This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 01/11/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Acts 10:34-48 and Matthew 3:13-17.
Our world is changing dramatically. We can all feel it – economically, socially, politically, technologically, and spiritually – our world is on the move. For better or for worse, we are headed into a new age.
We don’t get to control how history unfolds, but we still have to navigate it. Fortunately, we have the Holy Spirit to guide us in the midst of all this upheaval and uncertainty. And we have this church community, this spiritual family that supports us to become better listeners and responders to God’s direction.
This morning I want to present you with a message of hope, because we know both from Scripture and from our tradition as Quakers that even in the hardest times God is at work. We know that it is precisely in these dark times God can bring forth light and transformation.
In our scripture reading this morning from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus comes to John the Baptist to be baptized in the River Jordan. John, we will recall, is the prophetic voice in the wilderness warning of the great change that is to come – the Day of the Lord. John is calling on the people to repent and change their whole way of life before it’s too late. The revolutionary kingdom of God is about to sweep the world and make all things new. For John, the time to change is now.
Jesus steps into this context – into John’s ministry of anticipation and preparation for radical change. When John sees Jesus, he recognizes in Jesus the person whom God has sent to bring about this transformation.
But John’s expectations for Jesus are a bit off. John believed that in the coming kingdom of God, Jesus would be on top. The Messiah would rule the nations with a rod of iron. He would bring God’s vengeance and set the world right through violence and a top-down kingship in the style of David.
So John was surprised when Jesus asked him for baptism. John was taken aback and said, “No, how are you going to ask me for baptism? I’m the one who should get baptized by you.” Why would Jesus want this old baptism of repentance and preparation for the age to come, John wondered, when the Messiah brings the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire? But Jesus simply responds, “let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
I’m struck by this word that Jesus uses: Fulfill. The word fulfill here is the same word fulfill that Jesus employs in the Gospel of Mark, when he begins his ministry and says, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
This word has a sense of finality, completion and liminality. It marks the boundary between one era and another. John the Baptist was the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, but now that time of preparation is fulfilled. The new age of God’s kingdom is arriving.
I think a lot of us Americans, we are such progressives by nature. We believe that things should naturally get better with the passage of time. We tend to think that what is new is better than what is old. So it’s natural for us to think just like John the Baptist that, of course, the first thing we should do when the new arrives is to throw out the old. No need for the baptism of John, we should go straight to the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire.
Interestingly, that’s not what Jesus chose. Jesus opted to fulfill all righteousness – to partake in the ministry of John and thus complete it. Jesus chose to participate in John’s work and validate it even as he moved beyond it, bringing his people into the newness of the kingdom of God.
So there’s continuity here. There’s a sharp break, but there’s also a connection. The ministry of John is not suddenly irrelevant when Jesus shows up. But it is brought into its proper perspective now that the fullness of the life, power, and message of God has arrived.
We see this continuity in the Church today. Most of the church still practices water baptism, which incorporates John’s ministry into our new understanding as followers of the Messiah. Even for Quakers who do not traditionally practice water baptism, we haven’t thrown out the Old Testament. We haven’t thrown out the law and the prophets and the writings. These are still very relevant for us. God has given us these scriptures to prepare us for the fullness of the kingdom of God that we encounter in the person of Jesus Christ.
In Jesus all things are made new. We get a whole new order – a new heavens and a new earth – but the past is not lost. The past is not wasted. Our spiritual ancestors continue to walk with us, and we with them. Even as we move into new situations, and respond to what the Spirit is doing now – which can be different – we honor what has come before.
We see this very clearly in our reading from the Book of Acts, when Peter comes to the house of Cornelius, the centurion, and preaches the gospel. As they are listening to him speak, everyone in the household receives the Holy Spirit and begins to speak in tongues and praises God. Peter sees how the Holy Spirit has been poured out on these Gentiles in the same way that it was poured out on Jewish believers on the day of Pentecost. Peter is astonished, and says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So all of them were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
This is a wild story, because this is not what the early church was expecting. The first disciples in Jerusalem took for granted that the gospel was primarily, if not exclusively, for the Jews. And yet the way they saw God moving, the work that they saw God doing in the lives of other people, convinced them that God was doing something that they never anticipated. This movement of the Holy Spirit shook up a lot of their deeply held beliefs, traditions, and identity.
