| Our Worship |
| Our Covenant |
| Our Staff |
| Visiting FBC Rome |
| Directions and Contact Info |
| For Prospects and New Members |
| Sermons |
| Our Mission Theology |
| Local Missions |
| Global Missions |
| Missions Education |
| World Hunger |
| Cooperative Baptist Fellowship |
 |
 |
|
Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC RomeJanuary 6, 2008 Felix Manz: Drowning for GodMatthew 3:13-17; Romans 6:4Meditation Text: "In order that the dangerous, wicked, turbulent and seditious sect of the Council of St. Gall, Switzerland, 1527 ***I am contemplating writing memoirs as a Baptist minister that I decided I would entitle, "My Most Embarrassing Moments As a Baptist." Until I write that book, let me share with you a couple of the chapters that will be in there. First, about 25 years ago while serving a Baptist church in Memphis, there was another Baptist congregation that called a woman to be pastor. The local association was trying to decide whether or not to eject this church from the association. In a public discussion, an older pastor was trying to rationalize and explain why he was opposed to this woman, and he said, "Well, you have to understand, I was raised in a church in Western Kentucky where in a business meeting one time, a deacon slapped his wife because she had dare speak in the business meeting and, therefore, breaking the admonishment of Paul that women are to keep silent in the church." He thought he was being very generous, I guess, because he wasn't slapping down this woman pastor. That report kind of got out, and I spent a long time explaining to people that I'm not that kind of Baptist. About the same time, a president of the Southern Baptist Convention stated, and it was picked up in the national press, that God does not hear the prayer of a Jew. I always find it interesting that anybody knows they can read the mind of God that well. I spent a long time explaining to others that I'm not that kind of Baptist. A few years ago, there was a group of Baptists who decided to boycott Disney. They decided that the human resources policies of the Disney Corporation were not what they thought they should be so they encouraged everybody not to go to Disneyland or Disney World, not to buy anything Disney, and not to watch the Disney channel. A couple of years after that, I had a person ask me, "Are you a Mickey Mouse Christian, one who goes to Disney World, or are you a Mickey Mouse Christian, one who is sort of," well you know what that means. It wasn't much of a choice, and I had to spend time explaining that I'm not that kind of Baptist. Now later this month, there will be a meeting in Atlanta called the New Baptist Covenant and it will be a meeting of 12 different Baptist organizations that I anticipate will be a better moment than any of the three I just described for you. We live in the Atlanta metro influence area and, therefore, I imagine a lot in the news will be stated about this. There will be senators, ex-presidents, and nationally-known speakers who will be a part of this. Instead of waiting until after it is over and saying, "Yes, that's the kind of Baptist I am," because I am sure there will be some Baptists who will hear about this meeting and say that they are not that kind of Baptists, it seemed good to define for ourselves what it means to be Baptist during this month of January. Too often, we have earned the descriptions that are narrow and negative and people thinking of us in ways that are not complimentary. Personally, I think that is to overlook great significant portions of the Baptist heritage that are to be cherished, and that is what we are calling this, Our Cherished Heritage. If you noticed when we read the Church Covenant earlier, we said that we respect all faith traditions and in this congregation we do, but we do cherish our Baptist heritage and this is why we talk about these good things, these wonderful things, these parts of being Baptist that, quite honestly, helped shape this country and our understanding of freedom as we have it as a country today. Today, we have observed baptism. Baptist is our middle name. Miss Prissy mentioned to me some of what she was going to say to the children and I wasn't able to overhear. Some of this may be redundant but it is important for us to understand why Baptist is our name and what that really conveys. In order to do this, I would like to give you about a two-minute introduction to the Protestant Reformation, if you can bear with me that long. In Medieval times, the Roman Catholic Church had fallen into some harder times. They had lost their moorings a little bit. In almost every generation, some church does this and, at that particular time, it was the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther was a Catholic monk who decided he was going to reform the church. He was going to make it better. He set out to do that and was not well received, and as we know, Protestant churches came out of the Roman Catholic Church. They separated. By the early 1500's, that first wave of reformation had taken place, and things were very different in some ways, but in a couple of ways, they were still the same. They were still the same in that where you lived determined what church you belonged to. If you were born in Italy, you were Italian and it was assumed that you would be baptized into the state church. You would be baptized under the Roman Catholic Church. If you lived in England, you would be British, and it was assumed that you would be baptized into the Anglican Church. If you lived in the portion of Europe that became Germany, you were Lutheran and you were baptized into the Lutheran Church. If you were born in portions of Switzerland, you were Swiss and it was assumed that you would be baptized into the Reformed tradition. In the area around Zurich, there were Christians who thought this did not go far enough. As they searched their own personal experience and as they read scripture, they came to two convictions. One, when they read the New Testament, the people who were baptized consented to be baptized. They were people who asked to be baptized, just like Jesus comes to John and says, "Baptize me." They called it, therefore, a believer's conversion, and the emphasis was on making a personal decision. We hear this in our religious language today when we talk about, "Is Jesus Christ your personal Lord and Savior?" That means did you make the decision? Nobody made it for you. They were also convicted that the baptism was by immersion, going down into the water. It does say, doesn't it, that when Jesus came up out of the water and the words, "He was baptized in the Jordan," means into the Jordan so we know he was baptized fully in the water. They taught that Christians were not people who were born to a country and baptized as infants into a church but that they were people who made a conscious decision to follow Jesus Christ. Again, as a Baptist minister, I get a lot of conversation about dunking people. "Well, did you dunk so and so? I hear so and so is going to get dunked." We think that is the mark of what it is to be Baptist and it is significant, but the real key is not into the water. The real key is that you did it because you made the decision. You participated in believer's baptism. I don't know how many of you read ahead to the meditation text, but if you read this edit from the Council of St. Gall in Switzerland in 1527, you will see exactly how revolutionary