Water and Fire: A Sermon on Baptism
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, January 18, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the third chapter.
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.’ ”
4 Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, 6 and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, 9 and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
11 “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with[d] the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Water and Fire: A Sermon on Baptism
There’s something about water that draws us in, isn’t there? We’re pulled toward oceans and rivers, we find peace beside lakes, we’re mesmerized by rain. Maybe it’s because we’re made of water, about 60% of us in fact. Or maybe it’s something deeper, something primal. Water is where life begins. In the womb, we float in water. In Genesis, the Spirit of God hovers over the waters of creation. Water cleanses, water sustains, water transforms.
Enter John the Baptist, standing waist-deep in the River Jordan, wild-eyed and wild-haired, calling people to come down into the water. Not just any people, he’s got Pharisees and Sadducees, tax collectors and soldiers, ordinary folks and religious elite all wading into the same muddy river. And John is shouting about repentance and preparing the way and someone coming who will baptize not just with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
Let’s start where Matthew starts. John appears in the wilderness of Judea, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now, baptism wasn’t new. Jewish people had ritual washings, mikvahs, for purification. Gentile converts to Judaism went through baptism as part of their conversion. What was radical about John’s baptism was that he was calling everyone to be baptized, including Jewish people and those whose religious and ethnic membership was beyond question.
John is essentially saying: your pedigree doesn’t matter. Your religious and spiritual heritage doesn’t impress God. Before God, your degrees, credentials, and titles aren’t worth the paper your diplomas are printed on. Everyone needs to turn around, change direction, be washed clean, start again. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’” John warns the religious leaders. “For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
This is John’s liberating message: the old hierarchies don’t hold in the water. The old categories that kept people in and pushed people out are dissolving in the Jordan. God is doing something new, and it starts with everyone—everyone—acknowledging their need for transformation and stepping into the water together.
And then Jesus shows up. Jesus, who doesn’t need to repent. Jesus, who John recognizes immediately as someone greater than himself. And Jesus says, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
Now, theologians have puzzled over this for centuries. Why does Jesus need to be baptized? But I think we might be asking the wrong question. Maybe it’s not about what Jesus needs. Maybe it’s about what we need. Jesus enters the water not because he needs cleansing, but because we need to see God enter fully into human experience, including the vulnerability of standing in a river and submitting to a ritual of transformation. Jesus doesn’t baptize himself. He lets John baptize him. He demonstrates that the path to God’s kin-dom runs through humility, through community, through letting someone else’s hands push you under the water and pull you back up again.
And what happens? The heavens are torn open. The Spirit descends like a dove. And a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Before Jesus preaches a single sermon. Before he heals anyone. Before he calls a single disciple. Before he does anything to prove himself, God declares over him: You are beloved. You are mine. I am pleased with you.
This is what baptism announces over every person who enters the water: You are beloved. You belong to God. Before you accomplish anything, before you prove yourself, while you’re still dripping wet and vulnerable, you are claimed by divine love.
The Journey of Baptism Through Time
So how did we get from John baptizing in the Jordan to the practices we have today? Let’s take a brief journey through baptismal history, because understanding where we’ve been helps us understand where we are.
In the earliest church, baptism was serious business. The Didache, a first-century Christian teaching document, instructs communities to baptize in running water when possible, echoing that Jordan River experience. Early Christians were baptized as adults after a period of instruction called the catechumenate, which could last up to three years. Baptism typically happened at Easter, in the middle of the night, and candidates went completely under the water, symbolizing death and resurrection with Christ.
These early baptisms were full-body immersion in cold water, often performed naked, followed by anointing with oil and putting on white robes. The symbolism was powerful: you went down into the water as your old self and came up as a new creation. You died with Christ and rose with Christ. The water was both tomb and womb.
By the third and fourth centuries, as Christianity grew and became more institutionalized, practices started to shift. Infant baptism became more common, partly because infant mortality was high and families wanted to ensure their children were baptized. The theology also developed that baptism washes away original sin, a concept that would become central in Western Christianity, particularly after Augustine.
