Baptism of our Lord Sermon 2021

 

We live in an age when the dominant religion around us repents not of sin, but of the good that God made. We are taught to celebrate men coming out as sodomites and women transitioning into some strange imitation of men.  We give our women and children drugs to change the chemistry of their brains, because that is the problem, not divorce, broken families, and the pursuit of our own careers to the neglect of the home. There is no room for repentance, but there is a great desire to change the good creation of God.  What God made is rejected, but our own sinful desires are the key to becoming new people. 

 

Repentance now no longer needs a Savior from sin, but a savior from the ways in which God created us to walk.  Nature is not to be ruled over with wisdom, righteousness, and love, but it must be tamed, because the Law that God wrote on our hearts and to which nature testifies confines us too narrowly, inhibits our self-actualization, and prevents us from being the gods the priests of science and the humanities say we must be if we would be happy.

 

But God thinks the exact opposite way.  God does not despise what His hands have made. He sends His Son to be born of a woman’s womb because what He created is good.  He sends His Son to be baptized by John in the Jordan, because sin is real, and it is our sin which destroys what God has made.  Jesus does not come to wage war against nature and tame it.  He comes to wage war against our sin and the devil who seduced us into believing that we are like God because we know a little about the difference between good and evil. 

 

Today people are obsessed with and enjoy the grotesque image of everything around us being destroyed, and us left to fend for ourselves in a brave new world.  From The Hunger Games to The Walking Dead, from the promises of Marxists for an elusive and ridiculous equality to the destruction of the homes and businesses around them, from the paranoia about a disease that can hardly be called a pandemic to the willingness to be rid of family for a long while, we see this obsession with dystopia living itself out around us.  Men don’t desire heaven; they desire hell.  They relish in the pain of it.  They are conforming themselves to the image of their lord, the devil.

 

But God wages war against the devil.  The meat pots in Egypt aren’t worth the slavery Israel is experiencing under Pharaoh.  They need a new life.  Hard-hearted Pharaoh must drown in the depths of the sea while Israel is baptized and receives a new life of freedom.  The land East of the Jordan isn’t enough.  God must give what He promised, a land flowing with milk and honey.  The righteousness of the Pharisees may have shone brightly to a heathen world, but the heart beats out blood for life, and the heart must be changed.  God not only can make children of Abraham out of stones, it is His normal way of doing things.  He changes our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh that believe. 

 

And He does this by means of our Substitute.  The world is already as bad as it can be.  The devil is roaring like a lion, seeking whom he may devour.  Men by nature choose the evil and reject the good.  The reason people today relish the thought of everything burning all around them, it is because they hate the world they live in, and they are disgusted with themselves.  The reason they want it all destroyed is to save themselves from the pain of their existence, because they love themselves more than anything else.

 

But God loves us more than even we love ourselves.  He sends His only begotten Son full of grace and truth, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.  The hell that people desire is already in them, and no brave new world will change that.  Only the new Joshua can lead us out of the pain of serving sin to the freedom and joy of knowing and loving God, the maker of heaven and earth, the giver of all that is good, the lover of mankind.

 

And He loves man.  The very God of very God became a man.  How greatly God must love you!  But it is not enough that God becomes a man. The heathen had their gods become men to enjoy sensual pleasures.  The Son of God becomes a man to know our pain, weakness, and misery. The heathen have demigods becoming gods through their marvelous feats of strength on earth.  God becomes a man to join us in our weakness.  God joins this world of misery, and He shows us this in our baptism. 

 

John baptized sinners, and Jesus comes to be baptized by Him.  He waits in line with sinners to be baptized, though He knows no sin.  He claims our humanity, the good that He created, to cleanse our humanity and remove from us all that destroys us, the hell within our hearts, so that we might enter the kingdom of God. 

 

John wanted Jesus to baptize him.  He knew that Jesus was pure, and that he was a sinner.  But God joins us in our sin.  He gives up the beautiful heaven and all its pleasures to take all that is ours.  John helps him fulfill all righteousness by performing for Jesus the rite of baptism which we all need.  We need to die and rise again.  Pharaoh needs to drown.  The Jordan must be crossed.  We need to die and live a new life.  And so Jesus is baptized to mark Him as the Lamb of God who carries the sin of the world.

 

Moses’ staff opened the Red Sea and also struck the rock from which the water flowed.  Jesus took our place under the Law.  Baptism is death for Jesus.  “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” Jesus says.  Baptism marks sinners for death.  God made Him to be sin for us. 

