Here are my sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 17th April 2022), in which we celebrated Resurrection Sunday and some of our church family being baptised. At some point this coming week, you will also be able to watch our service via or MCC YouTube channel.
READ: MATTHEW 28:1-10, 16-20
I must admit, I am a little lost for words this morning.
I’m aware that it is not only Easter Sunday (Resurrection Sunday), it is also a Baptism Service. A lot could be said about the extraordinary significance of both of these things.
So, to be up front, I will fail at that this morning, my words will fall short, and that’s OK. Sometimes, we need something other than words to communicate. So, as humans, we also do things to communicate what we are about.
That’s what is happening today. In a few minutes, words will stop, and we’re going to do something, and allow this act of baptism speak. S, J and Y are both going to enter the water behind me, we’re going to lower them into the water, and then bring them back up out of it, modelling something, in a symbolic way, of the Easter story of death, burial and resurrection (we’ll touch on that in a moment).
As we do this, there will be two notable things:
Firstly, when S, J and Y come back up out of the water, the gathered people of God in this room are going to go crazy with applause and celebration.
The second noticeable thing is this: that when S, J and Y come back up, they will be undeniably, absolutely soaking wet. That’s the way it supposed to be. Actually, that is what the life of following Jesus is supposed to be; a drenched life, a submerged life.
A life underwater, I suppose.
UNDERWATER LIFE
The word baptism conveys this meaning. It’s a word that has been around for a very long time, even before religious communities started using it, and it carries this image of being plunged and sunk into another substance.
As crazy as it sounds, it doesn’t imply coming out of what you have been plunged into.
Baptism was actually, in ancient Greece, used to describe the process of dyeing cloth. An uncoloured piece of cloth would be plunged into a tank of colourful dye. And even though the cloth would be lifted out of the tank, it isn’t lifted out of the substance of the dye. The cloth is forever immersed, forever baptised in the dye. You could say that the cloth is in the dye, and the dye is in the cloth. A union that has transformed the cloth.
In a similar way, what S, J and Y are doing today, in water, is a picture of what has already happened to them when they put their trust in Jesus Christ. This water baptism is a means of communicating their ultimate baptism into Jesus.
I’m saying this, because we are not drowning S, J and Y today—we’re not leaving them underwater, we will bring them back up and afterwards they will dry off. But the idea being expressed is not that we get dipped into Jesus and then taken out of Jesus. Like the dyed cloth, the image is that they are forever immersed into him.
This is what salvation is all about. To paraphrase something that a preacher called Martyn Lloyd-Jones said in the 1950’s: The most wonderful thing about salvation is not forgiveness of sins, or eternal life, although we have those things; the most glorious aspect of our salvation is that I am in Christ and Christ is in me. It is this vital, life-giving union—a baptism.[i]
That’s what Jesus is talking about at the end of the passage we’ve just read. After the resurrection Jesus commissions his followers to go into the world, make disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19).
It could sound like Jesus is talking about doing two separate things: make disciples and baptise people, as if Jesus is talking about dunking them in water. But Jesus isn’t talking about water (although we do dunk people in water to express what he is talking about).
Jesus is actually saying the same thing twice: disciples are formed by plunging them into the identity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. As followers of Jesus, we are immersed, sunk—unified—into the very nature and character of who God is. And we are plunged into the nature and character of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in order to be people who are learning to express the plunging nature and character of God in our world.
UNDERWATER MINISTRY
You may or may not realise this. But what we’re celebrating at Easter is the fact that God plunged into our world before we ever plunged into God.
For those of us who call ourselves Christians, we recognise that we only love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). God didn’t just use words to tell us this, God did something.
In Jesus, God plunged into the depths of our humanity. Jesus entered in to the pain, the suffering, the mess and mayhem of our world.
As the Apostle Paul quotes, in a beautiful hymn in Philippians 2: God didn’t keep himself at a safe distance; God didn’t act all high and mighty, keeping himself dry. In Jesus, God emptied himself into our world. God got soaked. God became human. God became a servant. Plunging even further, Jesus suffered. Jesus died.
As John 3:16, puts it, God had such love for the world that he sent his Son to save it. God sought to bring life and light into a world ensnared by Sin and Satan in death, darkness and despair.
‘Christ comes to us under the waters, beneath the waves of chaos…’[ii] and in this acting of plunging to us, life—resurrection life—also came to us.
In the resurrection, Heaven marries itself to Earth. Jesus is given all authority (Matt. 28:18). Divine life comes to reign and overthrows the reign of death and sin in creation. Or, as Matthew words it, in his opening line of Matthew 28, a new day dawns in the life of humanity.
All we have to do, is trust in what God has done. Or to put that another way, we choose to plunge ourselves, our lives, into the life that God has freely poured out for us in Jesus Christ.
God is a plunging God.
As I said earlier, to say that we are baptised people, people plunged into Jesus, means that we are learning to express this plunging life of God.
Baptism, being in Jesus, doesn’t take us away from the world, it doesn’t cut us of from the world, it’s people, it’s pain, it’s problems. Baptism calls us to go deeper into the darkest recesses of our world in order that God’s love, light and hope can be shed there.
To repeat something Rowan Williams once wrote, “[B]aptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need… in the depth of God’s love; in the depth where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.”[iii]
S, J and Y are entering the water today, as so many of us have done before, to show that they have firstly, plunged themselves into the life of Jesus, and secondly, that they are giving themselves to learning and walking in the light of that new identity.[iv]
[i] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans: Exposition of Chapter 6: The New Man (The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1975), p.37: “The great thing in salvation is that we are not only justified, not only forgiven; in a sense the most glorious aspect of salvation is that I am ‘in Christ’, and Christ is in me, – this vital union!”
[ii] To use the words of the Orthodox minister, Fr. Stephen Freeman. His full statement is: “Christ comes to us under the waters, beneath the waves of chaos. His ministry is an underwater ministry. It is there, beneath the waves, that we find Him. It is to be noted that all who come to Him are immediately plunged beneath the waters. It is our union with Him. Baptized into His death, just as He was Baptized into our death, so we are Baptized into His resurrection, for He has overcome the waters. We, too, now have an underwater ministry as we seek to save those who are lost. There are moments of sheer resurrection in which we also become water walkers, as winds and seas obey Him. And He rescues us yet again as our unsteady feet, guided by an unsteady faith, begin to slip back under the waves. Buried with Him in the waters of Baptism, we are raised in the likeness of His resurrection. As He is, so are we in this world. Our ministry is beneath the waves. We daily enter into the aquatic life that we might save some who are drowning. Here, we hasten to destroy the Enemy, hidden in the waters, trampling Him underfoot in the name of Christ.” (Taken from Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog,The Life Aquatic – Underwater Ministry.)
[iii] Rowan Williams, Being Christian
[iv] As I finish this, I’m also reminded of the following words of Anne Lamont, in her book, Travelling Mercies: ‘Christianity is about water: ‘Everyone who thirsteth, come ye to the waters.’ It’s about baptism, for God’s sake. It’s about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that’s a little sloppy because at the same time it’s also holy, and absurd. It’s about surrender, giving in to all those things we can’t control; it’s a willingness to let go of balance and securing and get drenched.’
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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