“[He] was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead.”
Seventh Sermon on the Apostles’ Creed
The Baptism of the Lord; January 8, 2006
I Peter 3:17-22
Christianity is a very strange religion. We just got through an overdone celebration about a baby, perfectly aware that the Baby’s destiny is a horrid death at much too young an age. Our churches have crosses in them, on the spires – I’m even wearing one. A cross is an instrument of execution; one minister famously said that there is no cross in his church because it would be like hanging an electric chair in the church. Well, he’s right.
The Cross is a reminder. You and I need reminders, generally. Many of you have already heard me say to you, “Wait a minute; I have to write that down. If I don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist.” My stomach reminds me to eat, my dog reminds me to take her for a walk, my Day-Timer reminds me to take my checkbook to a Rotary meeting; the Cross reminds me that Jesus died, and that he died for a purpose.
Purposes, actually; practically every writer in the New Testament suggests a different purpose for the death of Jesus, some of them more than one. I like St. Peter’s convoluted reflections in this text; he’s grasping at the experience of the Cross, and gets all twisted up in his attempt to make sense of it.
At the heart of Peter’s reflections is this simple statement of purpose: “in order to bring you to God.” Jesus died in order to bring you to God. Continue to consider the strangeness: brutal execution and constant reminders of that execution are to bring you to God? Yes. For the Cross shows us that God has tasted death, the immortal one has perished, the Creator has borne the mortality of the Creation.
This is an emphasis of the Creed that was very serious at one time but may not matter so much now: Jesus really died.1 That may be what’s behind the repetitiveness of this line; why not simply say “He was crucified”? Perhaps because it needed to be hammered in: he was crucified. He died. He was buried. He descended to the dead. One of the early heresies was that Jesus was not a real human being; he was a spirit shaped to look like a human being, but he wasn’t really human. Therefore, he didn’t really die. For the sake of appearances and to drive his message home, he seemed to go through death, but he wasn’t really dead. After all, he was the Word of God incarnate, and God cannot die; therefore, Jesus could not die.
That’s part of the wonder of the whole thing. God figured out a way to die. I have to tell you about a girl I met when I was doing a chaplaincy internship. Melissa – Missy – was a Down’s syndrome girl who was in the hospital for heart surgery. She was about twelve. I visited her often after her surgery and she became comfortable with me. One day I was sitting next to her bed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and she reached through the bars to finger the Cross hanging around my neck. She said, “God.” I replied, “Yes, Missy, this means God.” She said, “God died.” The faith of a twelve year-old Down’s syndrome girl hit me like a blow. Her awareness of what God had done and her grasp of it in her broken and mended heart continue to move me to say that she is the greatest theologian I have ever known. “God died,” she said; although I cannot reproduce them for you, her tone of voice and simple, clear conviction remain with me still.
The folks I drink coffee with at Betty’s Dream sometimes announce a new topic by stating, “Change of subject.” Okay: “Change of subject.” According to Peter – and I love this picture – Jesus took advantage of his tenure among the dead to “preach to the spirits in prison.” Because of this picture from Peter, I do really prefer the older form of the Creed on this point only: “he descended into hell.”
Someone said that Hell is not a place you go to but something you go through. If you have been there, if you are there, then the Cross is a reminder that Jesus Christ has been there too. Peter connects this with the story of Noah’s Ark; while the storm rages and the flood-waters rise in your own hell, there is an Ark where Christ is present to save: His Church. It isn’t perfect; as Robert McAfee Brown is reported to have said, the Church is like Noah’s Ark: if it weren’t for the storm outside we would not be able to stand the stench inside. When you go through Hell, Christ has been there before you and has provided for you the Church to help you get through it.
I recall a story of a widow. Her husband died on Friday and the funeral was to be on Monday. She went to Church, as usual, on Sunday. Now, everybody knows what to say to a widow or widower at the funeral and at the visitation, but nobody knew quite what to say to her on Sunday. Finally, someone asked her, “What are you doing here?” She replied, “Where else would I be?” Of course; the Church was her Ark to carry her through the storms of hell.
Peter says that while Christ was there, he preached the Gospel. There’s the rest of the amazing picture: Christ got into hell the normal way, by dying, but while he was there he showed people the way out! I heard someone caricature the Christian Gospel this way: Out of his unconditional love for you, God sent His Son, and if you don’t accept that unconditional love, then you will burn in Hell for all eternity. Actually, Christ went to Hell in order to break down the gates and let everyone out. No one has to stay who does not choose to. People still go through hell, but no one has to stay there.
When you walk through hell with Dante and Virgil in the Divine Comedy you keep running into signs that Christ has been through: walls broken down, people who were there but are no longer. The old phrase is “the harrowing of hell;” whatever you want to make of it, I urge you at least to keep in mind that when hell erupts in your life, Christ has already been there, Christ has unlocked the gates so no one has to stay there, “in order to bring you to God.”
Peter makes one more interesting connection to the Crucifixion that is particularly relevant today, the day we celebrate the baptism of Jesus. Just as Noah and his family were saved through the waters of the Great Flood, so Christ saves us by baptism. Let your baptism be a reminder that Christ has saved you; any time you see someone else baptized, remember that Christ has saved you; any time we reaffirm our promises of baptism, remember that Christ has saved you. You don’t have to remember the event of your baptism, so long as you remember that it happened. If you need to, get out your certificate of baptism and look at it from time to time.
Another story. A wonderful man – I’ll call him Charles – used to worship with us in a church I formerly served. When I knew him, Charles was in his eighties. He was no longer a member of our church; when he married a Methodist he joined her church. But he liked to come to worship with us from time to time. He made an appointment and came to see me one afternoon in my study at the church. He came and said he wasn’t certain that he had been baptized, and that troubled him. He thought he had been baptized at our church in the late 1920s, but he wasn’t certain, and he wanted to be certain.
I got into the safe and dragged out old Session books and began to look. I checked the register and found a clue that led me to the minutes of a meeting in (I think it was) 1927 and there I found a list of children baptized on a particular Sunday morning. His name was on the list. I turned the book toward him, showed him the date, and pointed out his name. His eyes brimmed with tears as he said, “Thank you; thank you.” It was about a year later that he died, and I’m grateful he died with the certainty that he had been baptized.
The point isn’t the baptism, of course; baptism is, among other things, a reminder that Christ was crucified, died and was buried and that he descended to the dead “in order to bring you to God.”
Let us pray. Thank you, Lord and God, for the gift of baptism, for its sign to us of Christ’s death and resurrection and for the assurance of salvation. We dedicate ourselves to live for Christ who died for us. Amen.
Robert A. Keefer
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Clarinda, Iowa
[1] One example of a Church Father arguing against the heresy is Ignatius’ Epistle to the Tarsians.