Coming out of the Water

Text: Mark 1:9-15

Several years ago down in West Virginia I assist a minister friend of mine with some river baptisms.  We were at a hole where the water was deep enough that we could baptize by immersion.  That event had a profound effect on my understanding of baptism.  Among those to be baptized was a man about my size.  We had him cross his arms over his chest so that we’d have something to hold on to.  Dwight took one side and I the other, and we proceeded to put him under, but his body wanted to float.  We had to get over top him and really push to get Rex under.  It started to feel to me as if we were trying to drown him.  From that moment on it became very clear in my understanding that baptism isn’t simply about washing away sin.  It is about dying and rising with Christ.

Paul says as much.  He writes at Romans 6:3-4: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”  Paul is pretty straightforward here; in baptism we die with Christ and are raised to the new life with him in his resurrection now until our own resurrection come that day.  Baptism enacts a new life that we live now by faith with the presence of the Holy Spirit with us who orients us towards Jesus and his Lordship over us.  This new life we have is new because suddenly there is in our lives a new focus, Jesus Christ.  He now has a claim on our lives so that our lives are not our own.  We must now live them towards him, in him, with him.  

This is even the case with infant baptism.  Must of us here were probably baptized as infants and have no recollection of ever being baptized.  But I would offer that the reason many of you are sitting here is because you were baptized as infants and in that baptism were claimed by Christ Jesus as his own.  If we are to take the Bible seriously on baptism being our participation in Jesus' own death and resurrection, we cannot believe infant baptism to simply be some symbolic thing we do in hopes the child will grow up and believe like we do.  In infant baptism we say that Jesus Christ has indeed claimed this child as his own and we therefore acknowledge our role in participating with Christ Jesus in raising this child who belongs to him to understand she belongs to him.  Christian parenting is not simply just trying to raise a good child, it is raising a child to understand she bears the image of Christ, that she is indeed a Christian—a new creation, a beloved child of the Father, sister to the Son, indwelt by the Holy Spirit who helps her to know this about herself.  It is not our place to convince our children.  God does that.  Rather, we are to model before them what it is to be a child of God.  By our, I mean not just the parents but us the community of faith as well.

There will come a day when it is God who speaks to our children and what they will hear will come somehow packaged in a word or act that sounds like “You are my beloved child with whom I am well pleased.”  They will hear that word knowing that it is Jesus Christ who has made it so.  When God speaks this gospel Word into their lives, a Word made audible by the Holy Spirit’s presence with them, the change it brings about is the death of the old-self and the birth of a new self that wants to live as a disciple of Christ.   We do not hear this Word of God apart from the gospel proclaimed and lived in Christian community.  

         Well, enough on our children coming to faith, let’s talk about our own for as I said earlier our responsibility is not to convince our children but rather to model before them, live before them as those who have come forth from the waters of baptism with the knowledge that we are beloved children of God.   This task is something that we ourselves cannot do unless we know that we ourselves are beloved children of God born anew in the saving work of Christ Jesus and the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.  If we do not know this ourselves then we will be nothing more than hypocrites who present a hypocritical faith, a dead religion that serves some sort of false god that we’ve created to be in our own image.  We have many false gods that we serve.  There are of course the obvious evil cronies of money, sex, and power.  There are also the lesser benevolent gods of morality, inclusivity, exclusivity, nationalism, technology, altruism, progress, family values, education, and the list can go on.  These are ideals that we so often serve instead of God.  Yet, the most dangerous of them all is what Eugene Peterson would call the anti-trinity of “me, myself, and I”.  Probably the greatest challenge we face in passing the faith onto the next generation is to live as those who love and serve Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rather than the anti-trinity of “me, myself, and I”.  It is  “me, myself, and I” that died with Christ in baptism.  Coming forth from the water, we have been raised with him to live in the relationship of the Holy Trinity through Christ in the Holy Spirit to the praise of the Father.

When Jesus, God the Son came out of the water we find the heavens being ripped open and we find him being sated, stuffed to the gills with the knowledge of the Father’s love for him and anointing upon him with the Holy Spirit to carry out his calling as Saviour.  Next, Mark says the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  In the wilderness Satan tempted Jesus to serve himself rather than the Father’s will.  He tempted God the Son to put himself in the place of God the Father.  He tempted Jesus to become the anti-trinity, to serve “me, myself, and I” rather than the Father in the Spirit.  Jesus loved the Father and sought to do his Father’s will above all things even though he knew it would eventually mean his own death.  There in lies our model for living the new life. Having died to the old life of “me, myself, and I” in baptism even if it done to us as infants we must put that old self to death.

