Today is the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany – and the day when we honor the Baptism of Jesus (who in the lectionary has grown very suddenly from a baby to a grown man). And we are celebrating the baptism of one of our members today! So it’s a good day to talk a little about baptism.
There is something fundamentally mysterious about baptism. Like the Eucharist, it’s something the church does because Jesus told us to do it, so however many thousands of book are written about it, we will never really know what it means or how it works, on this side of the veil. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to talk and wonder about.
The word “baptism” comes from the Greek word that means to immerse or dunk into water. Baptism has its roots in some of the ritual practices of Judaism, that included washing yourself at certain times for purposes of religious purification. John the Baptist seems to be riffing on those traditions when he starts dunking people in the Jordan River and telling them this is a path to forgiveness of sins and a new way of living.
Christian baptism takes John’s practice a step further. Our Acts lesson today highlights an interesting moment in the spread of the Christian movement. Paul, the great missionary of the early church, encounters a little group in Ephesus who have heard about Jesus and become believers. But they have only received “John’s baptism” – water baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
Paul sees baptism as more than that. In his letters he talks about baptism as washing away our differences – we are baptized into one body, Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female.
He also talks about baptism as a kind of death and resurrection: your old self drowns in the baptismal waters, and your new self rises with Christ to new life.
And then there’s this idea of baptism with water and the Holy Spirit. For the early church, baptism by the Holy Spirit seems to have been both a ritual practice – something someone like Paul could do to and for people – and also a religious experience of being overwhelmed by the power of the Holy. In stories from the Book of Acts, sometimes baptism in water and Spirit are separate. With these folks in Ephesus, they’ve already received water baptism, but Paul baptizes them with the Holy Spirit. There’s another time when a group receives the Holy Spirit while listening to Peter preach, and Peter baptizes them with water too.
But pretty early on the Church comes to understand our practice of baptism as including both water and the Holy Spirit in one ritual act. We can see and feel the water; the action of the Holy Spirit is more mysterious. But we trust that She shows up, and does something that – invisibly, ineffably – marks the newly baptized as Christ’s own forever.
I want to take us back, now, to around the year 200. It’s about 150 years after Paul’s visit to Ephesus. Christianity has grown and spread, becoming its own religion distinct from Judaism. But it is still very much a minority religion. It has fans and supporters; it also has detractors, and believers face occasional and local bouts of persecution.
People accused Christians of some weird things. For example, maybe because of the practice of the Eucharist – Take, eat, this is my body – some people thought Christians were prone to cannibalism. Some even thought that Christians stole, murdered, and ate babies.
But other people disdained Christianity just because it was kind of boring, in comparison with available alternatives.
In the Roman Empire, everyone was supposed to participate in the imperial religion, worshipping various Romans gods and honoring the Emperor as part of civic life. It was a little like saying the Pledge! Christians got into trouble for refusing to participate in all that, at times. But Christians were not the only group with their own set of beliefs and devotional practices – and Roman civic religion wasn’t Christianity’s main competition.
The Roman Empire connected large areas of the ancient world, and it was fertile soil for new religious movements to rise and spread – including a wide range of what religion scholars call “mystery cults.”
Mystery here means that you weren’t allowed to know very much about the group’s practices and beliefs unless you joined. Cult here just means a specific, minority religious group; it doesn’t necessarily carry the implications that word does in popular usage today.
Spencer McDaniel writes, “Joining a mystery cult was optional. People who were members of mystery cults were members of those cults because they chose to be, because they wanted something more than what traditional public religion had to offer.”
He explains that joining a mystery cult connected you with a community that would gather regularly for worship. It had scope for personal devotional practices, and a sense of deepening knowledge and relationship with a particular god or divine being – and also of perhaps having favors or benefits conferred, like personal renewal or even eternal life. Does that sound familiar?
But mystery cults were a lot more interesting than Christianity. To begin with, there was the element of mystery itself.
These groups didn’t have evangelists handing out pamphlets in the public square. It was more of the kind of thing where a friend takes you aside to say, Hey, I’m in this thing… you should come to a meeting sometime.
Meanwhile, the successors to Peter and Paul, Christian missionaries, are walking all over the Empire telling everybody all about their god and his teachings and how to join their movement.
The gods at the center of the mystery cults were exciting and exotic. Some of them were Greek gods, who had fun stories and myths to build your cultic practices, like Dionysios. Some were imported and adapted from the edges of the empire, like the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, or the Syrian sun-god Elagabalus, or the Person god Mithras. In all these cases, the Roman mystery cult’s practices were pretty different from the way those gods were honored in their original context.
In comparison, the Jesus cult was built on the foundation of Jewish religion, and their god was notoriously cantankerous. He didn’t like people making statues or murals of him, and he didn’t like being one among the many gods honored across the Empire – maintaining instead a ridiculous insistence on being the one true God. So cringe!
