January 12, 2025
God’s Gift and Our Generosity
Acts 8:14-24
Today is Baptism of the Lord Sunday. Each year, beginning of January, we remember the baptism of Jesus. In this congregation, we also remember our own baptism and reaffirm our baptismal commitments. If you have never been baptized, this Sunday is a chance to consider what that would mean for you.
Today we are also continuing in our stewardship series, Pathways to Generosity. During this season of spiritual growth, your session is asking each of us to pray the prayer, “God, where do you want me in my generosity?”
Our text in Acts today, which is assigned by the Church for this Baptism of the Lord Sunday, brings together both of these themes.
First, let’s set the context. The Acts of the Apostles is a record of the early days of the church after Jesus ascended, and God poured the Spirit onto the church. It is the story of the movement of God’s good news out into the world, from Jerusalem, to Samaria, to ends of earth.
In Chapter 8, the gospel moves out beyond Jerusalem to the Samaritans. This event is an important moment because it is the first demonstration of how the gospel crosses our typical social, ethnic, cultural boundaries in order to create a new community founded by God’s Grace.
Philip is the evangelist to Samaria. He fled persecution of Christians in Jerusalem, and went to Samaria to preach, and many believed the good news and were baptized. That’s where we pick up in our reading today.
When the Apostles in Jerusalem heard what was going in Samaria, they sent Peter and John – their senior leadership – to check out this new development.
What they found was odd: Samaritans had been baptized, but they had not received the Holy Spirit. So, Peter and John prayed that they would receive the Holy Spirit. They laid hands on them and they received God’s Spirit.
Why is this odd? Everywhere else in the New Testament, baptism and Spirit go together. They are one and the same event. Jesus’ baptism is a model for this. He came out of the water and the Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove.
It’s not clear why it happened this way in Samaria, but the story makes this crucial point baptism by water and Spirit belong together.
The way the Church describes this is that the water of baptism is an outward sign of an inward grace. That means, the water of baptism symbolizes on the outside what the Spirit is doing on the inside.
Water cleanses. The Spirit cleanses from sin.
In water, we can drown and die, as in a flood. In the Spirit, our sin is drowned and we die to the old self.
In the waters of the womb we are nurtured and born. In the Spirit, we have new birth, born again to a new life in Christ.
Water is an outward sign of inward grace of the Spirit. Now, this is very important: water dries, but Spirit remains. Even if you were baptized decades ago, the Spirit is alive and working in you the rest of your life.
When we see the font in worship, it’s not simply a reminder of an historical event in our life story. It is a sign of the present. The Spirit is alive in us, doing the ongoing work of baptism within us.
The Spirit, given to us in baptism, helps us grow into the image of Christ, knitting into the body of Christ.
Now, one person in Samaria still had a lot of growing to do: Simon the Magician.
Who was Simon? He was not a person who did card tricks. He was a common figure in the ancient world: a local sorcerer and healer. He was famous in Samaria and respected by the people. So far so good. But Acts tells us something very important about his character:
“He boasted that he was someone great. And people said he is rightly called “The Great Power of God.”
What does this tell us? Simon had an enormous ego. Simon had a Savior complex.
When he saw Peter and John laying hands and people receiving the Spirit, he saw competition in the miracle marketplace. He wanted a licensing agreement. He offered them money for this great power.
You can imagine how that went over. Peter and John knew this was God’s gift. They had been with Jesus from the beginning, see him betrayed and arrested, met him in resurrection power. They knew he was God’s Messiah and the Spirit belonged to him. So, Peter set Simon straight in the strongest possible terms:
20May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money! 21
Now that is very well translated, but the Greek is much stronger and more forceful. Peter says to Simon, literally, “To hell with you and your money.”
He goes on,
“You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God. 22 Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord in the hope that he may forgive you for having such a thought in your heart. 23 For I see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin.”
Wow. Simon did not understand the gospel. What’s going on with Simon and why does he matter to us?
Simon is a cautionary tale. Simon symbolizes anyone who uses their faith, or the Church, or the gospel as a cover for advancing their own ego-driven agenda. Simon has had and still has many imitators.
The media regularly shows us pictures of hypocritical religious leaders, who pursue their ambition for wealth or power under the guise of faith. A disgraced pastor who steps down. A denomination appoints a committee to investigate abuse.
We see it in politics when a political candidate or party wrap themselves in the language of faith in order to advance their own ambitions and schemes for power.
Sadly, we see it in local congregations. Pastors and leaders in congregations pursue their own goals and agenda under the guise of faith. The veneer of principle may be right, even the goal right, but it is too ego-driven, with too much self-ambition.
Simon’s story, and Peter’s word of warning to him, is a reminder to us that this gospel is not ours to control. The gospel is never at our disposal to serve the aims of our ego. Salvation is the Spirit’s project. The restoration of the world is God’s project. We participate in it. We bear witness to it. We hope to stand in the stream and flow of it. But we never control it, and we dare not use it for our own ends.
The proper stance of one who receives the Spirit is humility; not grasping power or ambition, but giving it away for others.
Now, how does this relate to stewardship? When we give away our money, we tangibly give up control, or ego-driven agenda.
Money is a tool: it helps us to do many things. But money is also a symbol: symbol of accomplishment, of ego, of power, of independence. It’s literally a way of measuring worth.
And when we give money away, we literally become more humble.
The question of our stewardship theme is, “where does God want us to be in our generosity?” That’s a personal question that each must answer for themselves. I’m convinced, though, that at the very least, God wants us to be generous at a level that makes us more humble. To give in a way that makes us less powerful, less independent, more dependent on grace.
Generosity is a way that we both spiritually and tangibly set aside our own agenda. We place ourselves under the grace of the Divine Gift and the Divine Giver.
This is what Simon the Magician did not understand. The power he saw was not magic but was God’s free Spirit. Yet, all was not lost for Simon.
If you look up Simon, you’ll see that he went down to history as a marquee name of Christian heresy. The very word simony means selling the blessings of the church, and it comes from his name. But the way he ends this conversation with Peter is so hopeful.
Simon doesn’t resist Peter’s rebuke, instead he makes a humble request: “Pray to the Lord for me.” Simon knew he needed to grow in this new Spirit of grace.
When we see our own ego driving us too hard, when we see self-ambition masquerading as righteousness in ourselves: this is the best place to be. Standing with Simon, standing in the place of prayer.
When we see others who are misusing faith and religion as a cover for their own agenda, driven by too much ego, one of the most important and faithful things we can do is pray for them.
We must resist the abuse of the gospel, yes, but also pray for them.
Pray for them, and pray for ourselves, and pray for one another. Pray that all of us will have grace to grow in our baptism by the power of the Spirit. May the Spirit given to us in baptism continue to grow each of us into the image of Christ. Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina