April 15, 2018 “Included” – Acts 19:1-7

Acts 19:1-7
“Included”
April 15, 2018 – Third Sunday of Easter

“What would you like for breakfast?” That was the question my hosts asked as I checked into my AirBnB for a night. I said, “I didn’t even know breakfast was included!” and went on to remark on what a good deal my stay was.

About twelve believers in Ephesus had a similar response when Paul asked them about the Holy Spirit and they said, “we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” They were disciples of John the Baptist, they had heard about Jesus and believed in Him, but they didn’t know the Holy Spirit was part of the deal. In other words, they were sorely lacking in understanding just how good a deal Christian faith is.

Many of today’s Christians may not be, in any practical way, much different from those dozen Ephesians. Yes, we may sing “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” every Sunday, and even be relatively clear that God as Trinity includes someone called the Holy Spirit, but our experience of and reliance on the Holy Spirit may be next to nothing. The Holy Spirit is often referred to as the “overlooked” member of the Trinity, and not just a long time ago in Ephesus. Let’s think about that together for the next few minutes.

First of all, let’s notice that those twelve folks in Ephesus had to have heard of the Holy Spirit. They were disciples of John the Baptist It’s not as if John never mentioned the Spirit. In Luke 3:16, John said “I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” So their remark that they had not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit cannot be literal truth, but only a way of expressing how little they knew about Him or how He is connected with Christian faith.

It’s a bit of a mystery. The writer, Luke, calls them “disciples” in verse 1. When Paul asks them about the Holy Spirit, he asks in terms of “when you became believers.” Both those words, “disciples” and “believers,” imply that they knew about and believed in Jesus. They were Christians of some sort, although some scholars think they weren’t actually Christian yet. “Semi-Christian” is a good term for these folks. Maybe “semi-Christian” is a good term for some folks today. In any case, we aren’t told exactly what these twelve believed or didn’t believe except for the gap in their knowledge about the Spirit.

In verse 3, Paul connects a couple of dots for us. He asks them about their baptism. John said that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit. They lacked the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Paul realized, they must not have gotten the full message about Jesus and about being baptized the Jesus way and receiving the Spirit. Otherwise they would already have and know about the Holy Spirit.

So let’s pause for a moment and take note of what some modern Christians have done with this passage and a couple others here in Acts. They’ve driven a wedge between being baptized in water and being baptized in the Holy Spirit. In some Pentecostal or charismatic circles, people will tell you that, in addition to being baptized in water, you need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. The sign of that Spirit baptism is what these Ephesians experienced in verse 6, speaking in tongues. So believing in Jesus and being baptized in water is a first work of grace, they say, while being baptized in the Holy Spirit is a second, later work of grace. And that, these Pentecostal or charismatic Christians claim, is the normal order of Christian life. Even after water baptism and faith in Jesus, your Christian life is incomplete until you receive the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues.

The mistake of that particular sort of charismatic theology is that you can’t make a couple of Scripture passages into a plan for everyone’s Christian experience. In Acts chapter 8, the Holy Spirit comes on Samaritans sometime after they are baptized. In Acts 10, the Holy Spirit came to those in the household of Cornelius before they were baptized with water. Here in Acts 19 the Holy Spirit arrives almost immediately with their baptisms. The lesson is that you cannot generate what theologians like to call an “order of grace” out of unique incidents in the early years of the church.

What we can say is that Christian baptism and the gift of the Holy Spirit are connected, as Paul explained here in Ephesus in verse 4. John the Baptist’s baptism was only about repenting of sins, but John wanted people ultimately to believe in Jesus, to trust Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins and a new way of life. That meant another, different, better baptism in Jesus’ name, in the name of the whole Trinity, as Jesus commanded in Matthew 28, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Generally, and most often, you receive the Holy Spirit when you are baptized. If you were baptized as an infant, then your experience of the Spirit may not be much until you grow up some, learn about Jesus and place your faith in Him. Even if you were baptized as a believer, though you’ve been given the Holy Spirit, your experience of the Spirit may be lacking, as I said, just because you haven’t paid much attention to Him.

