Up from the Water

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Matthew 3:13-17

When we think of baptism we think of water.  No doubt water is important to us at a very basic level.  No water, no life.  Water is the determining factor in there being life on earth.  Our bodies are 60% water.  If we go more than three days without water we will begin to physically die.  Improper hydration of the body has its effects.  If we are under hydrated our mental functioning suffers.  We become depressed.  Our joints will hurt.  Too much water dilutes other important chemicals in our bodies causing weakness, disorientation, muscle cramping.  You can get drunk on too much water, but it takes gallons and who wants to pee that much.

Water is also an important symbol in the faith narrative of the Bible.  Let’s look at a few starting with the Creation story of Genesis 1.  This account appears to have developed among a people familiar with standing on the shore of a large body of water such as the Mediterranean Sea and taking in the horizon.  The image is that in the midst of a great Sea God created a bubble in which we live.  When God began to create, his raw materials were deepness, darkness, formlessness, emptiness, and…water – the primordial Sea of Chaos.  In the midst of watery Chaos God brought forth an ordered world and filled it with life.  Water is an important symbol of Creation.

In Genesis 2 we find a second Creation story which seems to have been developed by an inland people familiar with the desert wilderness feature of the oasis.  The Garden of Eden was an oasis formed around a spring, natural well, which was the head of four rivers that carried life giving water out into the rest of God’s creation.  We also find this River of Life image in the writings of several of the OT prophets and the Book of Revelation where a river of life-giving water is flowing out of the Temple in Jerusalem.  This is the life-giving and healing water of the Presence of God found in the spiritual life of relationship with God.

Water is also a symbol of cleansing.  In the days of Noah, God’s good creation became so corrupted with humanity’s Sin and evil that it needed to be radically cleansed.  So, God opened the skies and the ground and flooded the bubble with those primordial waters of Chaos and as they receded humanity got a new start.  

Water is also a symbol of deliverance.  By plaguing the Egyptians God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  For the finale, God parted the waters of the Red Sea to let his people through to safety and then destroyed their powerful foe, Pharoah and his army, by letting the waters collapse back on them as they tried to pursue.  

Finally, water is a symbol of future hope.  After God’s people’s Wilderness Wandering, God parted the waters of the Jordan River so that the Israelites could cross into the Promised Land and settle it.  God brought them out of the transitional and difficult life of trial in the wilderness to life being filled-full according to God’s promise to Abraham to make his descendants a great nation that would be blessing to all other nations.

Looking here at Matthew, it's in the waters of the Jordan that we find Jesus being baptized obviously as a symbol of a new beginning for God’s people in the Promised Land.  But, all these symbols of water are at play.  With Jesus there is New Creation, New Beginning.  Flowing from Jesus is the Live-giving Water of the Holy Spirit present with us.  With Jesus is found the cleansing water of forgiveness, of knowing we are accepted and beloved by God.  Jesus and his way of life is deliverance from the slaveries that overtake us when we don’t live life on God’s terms.  With Jesus is found a foretaste of our future hope of when God has finally intervened to heal his good creation of the disease of sin and of evil and death and filled it with a deeply personal knowing of himself.  It is in the profundity of all these symbols, these images of water that we find Jesus rising up in a clear image of resurrection.  

But wait a minute.  Water is not the only thing we need to consider here.  We must also note the opening of the heavens and the Spirit of God coming to alight on Jesus in the form of a dove and also the voice of God.  Jesus’ baptism is actually a moment of self-revelation by God very similar to the revelation of God we find present in Genesis at the beginning of Creation.  There God was mostly unseen.  But God spoke the Word, the creating Word of God that the Spirit of God who was hovering over the waters brought about.  

At the beginning of John’s Gospel this Word of God is what John says became flesh as Jesus. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1,14).  Jesus is the Word God speaks that brings everything into existence.  