Finally, many mystery cults had some kind of framework for moving to higher – or deeper – levels of involvement and secret knowledge. Let’s look at Mithraism as a specific example. Roman Mithraism started to get popular in the late first century, and spread around the Empire in the second and third centuries – meaning, it was moving into the religious marketplace very much at the same time as Christianity.
We don’t always know a lot about the beliefs and practices of the mystery cults because they were kept secret, but a few credible sources about Mithraism have survived.
Mithraic groups were all male; they usually met in an underground cave, decorated with images of the god Mithras killing a bull; and feasting was a regular part of their gatherings.
It seems there were seven grades of initiation: after you joined the cult at the Raven level, you could aspire to achieve the Bridegroom level, then the Soldier level, the Lion level, and so on, all the way up to the Pater or Father level.
There are also hints that moving up this ladder involved tests or ordeals – feats of strength or endurance. Frescoes from a Mithraeum – a site of worship – in Capua show a man blindfolded and naked, with his hands bound behind him. Whatever is happening in that scene is what gives you access to the next title and set of mysterious teachings.
In comparison, mainstream Christianity had just one rite of initiation: baptism. One and done! And it was such a simple rite, using water, and maybe a little oil. True, early Christian baptismal fonts were big enough for a person to walk down into and fully submerge, but it was hardly dangerous or exciting. Couldn’t they at least add some mind-altering herbs or a little bull’s blood, to spice things up?
Early Christians were aware that their faith seemed a little boring and simplistic in comparison with Mithraism and other cults. And one of them, named Tertullian, wrote a whole treatise about Christian baptism, addressing some of these objections. Tertullian lived from about 155 to 220 CE, in Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia in north Africa. He was a prolific writer, writing sermons and essays on a number of topics – explaining, and arguing for, Christianity in this context of religious diversity.
Tertullian held some unpopular opinions over the course of his life, and was thus never named as a saint. But many of his writings are eloquent defenses of the mainstream theology of the church, and people still read and value his work today.
I first read some Tertullian during my seminary studies – and I love some of his writing about baptism. I’ve always been tickled by this line: “We are little fishes, as Jesus Christ is our great Fish. And as little fishes we begin our life in water, and only while we abide in water are we safe and sound.”
Tertullian goes on at length about the virtues of water, justifying the use of such a simple and everyday substance in this sacred rite. He concludes that in baptism, water, “the substance which gives us earthly life, likewise becomes the agent of our obtaining spiritual and eternal life.
In baptism, human ingenuity has been permitted to summon [the Holy] Spirit to combine with water,… to rest upon the waters of baptism as though revisiting the Spirit’s first resting-place [at Creation].
Being thus sanctified, made holy, the waters obtain the power of sanctifying and making holy,
so that the spirit may be bodily washed in the waters,
and the body spiritually cleansed.”
But my favorite part of Tertullian’s essay on baptism is the way he takes the comparative simplicity of Christian baptism and uses that as a springboard to talk about how our faith is a faith of God present in the simple and the everyday, the familiar and the immediate. He writes:
“There is nothing which so hardens people’s minds as the simplicity of God’s works as they are observed in action, in comparison with the magnificence of what we promise they do.
And so it is with baptism –
for with such complete simplicity, without display,
without any unusual equipment,
and (not least) without having to pay for it,
a man or a woman or a child is sent down into the water,
is washed to the accompaniment of very few words,
and comes up little or no cleaner than they were –
because it is all so simple,
some cannot believe that these acts bear the gift of eternal life.
Other idolatrous religious groups build up belief in themselves by their secret and complicated rites, and by the fees that are charged!
O, that poverty-stricken unbelief, which denies to God his characteristic attributes, simplicity and power!
Well then, is it not a marvel that by bathing, death is washed away?
Because it is a marvel, is that a reason for not believing it?
No – rather it is so much the more to be believed – for God’s works are always marvelous!
We marvel because we believe.
Unbelief, however, marvels and refuses to believe;
it regards simple things as ineffective,
and sublime things as impossible.”
Baptism IS simple. Over the millennia the church has added to the rite until it fills up two full pages of your Sunday supplement in 12-point type, but at its core it is what Tertullian describes – there is water, and a little oil, and a few words; and the person baptized ends up not particularly cleaner than they were before.
And yet it’s one of the holiest things we do.
Perhaps it can be simple because it’s not something we do, really; it’s something God does. We just choose it and invite it.
Today CJ is choosing it. And the rest of us join him in affirming the faith of the church. We pray for him, and we welcome him as a full member of God’s household, this quirky ancient worldwide family.
Sources:
McDaniel’s blog post:
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/03/27/is-christianity-a-mystery-cult/
Some stuff about Mithraism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism