Advent Lutheran Church

"Jesus' Baptism - and Yours"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            In William Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It,” there is a rather melancholy character named Jaques who utters a line that has lived on in literature.  Perhaps you’ve heard it: “All the world’s a stage.”  Actually, what he says is “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one person in his time plays many parts.”  The central image is of a person’s life as it unfolds in seven “acts,” starting with infancy, then the student phase, and continuing on until it ends in what Jaques calls “a second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

            Talk about depressing!  If you graphed it out it would probably look something like an arc, starting in infancy and then progressing through act three or four but then turning in an inevitable decline into “oblivion.”  There are probably some political candidates fresh from the Iowa caucuses this past Tuesday night who could relate to that process, but as a characterization of human life in general – depressing indeed.

            What a different reality is embedded in a distinctly Christian life; not characterized by an arc that is determined by diminishing capabilities but a steady trajectory of strength and positive influence that is not impacted by age or mobility or health.

The starting point for that kind of trajectory is located right here, in the waters of baptism.  We conduct quite a few baptisms here in this congregation; in fact, we conduct about as many baptisms as other churches conduct funerals.  I talked with a friend the other day, the pastor of another Lutheran congregation here in the metro, and he said that they conduct an average of a funeral a month.  That’s about how often we conduct baptisms.  And because we do them so frequently it’s possible to miss the significance of what actually happens in these waters, miss the power that is transferred in this sacrament.

It’s important to note that our baptism and the power that it gives is inseparable from Jesus’ own baptism.  According to the writer of Mark’s gospel, Jesus was one of a mass of people who showed up in the wilderness to submit to a ritual of cleansing at the hands of John the Baptizer.  John demanded that people come clean about their behavior, admit the ways that they turned away from God and took advantage of other people, lived in ways that were contrary to the ways of God.  When they had done that they submerged themselves in the Jordan River, came up and committed themselves to a new life, a new moral and spiritual life that was focused on God.  There is no indication that God played any role in John’s baptism.  The determining factor was simply the people’s decision to do better through self-discipline and extra effort.

In the midst of the crowd of people who sought out that ritual stood Jesus.  He was very probably just another face in the crowd.  But as he came up from the Jordan, that’s when he experienced the revelation.  The heavens were torn apart, the Spirit of God descended like a dove on him, and he heard that voice, the voice of his Heavenly Father, proclaiming him to be his Son, the Beloved.

It’s interesting that Mark was so intentional about using that word “torn,” that the heavens were “torn” apart.  They weren’t simply opened – something that is opened can be closed again easily.  But something that is torn apart isn’t so easily repaired.  What Mark is saying is that God is on the loose in the world in a way that God hasn’t been in the past.

One of the questions that Christians have been wrestling with since Jesus’ baptism is: Why?  Why did he do it?  Basic to John’s baptism was a confession of sin.  People would admit their sin, and immerse themselves in the river, where the swirling water would carry their sins downstream. 

Interesting image, isn’t it; the water that surges and swirls lifting one’s sins away and carrying them off?  Back in the middle 1800’s Sam Houston was the first president of the Republic of Texas.  Houston didn’t grow up a Christian; in fact, he had a rather checkered past.  But as an elderly man he decided that he wanted to become a Christian, wanted to be baptized.  So the preacher took him down to the river, dunked him under the water, lifted him back up and said, “Well, Sam, your sins are all washed away.”  To which Houston replied, looking down at the water, “Oh, God help them fish.”  And that was the idea: the rushing water would separate the person from sin, and he or she would emerge clean, sinless.

But Jesus was already sinless; he had committed no wrong.  So why did the perfect Son of God submit himself to a ritual that was designed specifically for sinners?  The answer that is most often put forward by the Church is that Jesus wanted to fully identify with humanity, so that humanity would be able to point to Jesus and say that he was “one of us.”  This is no detached, dispassionate observer of the human condition, no aloof judge.  As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

Even though Jesus is holier than thou, he doesn’t carry himself that way; he enters into the human experience without being controlled by its limitations.   And that means that he knows who we are, he knows what we do, he knows our temptations – our temptation to do the right thing for the wrong reason; the temptation to anger, to envy, to pride; he knows your temptation to doubt yourself and your own capabilities; he knows about your temptation to doubt God.  He knows all of that, and he does not turn away.  You can trust him, because you know that he knows you – not who you want to be, or pretend to be, or need to be, or who you hope others think you are.  Jesus sees all of that, and still he loves you. 

There is no pretending, no pretense, with Jesus.  I knew of an elderly woman who hired a housekeeper to come in and clean her house once a week.  And without fail, on the day before the housekeeper was to show up, this woman cleaned her house from top to bottom.  Someone asked her, “Why do you do that?”  And she answered, “Oh, I could never let her see my house in that condition!”  The simple good news of the gospel is that God knows you for who you really are, and still claims you as his beloved son or daughter.  He did it first in your baptism, and he does it every time you remember your baptism, whether it’s in a worship service like this or simply in the quiet of your heart.

Something else happens in baptism as well, something that has to do with Godly power.  We believe and teach that in the water of baptism God publicly claims us as God’s own and we are given the gift and abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that was released upon Jesus at his baptism when he heard the voice of God confirming him as God’s Beloved Son.  If we stay with this story of Jesus through the next three years of his life and ministry, we see a strong connection between his functioning as Son of God and his corresponding empowering by the Holy Spirit.

For example, in Jesus’ day it was believed that upon contact an unclean person would transfer his unclean status, as well as his unclean condition, to someone who was clean.  So people who suffered from leprosy had to live in their own communities – leper colonies – until they either got well or died.  If you were healthy, you did everything in your power to avoid contact with someone who was not.

Jesus reversed that conventional wisdom.  When he touched someone who was unclean, he didn’t become unclean; they became clean.  When he touched someone who was sick, they became well.  When he touched someone who was a sinner, they became forgiven.  And he accomplished this through the power of the Holy Spirit that was given him at his baptism.

This world of ours needs a generous outpouring of that same power, because in some important ways, not much has changed.  People who go through divorce find that they don’t have the same friends anymore.  People who live with cancer discover the same phenomenon: not many people drop by for coffee.  People who are unemployed realize that the same old friends don’t want to hang out any longer.  People who are happily married, who are not ill, who are fully employed – they don’t want contact with “those” people because they don’t want to catch what they have, as if they could.  You can come up with your own examples of people you want to avoid.

But those people are opportunities to live out our status as Spirit-empowered sons and daughters of God, sons and daughters who can reach out and through their touch say, “You are clean.  You are forgiven.  You are well.”  That power does not depend on your mobility, or your age, or your health; it depends only on God, and that’s why the trajectory of life can be a constant, positive incline.

The baptized life is a gift, to us and to others.  It comes with the assurance that with you, God is well pleased.  To know that, to know that you are loved of God simply because you are alive – to know that is to know everything worth knowing.

Amen.