In the Book of Colossians Paul teaches that if we have died with Christ we must put to death the things of the old life and put on the clothes of the new life.  He writes: “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.  Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).  On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient.  These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life.  But now you must get rid of all such things-- anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth.  Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.  In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!  As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (3:1-17).

          I like that last sentence there, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”  I think that is a general rule of thumb.  Let everything we say and do be done in Jesus name.  Be gracious as he is gracious and give yourself as he gave himself and you will find your new life that is hidden with him in God as God chooses to reveal it to you.  Amen.

How Can God Be Known?

Text: 2 Corinthians 4:3-6

The point of this passage is that God has made it so that we experience and participate by the Holy Spirit in his self-revelation through Jesus Christ, a revelation that changes us by the sheer fact of knowing we are beloved children of God the Father towards whom he is steadfastly loving and ever faithful.  I make a bold statement in saying that for two reasons.  One, I am saying that God actually can be known.  We can actually know God who is otherwise unknowable and we can know this because God has revealed himself to us in, through, and as Jesus Christ according to the gospel. Two, I am saying that we participate in God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ because God is in us and acting through us.  Due to our actually knowing God in Christ through the work of the Holy Spiritwho makes us to know ourselves to be God’s beloved children we participate in God’s self-revealing to humanity. 

To say that we can know God is a bold statement because we have all been enculturated by a particular philosophy of science that says everything that exists can be known and understood by us because we have the ability to know and understand.  Yet, what we mean by known and understood is that it can be observed and measured or at least proven to exist by mathematical formula or by its effects on other things.  Also, it can be proven by experiments which we can predict their outcome.  Here’s an example.

This cookie is an object that we with our ability to know and understand things can know and understand.  We can know and understand its ingredients right down to their sub-atomic make-up.  We can know and understand the processes of chemical interactions that take place as it is transformed by heat from a doughy mixture of ingredients to what we call a cookie.  We can know its smell and most importantly it’s taste.  We can know it as intimately as taking it into ourselves by consuming and digesting it so that it becomes part of what we are; and if it’s effect on us was profound enough we could say it has become part of who we are or because that cookie was so good I am now a cookie lover when before I was agnostic.  Yet, the strange thing about this way of knowing and understanding, the object we want to know and understand sooner or later ceases to exist simply because we destroy it in our wanting to know it.  We find ourselves consumed with the desire to know the pleasure we derive from the cookie and we create technologies to become more efficient in producing cookies and we produce cookies and consume them until all the resources needed to produce them are gone and we find ourselves buried in the unusable byproducts of our consumption.  This fact I base on my own experience of the Oreo.

            Well, that’s a cookie.  This philosophy of science begins to break down a bit when we apply it to persons.  Rule number one: human persons are not objects to be known the way we know a cookie.  To attempt such a thing would be cannibalism.  The human body can be known as an object, but the human person, the human “being” is a mystery.  Indeed, life itself is a mystery that cannot and should not be reduced to biological mechanism.  My wife Dana is not an object for me to observe, manipulate, or consume in my efforts to know and understand her.  I think by nature we all feel very violated when we sense someone is trying to objectify us or manipulate us or consume us by sapping the life out of us.  Dana is a thinking, feeling, and willing subject in her own right meaning she is a person.  Dana is not the object of my desire, but rather the subject, the person, whom I desire to know.  I can know thing’s about Dana, her likes, dislikes, and habits for example.  But there is a limit to what I can know of her as a person.  I cannot know what it is to be Dana. If I could, only evil would result for that would mean I could objectify, manipulate, and consume her at the core of her being for my own pleasure.  When we call a person evil it is because they attempt to do just that.

Martin Buber, a Jewish biblical scholar and theologian from the early twentieth century wrote a book called I and Thou, in which he says we cannot really know another person.  We can only know the change that comes about in us from having encountered that person.  I cannot know Dana as Dana is in her person, but I can know the change her person brings about in me in our relationship and that is only if I am willing to let her person have an effect on me.  We as persons know one another by the way we have been changed by relating to one another.  If my relationship with Dana has not changed me, then I have not let myself be vulnerable enough to let Dana truly be present in my life.  She would be just an object in my life.  Her thoughts, abilities, giftedness, love, support, and even her dysfunctions all have an effect on me that changes me.  She does not do this intentionally for that would be manipulation.  Thus, we can never know what it is like to be another person.  We can only know the change a person has caused within us by means of personal relationship.