At Creation God spoke the Word amongst the words of what he wanted to come into being.  The Spirit brought them about.  Then, once Creation was filled with life, in the midst of all that life God placed an image of Godself – humanity – and then God said “Very good.”  

Here at Jesus’ Baptism, we see Jesus, God the Son, the Word of God become a human.  He is God filling full God’s own image with God’s own very self.  Jesus is the culmination of God’s very good Creation.  As Jesus comes up from the water of Jordan, the waters of future hope fulfilled, the Spirit of God alighted on him in the form of a dove to remind us of the Noah story and how Creation was washed clean of our turning from God.  At that moment God the Father speaks and the “Very good” that he speaks over his filled full Image coming up from the waters of New Creation is “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” 

This moment of Jesus’ Baptism is a self-revelation of God.  We have to note that God reveals God’s self here as Trinity, a Three-in-One/One-in-Three mystery.  Reflecting on that, we can say that God is a communion of persons (God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and at the heart of this communion is belovedness.  The Three give themselves so selflessly to each other in love that they are One yet Three but One.  I don’t want to get too theological here but God reveals God’s own essence to be a community of belovedness.  

Therefore, to reflect upon how this should matter to us: we are created in the image of God.  The image of God found in us is a capacity for living together in communities of belovedness – such is the importance of marriage and family.  True community is found in persons selflessly giving themselves, sharing themselves such that we find a unity in love arising in our relationships.  This is why things like self-emptying, serving, and helping and striving together to be all that we can be are so foundationally important to our own self-discovery and the survival of God’s very good Creation.  Noticeably, self-emptying, serving, helping, and striving together are things so totally given a backburner in this me-oriented world of individualism and self-actualization.  The result is that our attempts at being in functional community always just seem to culminate with a sourness of self-gratification that hurts others and fractures community, indeed mars the image of God we are created to bear.

To close, Jesus is the New Human around and in whom we find the New Humanity that has the capacity to truly be the image of God in God’s very good creation because this New Humanity is filled full of the Presence of God.  We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.  The water of creation, of life, of cleansing, of deliverance, and of hope are embodied in Jesus.  He is central to God’s purpose for us and his whole creation.  It is in relationship to Jesus displayed through following him that we discover that we each are a beloved child of God, a belovedness that is confirmed in the fellowship of those who follow Jesus and who love in the way he loved us, laying his life down for us, serving us, healing us.  In the midst of our following him together, we find ourselves daily being created anew by the mysterious presence and work of the Holy Spirit who alights on us and fills us.  In the community of faithfulness, we imbibe of the water of new life.  We find ourselves forgiven and cleansed of shame and guilt in the living-water of the welcoming hospitality embodied in our fellowship.  In the living water of this fellowship, we live in the realm of hope where God’s will, reign, and love are open to all and where it is becoming here on earth as it is in heaven. 

So, let us not underestimate the importance of the fellowship we share in self-giving love as followers of Jesus.  It is in the midst of our Christ-like, Holy Spirit enabled love for one another and for the community around us, in the midst of our serving and helping one another that Jesus yet again rises up from the water of his Baptism and the world receives of moment, a glimpse of who God is.  What a difference it would make in this world if the only God people could see is the God whose essence is a Communion of Belovedness in which all can come and be welcomed and loved.  Let us come up from the water and let God’s self-revelation be evident among us.  Follow Jesus in the Jesus was of self-emptying serving and helping.  Amen.

What's Your Calling?

Matthew 3:13-17

Please permit me to play pollster for a moment or two this morning and ask you some deeply provocative questions. When I ask them please feel free to respond by raising your hand or piping in where appropriate. The first question is: How many of you here believe that all Christians are called to full-time Christian service? If not, who is? Okay. How many of you think of or thought of your work, your employment, as a vocation to which God called you? If you are a full-time dad or mom or Grandma or Grandpa consider that to be your work. Are their other activities that you associate with a calling from God?