The medieval church saw baptism as the gateway sacrament, absolutely necessary for salvation. This created anxiety about unbaptized infants and led to emergency baptisms. The mode shifted from immersion to sprinkling or pouring, making baptism more practical but perhaps losing some of that visceral symbolism of going under and coming up again. In one of the harsher moments of theological and liturgical practice, the soul of an infant who died unbaptized was said to go to Limbo, a state and place outside hell, but also outside heaven. These young souls could not enter heaven or purgatory because of the “stain” of original sin, but they were blameless on their own account and so damnation to hell was not appropriate. The Roman Catholic Church continued to hold this belief until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
The Reformation exploded with debates about baptism. The Anabaptists insisted on believer’s baptism only, that’s what their name, originally meant as a pejorative, means, “re-baptizers.” They argued that baptism requires conscious faith and commitment, not just being born into a Christian family. Meanwhile, Luther, Calvin, and the mainline reformers maintained infant baptism but emphasized that baptism is God’s action, God’s promise to us, not our work or our decision.
In the centuries since, Christian communities have continued to practice baptism in wonderfully diverse ways. Some traditions baptize infants and confirm them as teenagers or young adults. Others practice believer’s baptism with full immersion. Some sprinkle, some pour, some dunk. Some baptize in rivers and oceans, others in baptismal fonts or tanks built into church sanctuaries. You might not realize it, but this chapel has a small baptismal font next to the altar.
Some traditions have developed liturgical rites for “reaffirmation of baptismal vows,” formal, public ceremonies which people can choose to complete after a period of study and preparation to make their Christian commitment in a more mature and meaningful way. Other traditions regularly offer communal reaffirmations.
But across all these variations, certain themes persist: baptism as cleansing, baptism as initiation into community, baptism as participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection, baptism as receiving the Holy Spirit, and baptism as being marked as God’s beloved.
What Baptism Means
Having a better sense of the history of baptism, the next question we need to ask is what does baptism mean theologically? Let me offer several overlapping images that our broad Christian tradition has passed down to us.
First, baptism is incorporation—being brought into the body of Christ. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that we were all baptized into one body, “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Galatians 3 extends this: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Baptism creates a new family, a new identity that transcends and subverts the categories that divide us in the world.
This is why baptism has always been such a radical act. In the early Christian world, baptism meant you now owed your primary allegiance to Christ and the Christian community, not to Caesar, not to your biological family, not to your ethnic group, and not to your social class. Baptism was and is a political act of resistance against empire and every system that divides people into worthy and unworthy, insider and outsider, beloved and expendable.
Second, baptism is death and resurrection. Romans 6 is explicit about this: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of God, so we too might walk in newness of life.” The water is a tomb where our old self dies. It’s also a womb where our new self is born. We go under, held by the hands of the community, trusting that we’ll be brought back up to breathe again.
Third, baptism is anointing and empowerment. When the Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism, it’s not just a nice spiritual moment, it’s his commissioning for ministry. Immediately after his baptism (and temptation in the wilderness), Jesus begins preaching, healing, and gathering disciples. Baptism isn’t just about being saved; it’s about being sent. It’s not just about personal piety; it’s about being equipped and empowered for God’s work in the world.
And fourth, baptism is belovedness declared. This might be the most part of baptism. Before Jesus does anything to earn it, God announces: “This is my beloved.” Our baptism announces the same over us. You are beloved, not because of what you achieve, not because of how you perform, not because you’ve gotten your theology exactly right or your life perfectly together. You are beloved because God says so. That belovedness is the foundation of everything else.
Living Out Our Baptism
Now that we understand the basic history and theology behind baptism, we are left with a single conclusion: if baptism is all of this—incorporation, death, resurrection, commissioning, and belovedness—then baptism can’t be just something that happened once. Baptism is something we live into every day.
Martin Luther, when he was struggling with doubt or despair, would remind himself: “I am baptized.” It was his anchor, his identity, his source of courage. When the world told him he was a heretic, when he feared he wasn’t good enough (which was most of his life), when he wondered if God really loved him (which, again, was most of his life), he came back to this simple truth: I am baptized. I belong to God. I am claimed by divine love.
What would it mean for us to truly live as baptized people? Let me suggest a few possibilities.
First, living as baptized people means remembering who we are. We are not primarily defined by our identities, our jobs, our titles and degrees, our political affiliations, or even our families. We are defined by whose we are: we belong to God. We are beloved members of the Body of Christ. This identity runs deeper than any other label the world tries to put on us.
