See, here is water! What is to prevent my being baptized? So queries the Ethiopian eunuch upon understanding how Jesus became that suffering servant of the Lord of whom Isaiah wrote, the One on whom was laid the iniquities of us all to free us from them. The story of Philip evangelizing the Ethiopian on a chariot ride is illustrative of Luke's purpose in the Book of Acts; he describes the Spirit’s Easter explosion as early Christianity streamed out to the nations of the earth. Upon hearing Easter’s strange but astonishingly good news of a sheep led to the slaughter, of a silent lamb before its shearer in whose humiliation for our sakes justice was denied, the eunuch asked for baptism. He henceforth wants to be identified with the Lamb who was slain for him by the baptismal sign of death by drowning. He wants to be baptized. What is to prevent my being baptized? he asks. Nothing! No barriers of race, nationality or sexuality block him. He gets to be baptized.
Now, notice that the entire episode in Luke’s telling has been orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. See, no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Whether one looks back at one’s baptism as an infant or as an adult looks forward to baptism, in either case the event of our conversion to Christ is the good and gracious work of the Holy Spirit. That is essential so that even in our own precious personal faith we do not rely on ourselves to put our faith in faith, but rely solely on the gracious work of God the Holy Spirit who binds us to Christ to the glory of God the Father. To be sure, then, the story indicates that there could be something to prevent one from being baptized. Without the Spirit at work in human hearing and understanding the good news of the Christ who lived for all who are poor in power and died for those dead in their sins, and thus in faith wanting this oddly good news to be valid also for oneself, baptism might be withheld on the grounds that it has been reduced to nothing but a human ceremony, shorn of its divine meaning and purpose.
One thinks here of merely ceremonial christenings of newborns. Years ago I remember getting a random phone call from someone I did not know asking me if “he could get his kid done in my church.” Of course, it’s not “my” church but Christ’s church, of which I am a faithful steward as a called an ordained minister. When I said that it’s possible but I require counseling for parents who present their children from baptism, he quickly ended the conversation. I’m suspect he kept looking for easier clergy through the phone book listings. Of course, for many centuries we have baptized little ones brought forward by parents or guardians who solemnly promise that the baptized child will be raised to understand the good news of Christ so that by the time of their confirmation in adolescence, they may affirm by personal and public confession that they indeed want this good news of Jesus crucified and risen to be valid for themselves. The ministry of the church thus has the holy duty to instruct parents and guardians in the promises that they are making on behalf of the child. For centuries prior, the custom had been for confirmands to receive their first communion on this occasion.
There are some outspoken in recent days who in the name of "radical hospitality" advocate offering Holy Communion to anyone who attends the worship service, regardless of faith, baptism, or any other “legalistic,” as they claim, requirement. This is wrongheaded. Holy Baptism is the radical hospitality of the gospel, radical because in it we are spiritually crucified with Christ that we may henceforth and daily die as members bound to the malice and injustice of the old and passing age to rise as members of the body of Christ, harbingers of God’s new humanity. Holy Communion nurtures the baptized in their new Christian lives as disciples of the Lord Jesus. It is meant for the nurture of Christian living. Whenever one communes, indeed, one joins in proclaiming the death of Christ until he comes again. Partaking of Christ’s self-donation of his body and blood, one ever freshly takes the cross of Christ upon oneself for the daily struggle against sin in oneself and for greater righteousness in one's world. One does not "have" to be baptized to commune as if some legalistic hoop to jump through. Rather, it is the baptized who want to commune with Christ and his people. The radical hospitality of the Christian message is on display in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, who earnestly asked, What is to prevent my being baptized?
These advocates advertise communion as offering "a little taste of grace" to seekers and visitors. In reality, this is grace so cheap they can hardly give it away. Certainly, unbaptized seekers and visitors should be heartily welcomed at the Eucharistic assembly of the faithful in appropriate ways. But this marketing of Holy Communion as a little taste of grace" is a profanation; it is a trivialization because grace is never little. Grace is always hugely, indeed altogether radically transformative as seen in the story of the Ethiopian. Grace transforms by uniting us with the death of Jesus for us in order that we rise with Jesus to newness of life. Just this is the radical love of God captured by the word "grace." So the First Letter of John testifies today: God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
The precious statement that, "God is love," is at the heart of our Christian faith and just so it dare not be trivialized. It is trivialized when “love” becomes a platitude, a cliché really, a religious bromide, a conscience-dulling narcotic, a marketing gimmick that obscures the holy battle of the God of love against our lovelessness, a divine battle engaged in baptism to rescue us from the daunting powers of sin, death and devil. The love of God is trivialized when pulpits offer a clichéd love of mere permissiveness. But all we get in this way is a cheap covering for our sins to produce a deceived but easy conscience, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously warned. The point being made in 1 John today is that radical love, the creative love of God's grace, is not cheap but costly. It costs God to love real, not imaginary, but the real sinners of which we and our world consist.
May I convince you? How often in fact are we tempted to give up on this world when we are confronted again and again in dismay and disgust at the sorry spectacle of human malice and injustice. How much more so – think of the formative story of Noah and the flood in the book of Genesis – might our Creator, seeing our human wickedness, resolve to eradicate us as hopeless and beyond repair? Indeed, how much more so might we in our own dismay and disgust be tempted to pull the trigger of eradication on our enemies, perceived and real, which in today's world would surely amount to mutually assured destruction?
Now, the truly radical love of God confronts just this well-justified dismay and disgust by the costly way of Jesus's expiation or our sins. If our Christian love is to bear one another's burdens, the divine love of Christ, which is the root of our little Christian love, is that before God he bore the sin of the world that God might once and for all judge and condemn our lovelessness and bury it forever in his tomb, ever giving us a new and fresh start on life. That is what this word, "expiation," means. That is why at the conclusion of the Eucharistic rite we sang the Agnus Dei, "Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, grant us your peace, amen."
And just this proclamation together with Holy Spirit transformative faith, is how the baptized, nurtured at the Lord's Supper, remain rooted in the true vine who is Christ. Here we see again why the “little taste of grace” pitch is so much false advertising, reflecting a sorry false consciousness among its advocates. Today Jesus says something that ought to sober them up – or rather, sober us all up: I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. We play with fire when we cheapen grace. Those who take and eat at this meal, I said, renew themselves in Christ by taking his cross upon themselves. That is what Jesus speaks about under the figure of the vinedresser who cuts out the dead branches and prunes with sharp shears even the fruit bearing ones. You can’t just have a little taste of grace and walk away from it. Because grace is huge and radical and life transformative. Therefore we hear this warning: If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. This warning applies more to the hawkers of cheap grace than to the poor souls that they have deceived.
But for us who have wanted to be baptized into Christ, the promises of the text we have heard today from Jesus are far more encouraging. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. For us it is not a threat, but rather a clear and clarifying, thus empowering explanation. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Nothing at all prevents anyone from being baptized but a willful and stubborn desire to stay at home in the world of malice and injustice. Being baptized, we are united with Christ who is the living source of any righteousness and love that we in fact perform. Truth be told, most of the time we don’t even notice, because the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives of righteousness and love emerges organically from the vine, Christ, in whom we are grafted. How utterly natural, then, for baptized Christians to glory in Jesus’s final word to us today: By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. So by radical grace, we baptized are grafted into the vine who is Christ to bear the fruit of his love and righteousness into the world to the glory of God.