Certain experiences have the effect of changing the direction of our lives.
There are times when God changes the direction of our lives in moments of theatrical intensity. Someone, for example, is reading a theological book when suddenly, a shaft of light falls upon a penetrating passage, and scales fall from the reader’s eyes. Or a hillside communion service at a church camp begins to glow with all the luminosity and power of the Upper Room, making one decide to become a fervent follower of Jesus.
However, most people change directions in their lives because of some seemingly ordinary experience. Some may have been forced to go to Sunday School by their parents, and later find it spiritually uplifting. Others who attend a church youth group just to spice up an otherwise dull weekend or to meet the opposite sex may discover that God has called them to become pastors.
One time I talked with a very faithful member of the church. He started driving his wife to choir practices. On Sundays, he would take his wife to church while he reads the newspaper in the parking lot. After years of doing this, he was bored waiting in the car. He decided to join the choir, and later became one of the active members of the church.
There are also teenagers with one ear on the pastoral prayer, and the other focused on the whispers of a friend and they end up spiritually fed.
There is a couple who started to come to church because they were invited by the family across the street, and they had no handy excuse to say no, and later became the staunches members of the church. There is this young woman who is in church because of the music, and who reads the hymnbook during the sermon, who later became a part of an evangelistic crusade.
Our journeys of faith are as varied as the people who profess it. Some of these experiences are so casual, but they become critical experiences which are life-changing.
Albert Schweitzer casually walked into a library and sat down at a table to study. He picked up a magazine that someone had failed to return to the rack. It was a publication of the London Missionary Society. As he thumbed through it, an article about African missions caught his eye. That article changed the direction of his life. He could have been a great organist, performing in the world’s most renowned concert halls, or a medical doctor, working in the great research centers of the world. Instead, he would spend the rest of his life in Lambarene, Africa as a Christian missionary, all because of a casual visit to a library.
Some of the weightiest decisions of our lives are turned on by the tiniest of hinges. At the time they are happening, we may not be giving them a second thought. And suddenly, things seem to converge, and we meet new people, or get a new idea, or acquire a different way of looking at things. The results are life-changing.
This is what may have happened to Jesus at the time of his baptism. When he went to listen to his cousin John who declared, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” it was for Jesus a sign, a turning point, a moment of decision. Jesus must have sensed God’s call to him a long time before, but it was at this point and at this place that moved him to start his ministry.
We live and work in the framework of time, and in the framework of God.
The Greek language has two words for time: chronos, which means a long period of time. This is where we get the word chronology. The other is kairos, which means a point in time, a time when everything seems to stand still.
It was a critical moment, a decisive moment for Jesus. He was no longer the waiting messiah or the eldest son caring for the family business. In the words of John, he is “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
Jesus’ baptism meant that he was consecrated to be the Messiah. For us who are baptized in Christ, baptism means that we are consecrated to be the Messianic people.
The baptism of Jesus meant that the righteous one took upon himself the sins of the many and became one with them. Our baptism means that we, the many, become one with him, and in him. It is the starting point of a life “in Christ”. It is the time when God’s love and forgiveness are experienced. And therefore, it is a time of change. It is also a beginning of a life to be spent in understanding and walking with God.
Thus, when we are baptized, it is never merely a human act, either of the one who administers it or the one who receives it. It is a divine act, the act of One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
What needs to be stressed over and over again is that baptism is the working of God, not ours. It is not something we earn, nor is it a sign that we have found all the answers. It is a rite of initiation into a way of life which may include some challenges. It is the desire to see the world differently, to see each other differently, and even to see ourselves differently. It is a fresh start, not a destination.
In Titus 3:5, it says, “He saved us, not because any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.”
It is for this reason that the church from its very beginning has baptized even little children who can do nothing. The New Testament church could not forget the Lord’s word, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:16).
But then, we ask, is not faith necessary if baptism is to mean anything? Of course, it is. But let us not forget this: our faith is always a response to what God does, and baptism represents what God does.
It is not an adult’s baptism or a child’s baptism, a believer’s baptism or an unbeliever’s baptism, but God’s baptism.
We may respond in faith to God’s word, and then receive God’s gift of baptism. Or our experience may follow the sequence in the baptismal command, first baptizing them, and then teaching them God’s word so that they may receive in faith what God has already done.
The important thing is not whether we were baptized as children or as adults, but to realize that baptism encompasses our whole life from beginning to end.
One time, a pastor said to a baby that was just baptized, “Little sister, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life. This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of God’s experiment with your life. What God will make of you, we know not. Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say. This we do know and this we say, ‘God is with you’.” God will be with us as we live out our baptism, too.
After tucking in his six-year-old son Chris one night, Robert O’Brien tapped his son’s chest and asked, “Do you know what you have in there?” Chris looked puzzled and responded, “My stomach?” “No, you have a piece of God,” his father replied. After a brief silence, Chris responded, “God is in my stomach?” “No,” said his Dad, “we have a piece of God inside of us; it is God’s gift to each of us.” Chris smiled, tapped his Dad’s chest, and asked whether his Dad had a piece of God in his stomach. They laughed, and together they began to ask this same question about the rest of the family.
“Does Mommy have a piece of God?” “Yes,” they answered, laughing. “Does Matt have a piece of God?,” they asked about his older brother. “Yes.”
O’Brien knew that Chris attended a day care center with a little girl named Mary who was so spoiled she made the people around her miserable. He said, “You know, even Mary has a piece of God.” Chris looked stunned, and then he said emphatically, “No, not Mary.” When his father insisted, Chris said, “Daddy, I have been with her more than you. She doesn’t have a piece of God.” But O’Brien told his son that God never missed anyone; everyone has a piece of God inside. Chris pondered this a while, and then said, “Well, her piece must be all covered up with junk!”
Our lives may be covered up with junk, but today our Lord says to us, as he once said to his first disciples, “With the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized” (Mark 10:39). We pray that our lives may be united ever more closely with Christ’s. As this takes place, the heavens will open to us, too, and gently and peacefully as the lighting of a dove, the Spirit of God will settle upon us. And we, too, will hear in our hearts the voice that says, “My son/my daughter, my beloved.”
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