So even though we, after two thousand years of Christianity, know about the Holy Spirit, we may be missing out on some of His assistance, much like those Ephesians were missing out. We may not realize just how much is included in the deal God gives us when we trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and are baptized in that faith.

Again, in verse 4, Paul pointed out that “John baptized with the baptism of repentance.” John the Baptist wanted people to acknowledge their sin, to repent, to turn away from sin. So with John’s baptism a person confessed sin and resolved to live a new life. Baptism was the sign of that commitment, of personal determination to be a better person. Acknowledge God’s law, God’s standards, and try to do your best to fulfill them.

What’s missing from “John the Baptist theology” is any power to accomplish what you now want to do. You want to be a better person. You want to live a new life. Even believing that God in Jesus has forgiven you doesn’t quite do the trick. You just can’t seem to do any better. You still find yourself weighed down by sin. I think everyone of us has experienced just how heavy that weight can be sometimes.

Long ago when I was a child and some television shows were still in black and white, I loved “Sea Hunt,” a series starring Lloyd Bridges as intrepid underwater detective Mike Nelson who used his scuba diving skills to fight crime. I watched it every week and longed to be a diver myself.

In almost every episode of “Sea Hunt” there was someone trapped underwater and running out of air. He or she might be tangled in an abandoned fishing net, or have a leg caught beneath a sunken derelict, or be pinned in the narrow crevasse of an underwater cave. You would watch that diver’s desperate efforts to get free. Then the struggles would grow weaker, the line of air bubbles would thin, and the figure would collapse.

Then, from above, slicing down through the water would come Nelson. Drawing his knife, he would cut away the entangling net or he would pry up the weight pinning a leg, do whatever it took to free the victim. But that wasn’t it. The rescue was not over. That helpless diver now hung there limply, needing air, needing to get to the surface. So Mike would start sharing his own air, hold his breathing tube to the other’s mouth, reviving his fellow diver. Then they would rise together, handing the mouthpiece back and forth, exchanging breaths from that tank of precious air, making their way toward the sunlight.

That is how our salvation is in Christ. Repenting of sin and getting forgiven, is only part of the story, the beginning. Jewish people knew that part of the story before Jesus ever showed up. They repented and God forgave them. That happens over and over in the Old Testament. John the Baptist was simply reminding them of what they already knew.

But the rest of the story is that Jesus died and rose from the dead and sent His Holy Spirit to breathe new life into everyone who trusts in Him. The Spirit is like Mike Nelson’s tank of air, a gift to revive and empower our lives when we are caught and nearly dead in our sins. The word for “spirit” in both the Old Testament and the New is the same as the word for “breath.” The gift of the Spirit is the breath of a new life and, as Paul communicated to those twelve semi-Christians, His breath in us is what makes us fully Christian, what gives us the power to turn our lives upward toward the light.

That’s why you and I need to know about and experience the Holy Spirit. It is by the Spirit that we are lifted with Jesus Christ into a truly new life, which is actually the life of God. What makes Christian faith truly distinctive among all the world religions is partly this wonderful, crazy idea that there is a Holy Spirit. God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. God is three in one, a Trinity.

When Christ saves us, the point is not just freedom from sin. Not just release from whatever binds us. Not just forgiveness. The point is to rise up into something new and glorious, the sunlight of God’s own marvelous life.

We learn from this story in Ephesus not just that the Holy Spirit is part of the deal, that He is included in our baptism, in our salvation, we also learn that, by the Holy Spirit, we are included. We are included in God’s family. It all flows out of getting the whole story that forever and ever, God’s own self has been a kind of family, Father loving Son, Son loving Father, and the Holy Spirit flowing back and forth between the two of them in a great circle of beauty and joy and peace. The grace of Christ makes it possible for us to be included in that circle and it is the Holy Spirit who comes to actually draw us into it, to change us and bless us to enjoy that new life.

In verse 5, those disciples there in Ephesus got baptized again. If you’ve been around the Covenant Church very long, you may know that we sort of frown on rebaptism. We take what Paul later wrote to the Ephesians, chapter 4 verse 5, “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” pretty seriously. If you received Christian baptism as an infant, we don’t want to baptize you again. If you received Christian baptism at an older age, but feel for some reason it didn’t take, we don’t want to baptize you again. We believe that baptism is more about what God does than what the person baptized does or the folks doing the baptism do. Baptism is God’s work and the gift of the Holy Spirit is part of it.