Now why am I asking all these questions? Well, I know that most of us deal with the question of “Where is God in my daily life?” Is it simply that God just shows up for a minute or two while we’re having devotions (if even then) or when we go to church and then disappears for the rest of the day or week while we go about doing what we do and trying to be a good person while we’re doing it. Or, could it be really be that God is with us always and has put us where we are so that somehow he can be working through everything we do? I guess the question is whether or not God really has anything to do with the stuff that we spend our days doing.

Before I left for seminary I wondered about those same questions. I considered myself called to fulltime Christian service which I believed meant going into the ministry. I was inclined to believe that full-time had to do with employment. I wonder if God wanted me in full-time ministry, then why am I working at the hardware store that I was working in. I figured that there had to be some reason why I was there rather than doing ministry since that was what I wasted my time in university preparing for. I came to see that somehow through that job at the hardware store God was preparing me for the ministry, giving me certain public relations skills and so forth. I never really considered my work at Golden corral or at the Hardware store as a calling from God until I met Mrs. Jackson one day.

Mrs. Jackson was a short, grumpy, and very abrupt little old lady who walked stiff-legged wearing very padded slippers. When she came into the store she always stood at the cash registers barking out her demands. She would stand there whining loudly, “Somebody help me. Somebody help me.” Usually, one of the cashiers up front would help her and that would entail having to run throughout the store to get what she wanted while she stood there waiting and then listen to her complain because it took them so long.

Well, this particular time I heard up front asking for help and then over thover the loud speaker “Randy, please come to the front.” I was like no. Please don’t do this to me. Well, I went up front and sized up the situation and realized that this was not going to be easy. I immediately saw that she was actually in a great deal of pain and did not want to be on her feet for too long, but that day she needed a telephone and not being too up on the latest in telephones she realized that she would need to have them explained. So there I was. I looked at her again and immediately it came over me that Mrs. Jackson, as rude as she seemed to be, just needed to be treated with respect and given the time of day and that I was the person to do it because I was a Christian. I escorted her to the phones and listened to her explain what she wanted and I gave her a couple of options to choose from and took the time to explain the differences and how they worked. She choose one and I escorted her up to the checkout. After she checked out the cashiers came to me and said “I don’t now what you did, but that’s the easiest she’s ever been to check out.” From that day on I was the one called for the difficult people.

That experience and many more like them made me realize that it didn’t matter whether I was going into the ministry or not, my first calling was to be Jesus’ disciple wherever I was and whatever I was doing. And now I firmly believe that God puts his people into different forms of employment in order to carry out Jesus’ ministry that begin at his Baptism.

So now I ask you two more questions: What is God doing in your circle of the world and why has God placed you there in the middle of it all? These questions are important because we believe that God is at work in this world. He leads. We follow. God is not simply the scapegoat we use to explain everything that goes on in the world as if he were the world’s after thought. God is at work in this world and usually way ahead of us. He leads. We follow. When we start asking the questions “What is God doing in my circle of the world” and “Why has God placed me in the middle of it all?” we are talking about our calling. What God has called us to be and do.

Now I know that when I use the word calling most will think that this word applies only to those people God has called into the ministry - pastors, missionaries, elders, deacons. It is not a word that is typically applied to the everyday life of the everyday Christian. And because of this we often do have trouble trying to make the connection of how God works in our lives outside of what we do for the church. God has called and still calls us each daily to his work. Called does not solely mean called to some form of service in the church. Called first and foremost means that God is calling out to us, inviting us to become Christ's faithful disciples wherever we are. To be Jesus’ disciples is our vocation, our purpose in life, our mission in life, our job, our work wherever we are and whatever we are doing.

When we were baptized as children our parents made a vow to God on behalf of us and when we came of age and joined the church we made the same vow to God for ourselves. That vow was that we would be Christ's faithful disciples, obeying his Word, and showing his love wherever we are. To be Christ's disciple means to listen to him and to love others as he loves us.