Now let’s talk about knowing God.  God is not knowable as an object.  God never offers himself to us as an object to be known, God cannot be observed and manipulated.  God cannot be seen or measured.  God cannot be proven by reason or mathematics.  God is not part of what makes things make sense nor is God a part of the equation.  God cannot be known by his actions nor the effect he has on things.  God is not knowable as an object otherwise God becomes nothing more than an idol onto which we project an image of ourselves to which relate through our own awareness of our own subjectivity, i.e. much of what passes under the guise of “spirituality”. 

God makes himself known to us as Person.  God is Person and what we know of God personally is the change that encountering him brings about in us.  This entails that we must have an encounter with this God who does not have a physical presence that we can know other than as Jesus Christ God the Son resurrected from the dead who sits as a human at the right hand of the Father and makes himself known to us by the Holy Spirit.  So, we say God is spirit, meaning a Person to whom we can relate – not a force, not an essence, not an energy; but rather a person.  Just like my being in relationship to Dana, we cannot know God apart from God’s revealing of himself, a revelation that we can only know because it renders a change in us.  Let us know talk about this change, our personal knowledge of God and its effect on us.

Paul says here in verse six that God spoke and said “Let light shine out of darkness.”  He is probably referring to the first day of creation when God said let there be light.  Please capture that image.  We would say that light shinning forth from darkness is impossible because there is nothing in darkness that can produce light both in a scientific sense and in a spiritual sense.  But, God speaks the Word and it makes light shine forth from out of darkness.  Now let us take that image of God speaking the Word and making light to shine forth from darkness and apply it to our hearts because he has spoken into our hearts the Word Jesus Christ by whom he has revealed himself and by whom he has saved us by the Holy Spirit through hearing the gospel.  The Word is spoken to us by the proclamation of the gospel, the announcement of our salvation, a salvation that is made real in us by the Holy Spirit who is God’s personal self-revelation to us and by having met the Holy Spirit we are changed, saved.  We encounter God in his very person and know God as the one who has rendered this saving change in us through Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit in accordance to the gospel. 

This saving change, which is our salvation, is nothing short of being a new creation according to the promise of the gospel.  This saving change one could metaphorically say is to experience the first day of the New Creation.  We know God by the saving change we experience having encountered Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit according the gospel.  The change that we experience is that we now know ourselves to be the loved children of God even though we were dead in our sin.  God has made light shine forth from the darkness of our dead hearts.

That is what Paul says is knowledge of the glory of God that we see in the face of Jesus Christ who’s glory shines to us through the gospel which is veiled to those who are perishing.  When we see the word glory in the Bible we must think the personal presence of God. To have knowledge of the glory of God is to have knowledge of the personal saving presence of God as it shines forth in the face of Jesus Christ and touches us by means of the Holy Spirit to say “you are my beloved child because I have made you able to hear the Word of salvation that I have spoken to my creation as Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior.” 

The saving change that happens in our hearts that comes about by encountering the love and forgiveness of the Father towards his children causes us to treat others with the same unconditional love by which we have saved.  Light shines forth from the darkness of our hearts.  When we relate to others accordingly the effect our persons have on others is part of how God saves them.  The light of God shines forth from our hearts so that our personal presence proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to others.  In my relationship with Dana, because she is a Spirit-filled Christian, her presence that changes me is part of God’s working to transform me into the image of Christ and so it is with each of us.  Friends, be aware that you are now part of the shinning of God’s saving light simply because he has saved you.  You are part of God’s saving “I love you” to every one you meet.  Be ever so careful to let it shine.

Purposeful Living

Text: 1 Corinthians 9:19-27

I remember back around the year 2000 the United States Army wanted to change it’s recruiting slogan.  The one they had, “Be all you can be” or “Be all (that) you can be” as the jingle went, had apparently run its course.  I never would’ve thought it, but that slogan is by some popular survey the number one most memorable advertising slogan there has ever been.  The Army’s announcement that they were looking for a new advertising slogan shocked the world of advertising.  Why fix what ain’t broke?  They then changed it to “An Army of One” which was counter-intuitive to the necessity of teamwork.  Recognizing that, the Army has now ventured into pick-up truck-ish slogans with “Army Tough”

Personally, I think they should have stayed with “Be all you can be” and I think most Americans probably have not realized the slogan has changed.  That advertising slogan has been so popular because it captures the vision of young people who are between the ages of fifteen and 22.  We all want to grow up and be somebody, not just anybody, but somebody.  The Army was saying that it could help a person do just that.  Through sacrificial service to one’s nation, Army values, and Army Code of Ethics would make a person a very fine somebody.

