If you are anything like me, you are averse to giving people bad news. In fact, you would probably rather pass that job to somebody else at almost any moment. There is nothing worse than having to give somebody bad news. On the other hand, there is nothing better than giving somebody good news, for you know that you will be liked as the conveyor of that news, and it is a good feeling to say something positive. The reality of life is that it is not always so clear-cut! There are times when good news and bad news go hand-in-hand. Delivering one might in fact also deliver the other.
Life is full of such moments. There is a tension to the juxtaposition between good news and bad news. And, it is that tension that gets our attention and gets us to look at the matter seriously. For example, back in the summer, there was an article in Forbes Magazine, and the headline went something like this: “Good news for polar bears is bad news for those who are concerned about global warming.” It is a very interesting article. It is written by James Taylor, not the singer and songwriter, but a regular contributor to Forbes.
It is about a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who has spent many years studying the polar bears of the Arctic. In her essay, she concludes that polar bears are remarkably adaptable creatures. They have evolved over time to be able to handle the environment that they encounter. So-much-so, that in past millennia where there has been more ice than there is now to times when there is less ice than there is now, polar bears have been able to survive. She concluded in this article that even with global warming, polar bears will probably have that same power to adapt to the environment that they find themselves in. “Such is the power” she says, “of evolution.”
It is fascinating because in the same article this idea and these findings have got the ire of those who are against global warming and who are concerned about what it is doing to the earth. They look at an article like hers as working contrary to their cause, and vice-versa. Of course, both are just science- speaking. What is good news for one group of thinkers, and certainly for polar bears, is bad news for others who make a life out of extreme concern for the environment. It is amazing! Tension between good news and bad news!
It is there in the Bible too. Is there a biblical story where there is not good news and bad news? Look for example at Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Good news! God says to them, “I am letting you live in the Garden of Eden. (It doesn’t get better than that!) The bad news is that you cannot eat from the tree that you really want the fruit from.” He says to Moses, “Good news, Moses! I am going to set your people free. They are going to be liberated from the hands of the Egyptians. Bad news, Moses! You are going to be the one to deliver the news to Pharaoh that he is going to let the people go.” Good news and bad news at the same time.
Isn’t this at the heart of all great literature as well? Is not that tension at the heart of most humour? There was the man who was a painter and he went to the entrepreneur who was running an art gallery to find out how his paintings were selling, and the owner of the art gallery says, “Well, I have good news and I have got bad news on this front. What would you like?”
He says, “Give me the good news.”
The owner says, “Well, the good news is that a man came in here that liked your art work, and then asked whether it would appreciate once you died. I told him ‘Yes’, and he has bought all fifteen of your paintings.”
So, the artist said, “What is the bad news?”
The owner said, “The customer was your doctor. That is what is bad.”
You see, good news and bad news, you are not quite sure how to take them.
Well, I have good news for you this morning and I have got bad news. The good news is that you are going to live forever. The bad news is you must die. Now, this might sound really harsh and cold. Yet, the reality is that when you look at it, it really is the heart of what we are going to encounter this week, Holy Week. It is sort of like Holy Week 101 and I am basing this from Paul’s passage from the Book of Romans.
Throughout the whole Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul is actually dealing with this tension between good news and bad news. For example, he says, “Now, if we die with Christ (bad news), we believe that we will live with him (good news).” He suggests that we will in fact share in Christ’s death (bad news), but we will be raised to eternal life (good news). He said that we will be able to belong to Christ (good news), but the bad news is we’ll have to give up our sinful ways. Good news and bad news are delivered simultaneously.
The way that Paul tries to capture the image of this is actually by talking about baptism. He suggests that baptism captures the good news and the bad news that characterizes the Christian story and the Christian message. He asks Christians to remember their baptism, and he likens the dying with Christ and the rising to new life to the symbol of baptism.
Now, in the great tradition of the Christian Church, we have had the service of what is known as “Asperges.” Asperges is when Christians remember their baptism. It is a ceremony where you take the palm branches and you dip them in water, and then they are sprayed on the head of believers with the words, “Remember your baptism. Remember who you are.” We used to do that a few years ago here at Timothy Eaton Memorial. Asperges is remembering your baptism. Paul says, “I want you to remember the baptism, because I want you to remember the good news and the bad news.”