But not all baptisms in the world are Christian baptisms. That’s what was going on here for these followers of John the Baptist. John’s baptism left them with the idea that the rest was up to them. They repented, but now they had to get their lives straight on their own. They hadn’t gotten a baptism in the name of Jesus, a baptism in the grace of Jesus. The fact they didn’t have the Holy Spirit showed that. They weren’t trusting Jesus to save them, they were trusting their own efforts.

So those twelve people in Ephesus needed another baptism, a real Christian baptism. The same may be true occasionally today. If someone comes to us from a faith that is not Christian or, like it was there in Ephesus, only semi-Christian, they may need another baptism. That’s a matter for a lot of prayer and discernment.

You may also be wondering about that business of speaking in tongues. Those dozen or so Ephesians spoke in tongues and prophesied, says verse 6. But as Paul makes very clear in I Corinthians and later in a letter back to the church in Ephesus, neither tongues nor prophecy is a gift given to every Christian. What Paul explains there in detail, especially in Ephesians 4, is that the gift all Christians receive is the Spirit Himself. As we are going to remember and celebrate on May 20, on Pentecost, the Father through Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on everyone who believes in Jesus.

That’s probably one part of the story these disciples in Ephesus were missing. They hadn’t heard about the day of Pentecost, how the Spirit blew in from out of town and filled not only the twelve disciples but filled and inspired with new life thousands more who became believers in Jesus that day.

So I would like you to remember what’s included today. Whether you were baptized as an infant or as a believer already aware of your relationship with Jesus, the Holy Spirit is part of the deal. Our Lord has sent His Spirit to live in you and be with you whether you know it very well or not. You have received an incredible gift, a powerful resource to enable you to enter into a whole new life. The Holy Spirit is included for you.

I’d also like you to realize that as God includes the Holy Spirit in the deal for your salvation, He is also including you in His family. Verse 7 of our text doesn’t seem all that important. It just says, “altogether there were about twelve of them.” But why would Luke mention that number if it wasn’t significant in some way? Twelve is the number of the first disciples. By putting that exact number on these newly complete disciples in Ephesus, Luke is saying that they are now part of that same sort of relationship which the original disciples had with Jesus. They too are now part of the church, part of the family of God.

One more thing: just as God has included His Spirit for you, just as He has included you in the Christian family, God wants to include everyone who will believe in Jesus. When Paul encountered these John the Baptist disciples in Ephesus, he could have simply moved on to greener pastures, looked for people who had the message straight. But he stopped and took the time to teach and baptize them so they could be included too.

In our Gospel lesson from Luke 24, Jesus told His disciples that they were to preach “repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations… You are witnesses of these things.” Then He told them to wait until “you have been clothed with power from on high.” Well, that happened. That power came down on Pentecost in the Holy Spirit and that power comes to all of who believe in Jesus. Now we need to fulfill that commission, to be witnesses, to share forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ name with everyone we can.

God’s inclusion is radical. God is like a Muslim woman I read about. She is in Mosul in Iraq. You may remember that the government of Iraq recently fought a bloody campaign to recover Mosul from the Islamic State, from what we call ISIS. Now a woman who went through all that, a resident of Mosul, Sukayna Younes, has taken in children of the enemy, children of members of the Islamic State. She is caring for them and hoping to return them to their families. Other residents hassle her and ask why she doesn’t just leave them to their fate. But she just says, “IS have destroyed everything in my life and now I am helping their children.” She’s not a Christian, but I think she understands something about God. The Holy Spirit is speaking to her too as she includes the children of her enemies in her care.

As we remembered on Good Friday, we all put Jesus on the Cross. We all tried to destroy His life. But He still loves us and includes us in His family. And He wants us to do the same, to be like Sukayna in Mosul, loving our enemies, loving the children of our enemies. Our world really needs that message now, really needs the Holy Spirit. Let’s help them be included. Let’s help them come to Jesus and receive His Spirit.

Amen.