Yet, there’s a catch this ad.  It picks up on this vision of young adults who are thinking: “I want to be somebody and nobody can tell me who that is because I’m going to do it my way.”  There’s a streak of arrogant independence that comes along with being a young adult.  This Army ad makes you think that you’re going to be able to be all that you want to be in the Army.  When in fact, it is the Army who’s going to tell you who you’re going to be and that’s “soldier.”  In fact, when you enter the military you actually give up your right to become what you want to be.  You also give up your right to individual freedoms.  You even give up your rights as a U.S. citizen.  But, you give up these rights for the sake of a higher and nobler cause, that of protecting the individual rights of civilians.  In the army, who you are going to be is a servant of the common good of the nation. 

It has long been the philosophy of the United States military that a person cannot become all that they can be unless they learn what it is to become servant of all for to be all that you can be is a call to service.  I think the Army has something there.  It is very difficult for us to find human fulfillment without the sense that our lives are serving a higher purpose.  We cannot be in life just for ourselves.  We must be in it for others.

It is not just the military that realizes this.  It is also biblical to say that we won’t find fulfillment in life until we pick up on this sense of being called to service, to become servant of all.  Finding the higher calling is part of what’s behind our Scripture reading this morning.  Paul realizes that his calling in life is to be a traveling missionary preacher who proclaims the gospel everywhere he goes for Christ’s sake.  He is not concerned so much with who he is as an individual but with how he might serve the higher purpose of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  He put aside who he wanted to be in life, which was a zealous Pharisee, in order to become what Jesus needed him to become so that we all might better understand what God has done for humanity in, through, and as Jesus Christ.

Paul lived his life under a higher calling.  The focus of his life was to serve a higher purpose.  But he would, and I will also, call into question this idea that one must serve a higher purpose in order to have a fulfilled life for not just any purpose will do.  There are people today who say you will be happy just as long as your life is lived for a higher calling or higher purpose.  You’ll be happy if you get involved in human rights efforts.  You’ll be happy if you get involved with saving the whales because your life will be serving a higher purpose.  But, not just any higher purpose will do. 

You see, the Trinity has created human beings in such a way that our lives are meaningless until we find our meaning in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The meaninglessness that we experience in life is actually a spiritual hunger, a hunger to know our Creator whom we have spurned; a hunger to be in a relationship with God the Father through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  This spiritual hunger cannot be satisfied until we respond to the Father’s grace in Jesus Christ and through the bonding of ourselves to him, which is the work of the Holy Spirit, so that we participate in Jesus’ missio dei; his work of bringing in the Reign of God through which he makes all things new.  Serving just any higher purpose will not feed our spiritual hunger.  It may make us feel like we’re better for serving a higher purpose, but it won’t feed that real hunger that we have for the love of God the Father freely shared with us through the Jesus the Son in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

Paul served Jesus as a traveling missionary preacher.  That was his higher calling.  But for us who are, let’s say, just ordinary folks, ordinary believers whose calling is not to be traveling missionary preachers, our calling is simply to share the good news that there is meaning and purpose in this life right where we are at, at home, at work, in school.  Being living examples of the transforming power of the love of God in Jesus Christ is our higher calling.  Being awakened by God’s grace and sharing that joy is where we will find true meaning in life.  There are things in life like friends, family, or work that make life more meaningful, but they cannot give our lives ultimate meaning.  Only our sharing in Jesus relationship to God the Father by our union to him in the Holy Spirit and participating in his mission and ministry to redeem, to give value a dignity back to his creation can give us true meaning.

So, how do we get in on this?  Well, the fact of the matter is that you are already included.  God is constantly at work in our lives and becoming a part of that is at heart simply coming to grips with it, accepting him, and going where he leads you.  It’s giving up on being all that you can be and devoting your life to becoming like Christ.  Being a Christian is living a life of constantly turning away from being self-led towards being Christ-led.  It is constantly praying for Jesus to make you aware of how he is at work in you, to pour his Spirit into you and make you a new creation.  Being a follower of Jesus is simple but yet the most challenging effort you will find yourself involved in.  Amen.