Jesus’ life work, his vocation began when he was being baptized. The moment he left the Jordan that day he began to live out what God had put him here to do. And so it is with us. When we became baptized members of Christ's church being Christ's faithful disciples in everything we do became our calling, the life’s work to which God has called us.

As Jesus’ faithful disciples we share a common identity with him. As he was God’s Son, the Beloved One, the one that God loves so we also are God’s children and God also loves us as he loved Christ. God is our Father and he takes that task seriously. He is active in our lives and wants to see to it that we become all that he has created us to be. He doesn’t abandon us to raise ourselves. He gives us the Holy Spirit to help and enable us. It was the Holy Spirit who moved me with compassion that day that I helped Mrs. Jackson. The Holy Spirit opens the Scriptures to us so that they become transforming, life-giving words to us. He feeds us when we hunger and thirst for his presence.

Finally, since we are children of God and Jesus’ faithful disciples and the Holy Spirit rests on us as it did on him, we participate in Jesus’ ongoing ministry in the world. When we go to work we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we go to school, when we go curling, when we go to Tim’s we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we raise our children and grandchildren, we raise them to be Christ's faithful disciples. That too is part of his on-going ministry in the world. We are Christ's faithful disciples and we are all called to full-time ministry of his on-going ministry in the world. Amen.

Defining What’s Proper

Text: Matthew 3:13-17

What is it to be proper? One way of defining the word is as appropriate, suitable, or right to a situation. It’s not proper to talk with food in your mouth. It’s not proper to use that language at the table. It’s not proper to speak of bodily functions except in a medical sense. Here proper means social appropriateness. Another way of defining proper is to say that it is a specific characteristic of something’s nature. It is proper to zebra’s to have stripes. Walking upright is proper to humans. Sin (alienation from God and one another or broken faith) is proper to human nature. There is yet another way of defining proper; the established or set way to do something. When making a deposit at the bank it is proper to use a deposit slip and have it prepared ahead of time. This makes everybody’s banking experience pleasurable. So there you have it, three ways to define proper…social appropriateness, specificity to nature, or a set procedure. Having the dictionary under our belts we should be more apt to arrive at what Jesus meant when saying about his baptism “it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness” for his doing so would seem improper in every respect.

           John’s baptism was baptism with water for repentance. It grew out of a fanaticism with ritual washing as a means to prepare to come before the Lord that was sweeping his day. As far as the Jerusalem Temple establishment was concerned John’s baptizing out there in the wilderness was improper. It was not the proper way to come before the Lord. The proper way was to come to Jerusalem and offer a sacrifice. Sacrifice was the way they worshipped. It wasn’t a sacrifice to appease an offended God. It was an offering up of thanks for something you were going to have to kill to eat anyway. The proper way to take life that God had given was to take it to the priest who took its life in the proper way. He would burn the fat and the guts, take a portion for the priests, and take the blood into the temple to sprinkle it on the altar or on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant otherwise known as the mercy seat where God was supposed to be. They believed that the blood was the life of the animal. So in essence the proper way to take life was to give that life back to God who created it. Moreover, they believed that this life passing through death (the animal slaughtered and the blood taken) and given to God covered over the sins of those who brought the sacrifice. The blood (the life) of the lamb would atone for their sins or cover them over. The Hebrew word for atone, kophar, means to cover over. Atonement was how they kept in right relationship to God. They believed this because that’s what God told Moses that this sacrifice was how the people should approach and worship.

Baptism develops from the OT teaching that one also needed to be clean to go to the temple to worship. There were certain things and people you could not touch, if you did you would have death or disease on you coming into the presence of God. Waiting a period of time and taking a ritual bath was usually the way to make oneself clean. This making oneself clean to come into the presence of God is what John was calling baptism for repentance.

