Why Baptists Baptize

Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17

            How many of you can remember your baptism?  If you were an infant or very young, you probably don't remember your baptism, and that’s okay.  I’ve talked to people who feared that if they couldn’t remember their baptism that somehow invalidated it.  Not at all.  God remembers.

            How many of you were baptized inside a Baptist church in a baptistery, like the one we use?  Probably most of us.

            Were some of you baptized in a creek, river, or lake?  I was baptized in a baptistry, but I have baptized in a creek.  My first church didn’t have a baptistry, so we delayed baptisms until the weather warmed.  A member lived on the backwater of the Coosa River, and we all gathered there for the baptisms.  I kind of enjoyed it.

            A casual observer looking in at us would have to conclude that baptism is important to Baptists.  It is now, and it was in the beginning.  First of all, our name is a dead giveaway.  They used to call us the Dippers, but the name that stuck is Baptists.  We came into being in the early Seventeenth Century in England and Holland.  We emerged out of a group called the English Separatists, who separated from the Church of England.  A distinguishing feature of those earliest Baptists was that they did not baptize infants.  The Catholic Church did.  The Church of England did.  The Lutherans in Germany did.  The Calvinists over in Switzerland did.  But the Baptists chose not to baptize infants, and here’s why. Baptists rejected the notion of original sin, that everyone at birth inherits sin from Adam and must therefore be baptized immediately.  In a time when the infant mortality rate was high, families couldn’t wait months or years to baptize a child.  If the child died not baptized, it was assured damnation.  They had a very harsh saying back then—it’s even hard to say—that went like this: “The walls of Hell are lined with the souls of babies not baptized.”  Harsh!

            Baptists were accused of child abuse because they would not let the state church baptize their children.  They were persecuted, put in prison, and sometimes run out of town.  So, in 1609 some of them did a most radical thing.  This is one of our greatest stories, and we all need to know it.  The pastor of a Separatist church in England was named John Smyth.  He became convinced that infant baptism was not necessary, and that baptism should be withheld until the one being baptized was old enough to exercise his or her own faith.  Smyth convinced the congregation that they needed to leave England, where laws governing religion were very restrictive and harsh.  They needed to move, he said, to Holland, to Amsterdam, where religious laws were much freer.  With a passion for freedom pulsing through their veins, the congregation agreed.

            When they got to Amsterdam, out from under the thumb of the King of England, away from the laws that oppressed their freedom of conscience, they disbanded their church, relinquished their offices in the church, and even renounced their baptisms, which were administered when they were infants.  Picture this now. They stood before the Almighty as individuals with no church and no baptism.  Let me read this classic account of what then happened from A. C. Underwood in 1947.

Pastor and deacons laid down their office, the church disbanded or avowed itself no church, and all stood as private individuals, unbaptized.  All being equal, Smyth proposed that Helwys their social leader should baptize them, but he deferred to his spiritual leader.  Smyth baptized himself, then baptized Helwys and the others. 

            Underwood’s account ends with this sentence: “The first Baptist church in the world was born with John Smyth’s self-baptism.” (Bill Leonard, Baptist Ways, p. 25)

            So, yes, baptism was and is important to Baptists.  And occasionally we need to be reminded of that.  Baptism is one of our two ordinances, the other being the Lord’s Supper.  Baptism is seen as our entrance into the life of faith, and the Lord’s Supper is seen as our sustenance for living the life of faith.  To understand why Baptists baptize, we must answer two questions.   The first question is this:  why was Jesus baptized?  And the second question is, why are we baptized? 

First question first: why was Jesus baptized?  We all remember that wonderful story in the gospels about John the Baptist baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River.  Jesus’ baptism did two things.  First, it confirmed Jesus’ relationship with God.  Do you remember what happened?  When Jesus was baptized, just as he rose from the water, the heavens opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And then a voice sounded from heaven confirming Jesus’ relationship with God:  “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  For all the world to know.  That’s who Jesus was.  He was God’s Son, the Beloved.  His baptism publicly confirmed his relationship with God.

            The second thing it did was confirm Jesus’ status before God: “with you I am well pleased,” the voice from heaven said.  Born in Bethlehem, reared in Nazareth, and now baptized in the Jordan River.  Jesus’ ministry was beginning.  He would meet success and persecution, adulation and condemnation.   Regardless of what he was experiencing, Jesus knew his status:  with you I am well pleased.

            That’s the first question.  To understand why baptism is  important to Baptists, we must answer that question.  Why was Jesus baptized?  It confirmed his relationship with God.  He was God’s Son, the Beloved.  And it confirmed his status before God.  God was well pleased with Jesus.

            Now, the second question.  Why are we baptized?  Why were you baptized?  In a creek, a lake, a baptistery, or wherever it was.  Our tradition withholds baptism until we are mature enough to make that decision for our self.  So why are we baptized?

Here’s what I believe happens.  When we’re baptized, if we listen with our hearts, we can hear God say to us the same things God said to Jesus.  You are my son, my daughter, my beloved.  The world is going to tell us differently.  There will be times when we may not believe it.  With this water, God says, I claim you as my own.  Lock this in your heart: with you, my beloved, I am well pleased. 

That is the ultimate parental blessing, isn’t it?  Some people go through life longing for their parents’ blessing.  To hear their dad say, “I love you, son.  I’m proud of you.”  To have their mom hug them and say, “I love you with all my heart, and I always will.”  At baptism we receive the blessing of our Ultimate Parent.  God says, “You are my son.  You are my daughter.  You are my beloved.  I’m pleased with you.  No matter what the world says to you, you’re mine.  No matter how many times you fail, you’re mine. Lock this in your heart and take it with you always:  I’m well pleased with you.”

            I remember Roberta Bondi talking about this a few years ago when she spoke here.  She asked us if we had ever heard someone say, “God loves us in spite of who we are.” She asked for a show of hands, and most of us acknowledging hearing, if not that exact saying, something close to it—God loves us in spite of who we are.  Then she said that she was going to get on a plane to fly home the next day to see her husband, Richard.  She hadn’t seen him in several days and was anxious to be reunited with her beloved.  Now imagine, she said, if she walked into their little condo in the mountains of north Georgia and he rushed up to her with arms outstretched and said, “Oh, Roberta, I love you in spite of who you are!”

            She said that it would be shocking to hear that, that another person would love us in spite of who we are. That’s not really love, she said.  Dr. Bondi said that that’s the theology many of us grew up with and live with as adults.  That God loves us in spite of who we are. But that’s not the message of the Bible.  The message of the Bible clearly is that God so loved the world that God gave his only beloved Son.  The message of the Bible clearly is that God proved God’s love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.  Clearly, clearly, the message of the Bible is, “You are my son, my daughter, my beloved.  I am well pleased with you.”

That’s why Baptists baptize. We have a ritual to help us lock that message into our hearts.  We call it baptism.  Today I simply remind you of that.

Closing Prayer 

We know it’s just water, Lord.  But we also know what it represents.  And that makes it more than just water.  We thank for our baptisms and what they represent.   Amen.