graham Hess from M. Night Shyamalan’s sci-fi thriller Signs, and the mild mannered Pastor Alden of the classic family drama Little House on the Prairie.
Some may wonder though why pastors would want to distinguish themselves at all. Why would one advertise his “spiritual credentials”, especially in light of the temptation to pride that such a practice can entail? Jesus Himself even seems to have decried this very thing—special clothes and titles for ministers—as demonstrated by passages such as Matthew 23… or did He?
When one looks to Jesus’ words concerning the ministers of His own time, one finds His distinctive use of didactic hyperbole (cp. Matthew 5:29-30, 17:20; Luke 14:26). This interpretation is necessary for otherwise the God-ordained uniform for the priests of the Old Testament (Exodus 28:1-2) and the willingness of New Testament authors to refer to themselves and others by the title “leader” (Hebrews 13:7) and even “father” (1 Corinthians 4:15) would be rather difficult to explain. And if this is the case, then we can see that Jesus didn’t so much condemn the Pharisees’ externals as the discontinuity between their outward presentation and their inward disposition. That is, Jesus’ objection to the Pharisees seems to be that while they were willing to “lengthen their tassels” and “broaden their phylacteries”—the rough equivalent of wearing a clerical collar in their day—they also “devour[ed] widows’ houses”, and while they placed mountains of religious obligations on their listeners backs, they were themselves “unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.”
Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees is aptly summed up Matthew 23:25 and 28: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence.” And, “you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” Jesus’ main concern then was not with attire and titles at all, but with a lack of consistency. A cup which shines forth in its cleanliness on the outside is not a bad thing, but it is certainly a deceptive and useless thing if its inside is covered with filth.
But even so, are there any benefits to wearing a clerical collar? Or, with an eye towards Paul’s words to the Corinthians, even though such a practice may be permissible, is it helpful?
From personal experience, the answer is an unequivocal “yes”.
First, it’s traditional and fun. The world is simply a more interesting place when people dress like what they are, whether they happen to be plumbers, chefs, dentists, or clergymen.
Additionally, a collar advertises to everyone (including the minister himself) what he is and, more importantly, for Whom he stands. A good example of this occurred at a ministerial prayer meeting in which I participated a while back: 25 pastors from a variety of evangelical denominations were praying for our city and our churches and I was by far the youngest person present (I’m in my twenties and most of the other pastors had either grey hair or bald heads). And yet, when a woman wandered in off the street looking for prayer, she panned across the room, saw me, and remarked, “Oh, a collar, you must be someone important.” In a room full of much more distinguished, much more experienced men, she approached me because I was the only one “flying the flag”.
This kind of recognition is particularly helpful during hospital visits and the like. In my own ministry I have found that a collar allows me access to patients that are “off-limits” even to their own families.
The collar is also something of a conversation starter which lends itself very nicely to evangelism. On one occasion I stopped in at a grocery store on my way home from a meeting and while I was standing in line, silently holding a twelve-pack of Coke, the cashier leaned over to the bagger and whispered, “I need to go back to church.”
Of course, Christ’s words still stand. A good show on the outside means nothing unless it is accompanied by faithfulness, virtue, and humility on the inside; this is something no Christian, ordained or lay, ought to forget. But as a minister I would encourage my fellow pastors to consider wearing a clerical collar in certain, appropriate situations. Who knows, your congregation may enjoy it and I’m sure that Lifeway (which sells clericals) would appreciate the business.