The Baptism of Our Lord (A)—Acts 10:34–43
Proclaimed at Trinity Lutheran Church in Pleasant Valley, PA.
It’s nice to have a chance to be back here at Trinity, after more than a year away. Spending October before last with you was a lot of fun, though I have to admit that I enjoyed 2019 even more. Some of you may remember that I was going to Malaysia, to teach for a year at Malaysia Theological Seminary. It was a wonderful place to be, and leaving there was very difficult. The land is beautiful, with thick jungle and expansive seacoasts and fantastic architecture. The culture is interesting, and the shape of faith is often a joy. But the true asset of Malaysia, its true gift to the world, is the people.
I say that because there are so many different kinds of people living together in one place, and unlike in America where racism can sometimes become virulent and even violent, in Malaysia people generally get along pretty well. Oh, stereotypes exist, and ethnic groups tend to stay close to each other. But there is enough mixing up in daily society that real hatred or fear doesn’t have the space to develop, and the result is a rich national culture that benefits from the diverse nature of God’s creativity.
There are four major cultural groups located there. The most obvious is the Malays, after whom the nation is named. The Malay people are Muslim, both by law and by practice—though perhaps only in the way that most Americans claim to be Christian, even if they’ve never been in a church. There are religious laws that they must keep, however, so you won’t find Malays in a restaurant that serves pork or alcohol, and women will always have their heads covered. Their first language is Malay.
There are very many Chinese-descent people living in Malaysia as well. We tend to think of China as one big country and culture. In reality, there are dozens, and many of them are here as well, having migrated over the last eight hundred years: Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainan, and Yi to start. They all speak their own language, and usually Mandarin as well. The majority of Chinese in Malaysia practice indigenous folk religions, burning incense to strange idols and offering gifts to their ancestors.
A few hundred years ago, a large group of Tamil-speaking people came from Eastern India to the Malaysian peninsula. As a result, there are some beautiful old Hindu shrines in Malaysia, including a monastery in a breathtaking natural cave formation on the north side of Kuala Lumpur. The brightly painted, ornate carvings there are worth seeing, if you can handle climbing a 272-step staircase to see them. The Tamils tend to be more conservative in their home life, and more adaptable in the public sphere.
The last big ethnic grouping in Malaysia are the many small indigenous tribes scattered throughout the country. Many of these people still live in villages tucked away deep in the jungle. They are starting to import modern conveniences, but some people I knew came from places that have yet to connect to Internet, or electricity, or plumbing. Or roads—you just take a boat and make your way past the crocodiles. Each of these peoples have their own language and culture, and they add great things to the collective beauty and wisdom of the nation, even if they are often forgotten by the larger world.
Four very different peoples, living together in the same place. In the 1960s, the British Empire formally gave them independence, and these diverse groups were forced to try to figure out who they were, together, as a single country. Decades have passed since then, and they still haven’t come up with a good answer. It hasn’t helped that corrupt government—finally voted out of office a year and a half ago—prevented the nation from developing a clear self-understanding.
Living in a nation full of people who struggle constantly to live peacefully with their next-door neighbor while also struggling to figure out who they really are… this got me thinking a lot about my own identity. It became noticeable a lot, too, when I would do things differently—strangely, they no doubt thought. I invited my students to call me “Aaron;” the Tamils called me “Padre” for some reason, and the others called me “Pastor” or “Reverend,” not even “Pastor Aaron” like in a church here. But students would invite me to a casual dinner out, and then were shocked when I tried to pay for my own meal (let alone theirs). Those who reached beyond themselves to become creative, critical thinkers suddenly reverted to regurgitating the facts they thought I wanted to hear when they were handed a written exam. Tamil students didn’t care about their grades, Chinese students cared ONLY about their grades, and indigenous students assumed they couldn’t get good grades but wanted to learn anyway.
I’m an American. What does that mean? What cultural values and practices are inherent in that identity? Are there things I say and do that seem strange to the rest of the world? And if so, should I reject them or cling to them? What makes me who I am, and really, is that who I want to be?
Peter is faced with that problem in the tenth chapter of Acts, part of which we read today. He’s taken to the home of a Roman centurion who wants to learn more about the Christian movement. Now, up until this moment in Acts, there is nobody who has joined this infant Church who wasn’t first Jewish. Nascent Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s just a type of Judaism, and an unimportant one at that.