This was not their idea. If Peter had had his way, he would have stuck to preaching to the Jews. Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect, inaccessible to Gentiles like me. But because of what he and the other disciples in Jerusalem saw God doing, they were forced way out of their comfort zone. They were drawn into a space of moment-to-moment dependence on God’s leading.
I can’t overstate how big of a deal this was. The Christian community in recent decades has been torn apart by questions of how gay and lesbian Christians should be treated and whether they should be accepted as full members of the church. The kind of changes that Peter and the other early disciples were being asked to make by the Holy Spirit were at least as profound as the welcome of LGBT Christians. God was moving in ways that fundamentally challenged the Jewish tradition and made it impossible for them to continue being a part of the wider Jewish faith.
This isn’t what the early disciples wanted or expected. They were Jews and they wanted to continue to operate within the Jewish community. But God’s embrace of the Gentiles and the fact that God did not demand that the Gentiles become Jews to follow Jesus caused a profound rupture. It meant that the early Christians were going to have to leave the safety of the old order and enter into something entirely new and unexpected.
We at Berkeley Friends Church aren’t facing quite the level of challenge and uncertainty that the early Jewish Christians faced. But the shift that we are experiencing in our society is still profound. The rules have changed. Our world has changed dramatically, and the pace of that change shows no sign of slowing. Many of the patterns and practices that were life-giving to be the church in the 19th and 20th century simply aren’t going to work in the decades ahead. We will have to change.
This can feel really upsetting, because most of us are here this morning because the 20th century style Sunday morning congregation, even if it’s not perfect, kind of works for us. We like the routine. We like our order of worship. We like coming to this building. We like the community that we have here. We like our committees and our programs. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But God is doing something new. The Holy Spirit is calling us. God is sending us. Jesus is leading us to do even greater things, to become new wine in new wine skins. We are called to adapt and share the gospel with a society that is passing through enormous upheaval.
As we pray together about what it means to be and make disciples in this new, post-modern era, I am touched by the example that Jesus gave us – the way that he honored John and participated in his baptism of water, even though that baptism was only a precursor for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I’m moved by the fact that, when Peter saw the Holy Spirit falling on Cornelius and his household, his response was to offer them baptism with water after the fact as a way of acknowledging what God was doing in their lives. Through this second baptism, he affirmed them. They were now truly a part of this Christian movement and members of Christ’s body.
Peter and the early church continued to use the old baptism of John. They carried forward this ritual that was no longer strictly necessary anymore. They used it as a symbol that drew their community together and gave them a sense of identity. They used it to point back to the faithful prophets who came before the arrival of the fullness of the gospel, and to the preparation that we must all do to receive it.
It makes me wonder, what is the baptism of John for us? What are those old, precious things that we carry forward? Not because we have to, not because the tradition is something that we can never question, but because it is life-giving. Because it connects us with our spiritual ancestors, even as we move into the newness of the mission that Jesus gives us for today.
Maybe it’s the silence that we practice as we wait on the Holy Spirit to lead us. Maybe it’s the old hymns that we sing to give glory to God as best we know how. Maybe it’s this beautiful meeting house that our spiritual ancestors passed down to us to use in the work of proclaiming the gospel message and building Christian community here in the East Bay.
What does it look like to honor and use the gifts that our spiritual ancestors have given us, even as we move into new ministry in a new era?
God walked with our spiritual ancestors – John the Baptist and Peter and George Fox – and we know that God walks with us now. We know from experience that God will lead us directly, just as he led Peter to Cornelius, and George Fox to Margaret Fell. God is here with us. He will lead us into even greater things if we keep following him.
As we learn from the story of Peter and Cornelius, following Jesus means staying attentive to the movement of the Spirit. It means listening to that ever-living Word of God in our hearts and in our midst, who is teaching us how to live and move in this society that so desperately needs the light of Jesus Christ.
If we’re going to be attentive in this way, if we’re going to really hear and respond to God’s guidance, we must have the courage to push the boundaries of our faith. Just like Peter and the early church were challenged to move beyond the limits of their religious tradition. Where might we be blocked by our notions of what we can and cannot do as Quakers?
We are entering a new era. Despite all the horror and uncertainty and darkness, this is also a very exciting time to be alive. The Holy Spirit is moving. God has work for us to do. It’s time to embrace the repentance and life change that John the Baptist taught us, in preparation for Jesus. It’s time to join with the radical, wide-open movement of God that Peter saw when Cornelius and his household received the Holy Spirit.
It’s time to follow where the Spirit leads.