 

Joshua led the children of Israel across the flooded Jordan on dry ground, and the priests brought the Ark of the Covenant, with the Law of God inside it, and with the mercy seat on it, into the Jordan to make this possible.  So John, the Levitical son of the priest Zachariah, brings Jesus, who has God’s Law in His heart, and whom God made to be the propitiation, the mercy seat for our sins, into the water of the Jordan.  Behold the Lamb of God, behold every sacrifice of the Old Testament, in the same baptism that you received.  Behold the Law fulfilled and the blood spilled on the mercy seat to take God’s wrath against a sinful world away, all in the waters of your baptism. 

 

Only through the blood of the Lamb can we enter the promised land.  We repent, because we are sinners.  This is true our whole life long.  There is only one baptism, but this bath is an unending fountain of mercy and forgiveness.  Just as Israel saw the promised land across the Jordan, so when Jesus was baptized heaven was opened and we see in Him our true home, the promised land of joy and gladness.

 

There is always truth in the evil around us.  People want to change, but they don’t know how.  They just end up destroying themselves all the more, because sinners can only destroy God’s creation.  Do not think that you will become a better person, a new creation, with a heart that refuses God’s mercy and forgiveness.  Job asks a good question.  “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing?  No one.”  But God brings the clean out of the clean by taking all our uncleanness into Himself. 

 

And so He finds you by the water every day.  As Isaac’s bride Rebekah was found by the well, and Jacob found his bride Rachel by the well, so Christ is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh in baptism.  And as Moses found his heathen bride by a well of water, so Christ calls the heathen, the blind, poor, wretched, foolish, and ignorant sinner to be His bride in baptism.  Look, heaven is opened, and you see the home the Father provides for His Son’s Bride, and the feast is already begun in the Supper of His body and blood, because Christ loved His Bride and gave Himself up for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her by the washing of water with the Word, and present you to Himself, a glorious Church, not having any spot or wrinkle or any such thing, because He has fulfilled the word of Hosea,

 

I will betroth you to Me forever;

Yes, I will betroth you to Me

In righteousness and justice,

In lovingkindness and mercy;

I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness,

And you shall know the Lord.

 

So He has claimed you.  He doesn’t destroy you.  He makes you a new creation in Himself. He draws His Bride from His own side in the baptism of His cross, when He died for the sins that destroy what He made, and poured out all righteousness in the blood He sprinkled before God’s presence.  The mercy seat is there in your baptism.  You are buried with Him through baptism into death.  He died for all, and so you died, and your baptism assures you of this every day of your life.  His death is your death, and so there is no sin to mar your relationship with Him.  He has washed that all away.  And He has ascended into the heaven that opened at His baptism, alive from the dead, because His life is yours, and He has gone to prepare a place for you in the mansions above.  The wedding feast is soon to come, which has no end.  Then everything we see will melt away, not for us to forage for ourselves a new existence, but for us to enjoy Him who made us and made us again by redeeming us with His own blood. 

 

He has made us a new creation not by our desires, but by His own fervent desire to have us as His own.  And so we repent and do not believe what the world teaches.  What God has made is good.  We see it all perfect and holy and righteous in Christ.  We look to our Lord from whose side we were born again and cleansed and made new.  And this newness of life is ours now.  We no longer walk as the heathen do, without God and without hope in this world.  We see through the Jordan the promised Land.  Pharaoh and his devilish heart die every day in the Red Sea, and the Lord is our strength and our song.  He has become our salvation, our bridegroom, our Lord, our Joshua who will teach us to be strong and courageous and show no mercy to our flesh, because He has had mercy on us, and He fights our battles’ just as He defeated Pharaoh, so He will defeat the Canaanites.  Just as He forgives us every day in our baptism, so His Spirit has alighted on us, and God has called us His beloved son in whom He is well pleased, and we have nothing but victory over sin and death and Satan before us. No matter the suffering, come cross and death, yet we say with Stephen, who was baptized with Christ’s baptism, “Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”  Let us pray.

 

Lord, when Thy glory I shall see

         And taste Thy kingdom's pleasure,

         Thy blood my royal robe shall be,

         My joy beyond all measure.

         When I appear before Thy throne,

         Thy righteousness shall be my crown,-

         With these I need not hide me.

         And there, in garments richly wrought

         As Thine own bride, I shall be brought

         To stand in joy beside Thee.