this idea was. It seems very easy for us today, but this was considered rebellion against the state. The people who practiced this were hunted down and imprisoned. They were also given a very negative description called Anabaptists. It comes from the Greek root that means again or baptizing people again. They were re-baptizing. One such person was Felix Manz. He was probably about 30 years of age when he was imprisoned in Zurich. They decided to make an example of him, and so 481 years ago yesterday, January 5, they took him from prison and took him out to a fishing hut in the middle of the river there in Zurich and shackled his hands. They had him sit down and they pulled his hands down over his knees and they took a pole and put it behind his knees over his forearms so that he was caught in that position. They read the charge against him. They tied him to a rope, tugged on him, and dragged him into the river where he drowned. They said, essentially, it was not the common method of execution of the day, but it was an example. "If you want to baptize people, well, we are going to baptize you. We are going to baptize you to death." Felix Manz was the first of seven Anabaptists who were killed for their faith. What we did this morning, Grace, Lee and I, if we had lived in Zurich 481 years ago could have been hunted down, imprisoned and/or executed. We sing the hymn, Faith of our Fathers, and it has a line in there about in spite of dungeon, fire and sword, that's just not a nice poetic line about something, but it's true. Our ancestors in the faith were put in dungeons and they were drowned for their faith. If you are not a Baptist, and we have people who come in and out of our church all the time, people who watch by television who are not Baptists, please understand that this is part of the reason why this is cherished to us. Our ancestors in the faith died for baptizing the way we baptize. We can argue till kingdom come about whether you are supposed to sprinkle, pour, or immerse or what's right or what's wrong, but the real key to what Felix Manz was preaching and other Anabaptists like him is this: What kind of Christian do you become after you are baptized? Are you the same way? What kind of Christian does this church produce? Does baptism really punctuate a life into something that comes before and something that comes after? In the life of the Anabaptist, there was this conviction that a person comes to Christ, a person makes the decision, and baptism is a symbol of what has taken place and what was before is different than what comes next. I told the story before, and I tell it now, of a young brother and sister. The brother hit his sister, and the sister said, "You can't do that. You've been baptized. You can't hit me." And he felt real bad about it and turned around to walk away. His sister hauled off and socked him, and he said, "Hey, you can't do that!" And she said, "Yes, I can. I haven't been baptized yet." Already, at a very early age, there is this sense of an awareness that there should be something different before and after. You shouldn't be the same after as you were before, not just the baptism, but the decision that it signifies. I remember my own baptism. I was in the seventh grade and our church had a Saturday retreat for junior high—we called it junior high then—students who had not yet made professions of faith. At that retreat, I got in a fight over a canoe with a kid named Robert. What can I say? We got in a fight. We both wound up making professions of faith and we were baptized on a Sunday night. As we stood on those steps waiting to go down into the water, we looked at each other and pretty much simultaneously knew that we had to put that behind us. Something now was different. We were getting ready to go into the baptismal waters. It was going to be a symbol that we had accepted Christ, that Christ had come into our life, and that Christ had changed us. So standing there on those steps, we shook hands and made up. There is the old Negro spiritual sung at baptisms when they would say I looked at my hands, and my hands looked new. I looked at my feet, and my feet looked new. I looked at my brother, and my brother looked new. It was a way of trying to sing and to say, "Things are different." The issue is really not, Do we baptize the right way and some other church baptizes the wrong way, but what kind of Christians come out of the experience? What kind of Christians come out of being a part of making a decision in a church like ours? I occasionally get criticism from people who say, "Well, you are a Christian and you think you are better than everybody else. You think you are better than I am, don't you?" The answer to that is, "No. I think I am better than I was. I think that Jesus Christ has come into my life and the comparison is not between you and me or someone else. The comparison is between myself and the way I used to be." Am I more like Jesus Christ and has this church produced people who are more like Christ because they have been baptized? We say that it is an outward symbol of an inner reality, and that's what it is. It's a way of describing and saying not that we do it the right way, that we have baptized correctly, but the key is, Am I more compassionate? Am I more forgiving? Am I less self-centered than I was before? Has the baptism really changed me? Felix Manz and other Anabaptists died for the sake of saying, This is what it truly means to be Christian, that we are changed. So often when we speak of baptism we talk about the symbol of cleansing. We think about the water and washing. Have you been washed? Have you been washed whiter than snow? Have you been cleansed? That is true and that's in the Bible, but that is so much easier than talking about death. Do you realize how many times the New Testament speaks of baptism as death? The hymns we sang today, almost every one of them about baptism has had a stanza that refers to death. The reason for that is it is not only a symbol of washing of our sins and being made cleansed, but it is a symbol of uniting our lives with Jesus Christ, of being buried with him in the waters of baptism, and being raised as Christ was raised from the dead, being raised to walk in newness of life. That's what Paul speaks about in the Letter of Romans. Felix Manz was drowned for his faith, and the truth for us is that's a pretty good image for us as well because something old, something less than what God would have us do, something that we would put aside has been drowned in the act of baptism so that we might be raised to a new life to follow Jesus Christ, so that we might be raised to a life of discipleship to be his hands on earth. I think it is a fitting symbol that behind me, over our baptistery, are the dove and cross. The dove reminds us of when Jesus came up out of the water and the spirit descended upon him to confirm who he was, and the cross as a reminder of where he was heading. It is a reminder for us that as we are baptized, or as we reflect on our baptism, that God has indeed touched our lives like the spirit of a dove, that he has called us to a life, a life to follow Jesus Christ, a life that is different than it was before. Have you been washed, have you been washed whiter than snow? Have you died to self so that you might be raised to walk in the newness of life that Jesus Christ offers? Copyright 2008. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved
| Home | |
Back to top