Baptized in the Wind
Old Testament Reading:
Psalm 51:15-17
New Testament Reading:
Colossians 2:16-23
Text: Acts 1:4-5
During this Pentecost season, I find myself absorbed in the
Pentecost account of the Book of Acts.
This morning I am intrigued by what Luke says by way
of alluding to John the Baptist and anticipating the
Spirit-baptism of Pentecost, "John baptized with water, but before many
days you will be baptized with
the Holy Spirit." This
statement echoes that attributed to John
himself in the Synoptic tradition:
"I baptize you with water; but
he will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit."
I do not think this saying goes back to John the Baptist; I
think it is a characterization by
Christians of John as Jesus' inferior
and predecessor. It means to put
John and his baptism in the shade by contrast with Jesus and
his baptism. And what kind of
baptism, pray tell, might that be?
The early church took over the practice of water baptism
from the Baptist sect, adding only the feature of pronouncing over
the baptized the name of Jesus or,
later, of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Is that possibly the baptism
referred to in the saying?
That can hardly be: the whole point would seem to be that
mere
outward water baptism is being
superceded by something different
in kind and far superior,
Spirit-baptism. Whoever said this
did not envision Christians
continuing to practice the soggy rite
of John the Baptist.
If we weren't so immersed in the traditional practice of the
church over 19 centuries, we would
see this. Among the few Christian denominations to have spotted it is the Church of
the Prophet Simon Kimbangu in
Zaire.
As a result they do not practice
water baptism.
I believe that the saying stems from an early stage of the
Christian movement when it was emerging from the womb of
Judaism and finding its way in the
Greco-Roman world. It was sloughing
off the old Jewish rituals, which
did not fit so well anymore.
I can think of a couple of other passages that might come originally
from this period.
"Why do
John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees
fast,
but your disciples do not fast?" Jesus said to them,
"No one sews
a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; if
he
does, the patch tears away from it, the old from the new,
and
a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old
wineskins;
if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the
wine
is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh
skins." (Mark 2:18-19a, 21-22)
So it would seem early on, some Christians celebrated the
novelty of their faith by dropping the
outward forms of Judaism, including both fasting and baptism. In
both cases, John's rituals are
among those left behind.
The passage from Colossians is another textual fossil
attesting the same view. The point seems to
be that the new Christian revelation has transcended the need for
outward charades, no more symbol and shadow-play, but the
straight truth; no more the shadow,
but now the substance.
This is a tendency we find again and again in the history of
religions: the attempt to strip
away what is perceived as the
dead ritualism and formalism of
conventional religion, to soar
free with an experience of pure
Spirit.
The Druze, for example, still alive and well in Israel,
Syria and
Lebanon,
began as a new revelation laying aside all the metaphorical and ceremonial baggage of
centuries of Islam. They even did
away with prayer as an eternal
formality.
Or Hegel, who thought the advent of the Absolute Spirit of
philosophy would render useless the old
picture-language of religion.
Kant, too, prescribed a "religion within the limits of
reason alone"--pure moralism,
no dogma, no ritual.
This is what I hear when I read the saying "John
baptized with water, but you will be baptized
with Spirit." The point seems to
be that the true spiritual
experience can and should be abstracted
from the primitive and messy outward form.
But religious reform movements are seldom able to stick to
this Spartan regimen. Sooner or later
new rituals are created to fill
the vacuum left by dispensing with
the old ones. (The Druze, inevitably,
began to compose and pray new prayers.)
This has certainly happened by the time Luke writes Acts: no
sooner does he have the apostles
receive the baptism of the Spirit on Pentecost
than he has them baptize some new converts
in water! The very thing that Spirit baptism should have
rendered totally
superfluous! Or think of Paul. In what may be a genuinely Pauline section
of 1 Corinthians he makes the puzzling statement "God did
not send me to baptize, but to preach the
gospel"--an odd thing if baptism is
as important as he himself seems to
make it elsewhere in his letters. There we read that baptism
is the very means of our becoming
spiritually one with Christ!
I suspect that these passages are later interpolations by
some successor of Paul who had embraced,
along with most other Hellenistic Christians, the sacramental
baptism ideas of the neighboring Mystery Religions. You see? In
the very text that tried to reject the outward form of baptism
as something unimportant, someone
has added passages reinstating it--and then some!
It seems, then, that religious people just cannot stand to
be long
without the outward forms. Put it this way: maybe we can't
use the old wine skins, but we have
to have some skins to hold
the wine!
And eventually the new skins are going to become old and
tight, with no more room to stretch. And
sooner or later we're going to
need to accommodate new truth, new
experience, new wine. So it will
be time for fresh skins again! It's a cycle. Why deny it?
Why do we need the wine skins of ritual? Done right, a
ritual is an acted symbol. It has the same sort of
power a psychodrama has. Something happens in your
acting out, when you take communion, when a bride and groom say
"I do." A ritual behavior is a
way of opening your hands to the
power of the human tradition, or
to the Holy.
And though it is often a step toward rationalism to dispense
with old rituals (as when the
rationalist Liberal Harnack dismissed
liturgy as a lot of
"mummery"), keep this in mind. Rituals provide a kind of alternate access
route to religious experience for
those of us who find it next to
impossible to believe the old
doctrines any more.
If you had rejected all rituals and thus were reduced to a
religion consisting only of doctrines,
and you could no longer believe in those doctrines, well
then, I guess your religiosity
is pretty much sunk! But with
ritual you still have a way of
plugging into those mysterious
realities which the old doctrines
no longer help you to understand.
Where are we in the cycle of old and new wineskins? We are
voyagers on a sea of religious
discovery. We are engaged in a spiritual quest. We are connoisseurs
of new spiritual wine, even if
it sounds pretentious and conceited
to say so.
Many of us are eager, indeed desperate to reinterpret our
inherited creeds and symbols and
rituals. But we have not gone so far
in our voyaging, say, as our
friends across the street at the
Unitarian Church. We still find the old rituals and scriptures to
be valuable resources, rich sources
of spiritual growth.
We are not particularly eager to cast out these wine skins
or to be without skins at all. We seem to
believe that the ancient cask
of the Christian tradition yet
flows with a choice vintage. We
want to embrace and affirm the
ecumenical ocean of the Christian (as
well as other) traditions.
The spiritual adventure is to set sail with the wind of the
Spirit at your back. There is no
telling on what undiscovered continent you may end up. We ought
to welcome the new, seek it like the air craved by the lungs of
a suffocating man. But in that voyage to new religious
horizons, it may turn out that the
old rituals and myths may be just
the sails you need to drive your
ship onward.
Robert M.
Price