It’s pretty clear from the way Peter speaks that he’s reluctant to share his message with this gentile stranger, an officer in the Roman army. But after he hears the centurion’s story, he cannot hold himself back. He preaches the short sermon we hear in our reading today, declaring this new, shocking thing that he has only just now learned: God shows no partiality. God does not prefer one people over another. God loves whom God loves, and draws them to himself, and pulls them into a love that sparks their desire to love him back and live rightly. And when Peter is finished talking about Jesus’ death and resurrection and forgiveness of sins, the fulfillment of prophecy and the bringer of life… the Holy Spirit comes into all those who are listening. And when Peter sees it, he baptizes them all.
There is a lot to notice here. It’s a shocking, bold, courageous act by Peter, baptizing gentiles without the permission of the whole assembly in Jerusalem, but he does it anyway. But he almost can’t help it. The Holy Spirit comes upon them first. Which is backwards. Every other place in the Bible—and in fact, every other place in history, the Spirit arrives after Baptism. When we celebrate this Holy Sacrament here, the newest member of the Body of Christ is washed in the waters and then anointed with the Spirit. It is almost as if we need to make room for the Spirit to come in, by washing those old sins out.
And that tends to fit our theology, doesn’t it? We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. We might say we are a royal priesthood, but we know better. We are not holy people. We are steeped in total depravity. We need the Lamb of God to take away our sins again and again, every moment of every day. We fail to care well for our bodies so they can become a holy temple for the Spirit of the Living God.
We have forgotten that it is precisely the Spirit of the Living God that makes our bodies a holy temple. Not our good behavior, not our purifying from sin, not our careful obedience. We do not need to make room for the Holy Spirit to enter into us. The Holy Spirit comes in, like it or not, and makes room for itself.
Which isn’t to say that all those things we believe about ourselves are not true. They are, I suppose. But they don’t seem very interesting. Because when the Spirit arrives in our Baptism, it fundamentally changes who we are. Oh sure, we sin, we cannot break ourselves free, but we are freed anyway, not by our work but by God’s. And now we are truly a holy temple and a royal priesthood. We are steeped in a new identity, and that identity is in Jesus Christ.
And this is what Peter finally realizes, and why he can go and Baptize these gentiles. Because they aren’t gentiles, or aren’t only gentiles, just as he is no longer only a Jew. Everything else about us, our ethnicity, our culture, our language, our race, our gender, our heritage, our sins, our successes, our gifts and our faults—they don’t disappear, they are still ours, but they can no longer be WHO WE ARE. Our good parts and our bad, we have them still, but they do not define us, because our identity has been blessedly overwritten by Jesus Christ instead.
For me, that is the most important thing the Church in the West needs to learn from Malaysian faith. Take, for example, Wesley Methodist Church, near the seminary. I got to preach once at their 8:00 a.m worship service. In most Malaysian churches, you’re not earning your paycheck if the sermon isn’t at least 50 minutes long. “But here, we need to be finished by 9:30,” they said, “because the Tamil-speaking service needs time to set up for 10:00.” And Mandarin Chinese was at 1. And Burmese at 7 in the evening, after dinner in the fellowship hall. The Nepali service was still only once a month, on a Saturday, but had a draw of several hundred.
In their worship, there was no shape or size or color or culture missing from that room. In this crazy country, where people identified themselves by race and language, where Hindus spoke Tamil and Folk Buddhists spoke Chinese, where the air rang five times a day with beautiful Arabic chant calling the Malays to Mosque prayers… the Christians have discovered that the ethnic, cultural, and language barriers do not define them. Their identity is in Christ, in whom we have been Baptized. Alleluia.
John knew that he needed to receive what Jesus had to offer. But Jesus insisted that righteousness, that holiness and love, be fulfilled, and he was baptized in the waters of the Jordan. You have been Baptized with the same Baptism with which he was Baptized. You have been clothed with Christ. You have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, poured out for you in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Now go, and be the child of God. Open the eyes of the blind and bring the prisoners out of the dungeon. Live like the beloved servant of Love that this world needs, and that you, in Christ, have already become. Amen.