I suspect that if I were to do a poll of all of you this morning that most of you would not remember your baptism. Most of us were baptized as children. I certainly think back to my baptism and I have no recollection of when an old man in an old church in Lancashire evidently at some point put water on my head and declared me to be a Christian. Now, if any of you at that age remember your baptism, please see me, because you are a psychological phenomenon! But, I suppose most of you don’t remember your baptism. Those of you who were adults however and made that commitment later in life, oh, you know it.
Paul realized that those he was talking to knew it. Baptism for them was something that was fairly new. They were new converts to the Christian faith. Paul says, “I want you to remember this baptism, because this baptism brings you into three things.” First of all for Paul, when you are baptized it brings you into Christ, into the Messiah. Paul talks about baptism in those terms.
I think it is fair enough to say that most of the Christians in the Roman Church understood the relationship between the Passover and Baptism. Passover was of course that time in Jewish history when the people of Israel were spared from the death of the Egyptians by having blood on their door, and the Passover was the coming over or the crossing over of those households by the Spirit of Death and the children that were in it were saved.
Passover has always been associated with God’s salvation. It has always been part of the salvation of the people of God. Passover is the symbol of the salvation of the people of Israel. For Christians, the symbol is baptism. It is the same symbol, but in a different form. It is the sign of salvation, but our salvation comes from belonging to the Messiah, to Christ.
We celebrate baptism in the same way that Jews celebrate Passover. Jesus understood that very night that he gathered his disciples to have the meal of the Lord’s Supper at that Passover that this would be as it says in Mark 10, Jesus liken his own baptism into death. In other words, when we are baptized, we belong to the community who has been saved by Jesus Christ. We belong and are part of a covenant community, and it is one of the most powerful things in our lives.
As some of you know, this past couple of weeks I have been in the United Kingdom spending most of my time at the Oxford Centre for Missionary Studies. This is a gathering place for people who study missions from all over the world, most of them doing their PhDs in missions, most of them missionaries themselves or former missionaries of nearly every denomination you can imagine. I was inspired by that! They represented almost every country that you can conceivably think of from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Some of them had missions in the Philippines, having originally come from Korea, and created large churches in the poorest part of the Philippines. One man that I met runs a bible seminary in Bethlehem. How is that for being in the right place? Another man that I spoke to was involved with the development of house churches in China, and had suffered under the hands of the Communists. A woman that I met has had a very strong ministry in the barrios of Argentina. She herself was a Christian from the Philippines. I mean, the network of crossing over these nations is incredible! One young man who had grown up in Syria (of all places) was actually having a ministry in one of the suburbs of one of the eastern European cities that was still emerging from the effects of the atheism of Communism: Incredible people.
What they all shared in common was that they all understood that we are, as a group of people “in Christ.” We belong to Him. That is our affiliation. That is our source of hope. Being baptized into Christ, as I tell all the families when I do the seminars here on baptism, is our passport into the world in His name. It is marvellous! It is the identity that we have. Above any other allegiance or identities that we possess, we move around life “in Christ.”
Does this mean then that Paul is suggesting that the act of baptism is some sort of magical faith that you go through the sacrament and Wham-O, you are automatically then a Christian, that somehow this does it all for you? By no means. Paul understood, as James Dunn the theologian suggests, that in fact the Sacrament of Baptism is an image of what Christ does to us. He brings us into Him. He draws us in to Him. He is the One who says “Come to me.”
When we are baptized, we are also baptized into his death – the bad news! As I suggested, Jesus on numerous occasions talks about baptism into his death. He says, “This is a baptism that I must endure, and you will have to in a sense die with me. You will have to take on in a sense death with me.” As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ calls someone, he bids them come to die.” You are dying to your old self, you are dying to your old ways, you are dying to an old era and an old epoch, you are now a believer in Christ, and you are living in a new life and a new state.