For those of us in the LGBTQIA+ community, this is especially powerful. How many messages have we received that we’re wrong, disordered, unnatural, sinful, or an abomination? How many voices have told us we’re not welcome in God’s family, not included in God’s love? How many times have we’ve been told that we aren’t welcome in the church as our authentic selves? But baptism announces something different. Baptism says: you are God’s beloved child, claimed, cherished, and commissioned for sacred work in this world. The waters of baptism wash away every lie that you’re anything less than God’s treasured creation.
And baptism creates a community where all those old dividing lines dissolve. There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, documented or undocumented. We are one body, baptized into Christ, bound to each other in radical welcome and shared belovedness.
Second, living as baptized people means dying and rising daily. Every day we’re called to let our old self die. That means setting aside our egos, our need to be right, our desire for comfort and security, and our participation in systems of oppression. Every day we’re called to rise into newness of life, to choose compassion over cruelty, justice over convenience, and solidarity over self-protection.
Many of my TFAM colleagues talk about thanking God for waking them up in the morning. I admit that practice is not part of my spirituality, but perhaps we should thank God each day for the ability to live out our baptism to the people around us and the people God puts in our paths.
But this is hard work. It’s the work of daily repentance, daily turning around, daily choosing to align ourselves with God’s kin-dom rather than the empire and the reign of darkness. Yet here’s the wonderful truth of baptism: we don’t do this work alone. We do it as a baptized community, supporting each other, holding each other accountable, and pulling each other back up when we slip under the water.
Third, living as baptized people means answering the call. Remember, Jesus’ baptism was his commissioning. The Spirit descended and then immediately drove him into the wilderness to be tested, and from there into ministry. Our baptism also commissions us. We are anointed and empowered for God’s work; work that includes speaking truth to power, standing with the marginalized, and resisting Christian nationalism and every theology and practice that weaponizes faith to harm people.
Friends, we’re living in a time when Christianity is being twisted to serve empire, to justify exclusion, to ordain oppressive policies and hateful rhetoric, and even to commit murder. But those of us who remember our baptism know better. We know that following Jesus means going down into the water with everyone else, not standing on the bank claiming our superiority. We know that the Spirit descends on communities which welcome everyone, which break down walls, which insist love is stronger than fear.
Fourth, living as baptized people means becoming the water and the fire. John prophesied that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. Water cleanses and renews. Fire purifies and energizes. We’re called to be both: offering the cleansing grace of acceptance and welcome, and burning with holy passion for justice and transformation.
We’re called to be water for those who are parched, offering refreshment, quenching thirst, and bringing life. And we’re called to be fire for systems and governments, fire that burns away what’s false and harmful and reveals what’s true and good.
Final Thoughts
Here we are decades past our own baptisms. Perhaps, like me, you were baptized as an infant, wearing a little blue suit, in what, upon further reflection might have been a birdbath, all of which you don’t remember, but have seen pictures. Maybe you chose baptism as a teenager or adult when you chose Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Maybe you’ve never been baptized. Perhaps you’re questioning what your baptism meant in a church or tradition that ultimately rejected you or which you rejected, kicking the dust off your shoes and walking away.
Here’s what I want you to hear: baptism is not primarily about the water. It’s not about who pushed you into the water. It’s about the God who meets us in the water and the community which pulls us back out, even if we meet that community many years after our baptism. And, most importantly it’s about the God who claims us and names us as their beloved.
That belovedness is not conditional. It’s not something you can lose. It’s the deepest truth about who you are. From that belovedness flows everything else: your identity as part of Christ’s body, your daily dying and rising, and your commissioning and empowerment for God’s work in the world.
Whether you were baptized yesterday or seventy years ago, whether by immersion or sprinkling, as an infant or an adult, you are baptized. You are beloved. You are claimed by God. You are called to live as water and fire in this world, cleansing, renewing, purifying, and transforming. And know that if you’ve never been baptized, you are still claimed and loved by God.
When the voices of shame and exclusion rise up, remember, you are baptized.
When the world tries to tell you who you are and who you’re not, remember, you are baptized.
When you’re tired and discouraged and wondering if God and their love are real, remember, you are baptized.
The waters that covered you once still cover you now. The Spirit that descended on Jesus descends on you. The voice that announced over him announces over you: “This is my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”
Thanks be to God.
Amen.