By Reverend Laurie DeMott

So, back to my opening statement... poor John had a problem. It was apparently the same problem that Matthew (see above), Mark (see above), and Luke (once more, see above) also had and the problem hadn't gotten much better in the twenty or so odd years since those gospels had been written. The problem was that everyone knew that Jesus had been baptized by the Baptist. It was an undeniable fact, as certain as the fact that Peter could be a bit thickheaded and that Judas was a skunk. Everyone knew it and memories of it had been passed down by those who had stood at the Jordan that day. Of course, to be fair, the real problem wasn't the fact that the Baptist had baptized Jesus; the problem was that the followers of the Baptist kept throwing it in the face of new Christians. "How can you call Jesus the Messiah," they taunted, "if our leader was the one to hold your guy under the water?" And new Christians would get all squirmy and wonder if maybe they should switch their allegiance to the big B. (that would be short for Baptist) because he, after all, did come first. The gospel writers couldn't deny the facts but they could try their best to spin the facts. And so Mark acknowledges the baptism but has the Baptist admit Jesus’ superiority before he plunges him into the river. Matthew expands the Baptist’s protest so that the Big B. tells Jesus, “You should be baptizing me,” and only accepts the task reluctantly because it is part of the divine plan. Luke moves the whole thing off stage and reports it in the passive voice ("now after Jesus was baptized") as if Jesus went under and came back up without a single human hand touching him.

The writer of the gospel of John, however, must have been having really serious problems with those pesky disciples of the Baptist because he is not content to just downplay the Baptist's role in Jesus' baptism. John wants to remind his church members that Jesus was better in all ways than the Big B. He has the Baptist say a dozen times, "Jesus came before me. He's been around since the very beginning of time. I'm not worthy to tie his sandals. He came first and I'm just here to witness to him. Really, listen everyone – he who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” Read the first chapter of John and you'll see how much it sounds like a stump speech supporting Jesus as the legitimate candidate over the Johnny-come-lately Baptist. And just to make sure that those indecisive voters are swayed, John says, "And by the way, that one thing that the Baptist was famous for, his baptisms? Well, Jesus even did that better - the Big B may have dunked his thousands but Jesus dunked his hundreds of thousands."

The gospel writer had outflanked his opponents, He had put those followers of the Baptist in their place and was feeling pretty good until he turned around to see the smugly satisfied looks on the faces of the followers of Peter. "You bet," they agreed. "Jesus did baptize people and our leader Peter was one of them, which is why you should join us because Christ laid his hands on Peter in the waters of baptism which is practically an anointing of a successor."

It was all giving John a headache. The Baptist’s followers were claiming their guy was the best because he baptized Jesus, and Peter’s followers were claiming their guy was the best because Jesus baptized Peter, which is why we hear John sputter out with his best spin voice, "Well, Jesus baptized more people than the Baptist ever did which makes him better than the Baptist but it wasn't Jesus himself who was baptizing but his disciples so you can't make any special claims for Peter, either." Like any good politician, John was trying to protect every flank with the result that we are left a bit confused about what he stands for. Did Jesus baptize anyone or didn't he?

Most scholars today agree that Jesus probably didn’t baptize anyone. He may have seen it as one of those rituals that put too much emphasis on external change instead of internal change and so didn’t make it a part of his ministry. Nevertheless, that couldn’t erase the memory that Jesus himself had been baptized by the Baptist nor could it stop people’s natural tendency to use anything in their arsenal to pull rank on others.

And so, what John is trying to do in his most confusing way, is wade through all of the debates about baptism and who dunked who and what those baptisms say about the authority of the leaders of the different factions and argue instead for the superiority of the Holy Spirit. John is claiming that it doesn’t matter who dunks you in the water; what matters is whether you have received the Spirit. It doesn’t matter who is the head of the Council in Jerusalem or who is the bishop of Rome; what matters is whether you have received the Spirit. It doesn’t matter whether you have learned your faith through the preaching of Paul or through the teaching of Peter or in the Sunday School rooms of a white washed New England church or in the cavernous sanctuary of a 1000 member cathedral; what matters is whether you have the Spirit. John’s gospel is Spirit infused as he argues for the legitimacy of his faith community which has no long tradition or apostolic leadership to give it authority, but only the experience of the Holy Spirit in their lives

John’s argument with the greater Christian community back in 90 AD has been played out again and again in the history of our Christian faith. There has always been tension between those who promote a hierarchal doctrinal institutional sort of faith and those who promote a decentralized experiential spirit-led sort of faith. Within the human breast there are apparently two conflicting needs: on the one hand, we have a desire for order and certainty – we want answers – and that leads to a church that writes creeds and elects bishops and calls for conformity among its adherents, but on the other hand, we want to respect an individual’s faith experience and promote a personal relationship to Christ which leads to a church that rejects creeds and gives every believer an equal voice in determining the nature of their communal faith. Thus it is that Christianity runs the gamut from Roman Catholicism on the one hand to the Society of Friends (Quakers) on the other with a thousand different variations in-between, and while we think of that diversity as a modern day phenomenon, we discover in the pages of our gospels that it is an argument as old as the hills.

John was squarely on the free church side of the debate. He believed very much in the sanctity of the individual believer and distrusted institutional officials that too often confused authority with authoritarianism. In fact, John would have been quite comfortable with a church like this one. You do not require an adherence to a particular creed, nor do you invest a bishop or even your pastor with any institutional authority. For John, there is no human authority, no human institution, or no human created document standing between you and Christ. All that matters is whether you have the Spirit.

As one who is myself steeped in a free church tradition, I would argue that the Christian faith would not be what it is today without people like John promoting the prominence of the Spirit because the Holy Spirit has a quality not found in institutions, creeds, or doctrines. The Holy Spirit can guide us to adapt quickly to new and changing circumstances as God speaks to us in new ways. The Holy Spirit keeps the church light on its feet so that it is able to change and respond in faith as societies face new problems or encounter new cultures. The activity of the Spirit reminds us that God is not a moribund God trapped in old parchments and traditions but is alive and involved in today’s world and continues to desire communion with God’s people. This kind of flexibility is necessary for the long term survival of the church.

One summer when my niece was about 3 years old, she spent some time with me at our family's cottage and she was going through a stage in which she had become a rigid traditionalist. If we didn’t brush her hair just like her mother did, she would cry and carry on. If we didn’t make her sandwiches with just the right amount of peanut butter and jelly, she would throw a fit. And heaven forbid if we gave her juice in any cup other than the blue cup. I think she would have died of thirst rather than drink out of a different colored cup and fortunately for her, we never misplaced the blue cup or she might not be with us today having perished from dehydration. The inability to adapt to change does in fact lead to death and irrelevance, whether you are talking about three year olds, dinosaurs, or churches. The dying last words of a church are said to be, "We've never done it that way before."

It is no wonder that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing expression of Christianity in the world right now because Pentecostal churches are Spirit-centered and have been able to adapt the Christian faith to a wide spectrum of Latino rhythms, African traditions, and Asian cultures while churches that insist that the only real hymn worth singing is "I Need Thee Every Hour" played on an organ are just not going to have much relevance in the steel drum culture of Trinidad. And that is not a criticism of our hymns or our organ; we just need to remember that our church music is a reflection of our personal taste not of God’s taste. The Spirit will move where it will and to any rhythm it chooses.

We have seen the advantage of a Spirit led faith in our own church. Twenty-four years ago the Spirit led you to choose a woman as your pastor and you were free to do that because there was no Bishop telling you that the denomination wasn't ready yet. And you can manage to accept the bread and the cup either sitting in your pew or standing by the altar because there is no Book of Discipline wagging its finger at you for choosing the wrong stance. When the culture changes, we talk it over as a community and figure out where the Spirit is leading us next which gives this church the ability to cope with everything from different kinds of music in worship to different sexual orientations among Christians, and while we all must confess that such diversity is not always comfortable, the Spirit as least makes it possible. John cherished his community's experiential faith because the Spirit allowed each person to have a direct experience of God unhampered by their very different personalities, backgrounds, economic positions, social status, color, gender, or language. And he was not about to give up that freedom of faith for any person who claimed that you had to follow any authority other than Christ's -- whether it be Peter's or the Big B's.

Of course, every person who accepts the prominence of the Spirit in our life of faith runs eventually into the question: If everyone has the potential of hearing God, what happens when two people in the church disagree? How do you know who has the real word and who has a false word? How do you know what the right belief is or does just anything go? The side of our character that respects individual autonomy smacks up against the side that craves certainty, clear cut answers, and a bit of predictable order.

And John, to the frustration of many, leaves those questions for later Biblical writers and church thinkers to figure out but he does give a hint as to the direction his own church would go in resolving that question. In John 13:34-35, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.... By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

This is a theme that would be picked up and developed extensively by John’s community in the later epistles of John – namely, that if it is truly of the Spirit, it will have the character of love.

It’s not always a satisfying answer to the chaos a Spirit-led theology can create, nor does John ever really speak to our genuine human need for some order, or the fact that sometimes traditions and creeds can actually evoke experiences of the Spirit. And so we are left to live with the tension of trying to follow a Christ rooted in history and tradition while responding to the living dynamic Holy Spirit without much help from the gospel of John in resolving that tension except this: Do everything in love.

The best we can do is try to move with the Spirit and stay light on our feet as the world changes around us but not so light that we dance right out of the ring losing touch with the central Christian message of love for one another. It is not always a comfortable place to be but we can take heart in knowing that our discomfort is as old as the hills!