Remember your baptism; remember that you are to live as a new person in Christ; and not like the old person outside of Christ. That is the power of the Christian faith. It is what gives it its meaning and its power and its purpose. For Paul, the symbolism of baptism is the symbolism of dying with Christ, going down under the water as if you are dying and being buried, and then coming back out of the water to a new life. But first, you share in the death of Christ: you go under the water.
I hope, but I am not sure, but I hope that none of you have ever had an experience of nearly drowning. If you have, it is a most, most frightening thing! Many years ago, as a young boy swimming off one of the beaches in Bermuda as I often did, I was snorkelling and I really did do something profoundly stupid. I decided I would show off by going deeper than I normally would and even though I didn’t have tanks but just a mask and a snorkel, I thought that if I went down long and deep it would be really impressive to my friends.
The only problem was that when I got down, I got one of my flippers caught in one of the coral reefs and I couldn’t seem to get my foot free. There was always this schoolboy mystery, one of those stories that had little or no truth to it that down there at the end of John Smith’s Bay there were Moray eels that would come from under the rocks and eat you. Well, I was still young enough to believe that sort of thing. So, I am stuck under the water with my flipper caught, hyperventilating at the thought that a Moray eel would come out and eat me. It was terrifying! I honestly and genuinely believed it was my last breath.
Finally, I got the flipper off and my foot extracted from it, and I went to the surface gasping for air, but for a moment I thought I would die. When you do that, when you go under the water, it is as if you died, it is like you are buried, but you come out again, and there is new life. For Paul, baptism is that very thing. It is the dying to the old self; and rising to the new. But there is quite remarkably a moral imperative in all of this for the Apostle Paul. It is not only a matter of sharing in the death of Christ, it is also being willing to live the life of Christ and bearing the burden that it brings.
Sometimes, according to Bishop N. T. Wright, we are given a half-truth, and the half-truth goes something like this: God accepts us as we are. It is a very common phrase, and like many phrases it is a half-truth. It is a half-truth because if God does not accept us as we are, God would accept nobody, and no one would be redeemed. So, the fact is that God has to accept us as we are, because we are as we are. That is grace. But, does that mean that God then wants us to stay as we are? Is that it? By no means!
Paul says that if we accept the grace of Christ does it mean then that we just keep on sinning like the old self? He says, “No - by no means!” On the contrary, sharing in the death of Christ means dying to self, letting go of the old, letting go of the sin; seeking to live a life worthy of Christ. It is not that Christ just becomes a bland example for us. It is more than that. It is that we participate in the ministry of Christ, and we let go of our old selves. That is the heart of what it means to follow Christ.
But, there is some good news. The good news is that we will rise with Christ. Again from Romans, Paul says, “Now if we die with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him. We will rise with Him. And, this life we live we do not live just for the life to come. We live life now as baptized people that belong to the Communion of Saints. We belong to the community of faith. We live now in Christ, and the life that He has is now our life, and the power that He gives is now our power.” So many people when they are trying and struggling to live the Christian life genuinely, honestly wanting to be faithful just don’t take the next step, and the next step is to allow in a sense the living Christ to live within you and to live with you.
It is not just that. Paul talks in the future tense in the Book of Romans as well. He says, “We will live with Christ. There will be a day we will live with Him. We will share in His Resurrection. We will enjoy His glory. All of creation will share in that joy and in that new creation that is His.” This is the glory and the wonder of our faith. This is what Holy Week is all about. This is what we celebrate today. This is what we consummate when we celebrate next Sunday.
Leonard Sweet in his book, Jesus Manifesto, which I have quoted once before, and who will be preaching here at a Wesley Conference in April if you want to come and hear him in person – he is a wonderful speaker – has at the end of his book a letter that Jesus writes to us. In one of the paragraphs this is what Jesus writes to us. I love it!
Dear Christians:
Since you have been raised to new life with me, set your sights on the realities of Heaven, where I sit in the place of honour at my Father’s right hand. Think about the things of Heaven, not the things of Earth, for you died to this life and your real life is hidden with me in God. And when I, your life, am revealed to the whole world, you will share in my glory.
Good news: some bad news; but even better news for we who are baptized! Amen.