Yet, this act of repentance was not the proper way. John was conducting a ritual that was not in accordance with Scripture as the priests knew it and he was not doing it in Jerusalem, but out in the wilderness. But, there’s significance to his doing this out in the wilderness. In Old Testament times, there was a Day of Atonement when the High priest would offer a sacrifice on behalf of all the people so that the blood, life that had passed through death, might cover over their sins. He would also get a male goat and whisper the sins of the people into its ears and send it out into the wilderness to be consumed by a demon named Azazel (Lev. 16:8,10,26). This was a symbolic gesture of sending sin to Hell more or less. This is also where we get the term scapegoat – “the goat that escapes.”

This was why John the Baptist was out there in the wilderness in a figurative Hell baptizing people in water for repentance and it truly was not proper. Well, in two of the senses of the definition of proper. It was not proper to the prescribed way. It was not proper to social appropriateness for i was offensive to the Jerusalem Temple establishment. But, considering human nature and our bent towards sin, out there in the wilderness in this figurative Hell baptizing people who desperately wanted to be righteous was most proper. These people were desperate. They felt God was coming with a vengeance to cast out the Romans from Israel, judge the people, and establish his kingdom. They knew that the proper means in Jerusalem at the temple was a corrupted farce. The priests had turned worship into big business. That being the case, they had no hope of being ready for "The Day of the Lord" other than to go out there where the scapegoat went and be washed clean by John the Baptist, the only true prophet of God who was calling them there.

It’s to these people that Jesus went. Jesus went out there to that figurative Hell like a scapegoat and had himself baptized in this improper ministry of John’s saying, “It is proper for us to do this to fulfil all righteousness.” Now one might think that what Jesus did was not proper to his nature. That’s what John the Baptist thought. To him Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and here was Jesus out in the wilderness like the scapegoat the high priest sent to Azazel. Moreover, Jesus was the one they were expecting who would baptize them, cleanse them, with the Holy Spirit, make them righteous in the core with the indwelling presence of God. It would seem logical and proper that with Jesus’ arrival these desperate people out there in that figurative Hell who had repented and made themselves clean with baptism were now ready to receive the Holy Spirit from Jesus.

Yet, that’s just not the proper way to come before the Triune God who is grace. To come running to Jesus saying “baptize me with the Holy Spirit because I’ve repented and cleaned myself up” would be improper. It wouldn’t be grace. The proper is for Jesus to meet us in our Hell of a wilderness and take upon himself our need to be made clean of our shame and to become himself our desperate attempt at repentance by and then take it all away with him into his death. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).” That is the proper way.

So what does all this mean? It means we don’t have to try to get right with God to gain his love. God loves us. Jesus Baptism was for everyone of us, for all of humanity. His baptism was for the fulfillment of righteousness. It was the sign of God the Son taking upon himself every bit of our sin-diseased human state. It is impossible for us to clean our acts up to the point of where we can say, “God, I’m clean. Show me your face.” Jesus baptism put an end to that. It is proper that he would meet us in our living Hells, take upon himself our need to be clean of shame and our attempts to be made righteous, and be baptized for us (a foreshadowing of his death and resurrection), and take it away.

Then, guess what? He came up from the water and the heavens were opened and then God revealed himself. Because of what Jesus had done for the people they saw Jesus God the Son with the Holy Spirit flittering in, over, and through him, and heard the voice of the Father saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased.” The proper way to knowing God is through Jesus Christ doing it all for us. That’s what grace is all about. Those churches who say you’ve got to repent of your sins and believe before you can receive, those churches that don’t accept the baptism of other denominations simply do not appreciate Jesus Baptism for us to it’s full extent and are still dealing in John’s baptism. Jesus baptism was our baptism, our repentance for us. He’s fulfilled righteousness for us. He who didn’t need it has done for us what we cannot do.

So then, what about our baptisms? When we were baptized, we were baptized into Jesus' death that we might be raised with him and live in his life. Ours was not a baptism for repentance, a way for us to clean ourselves up for God. Jesus baptism did that for us. As his baptism foreshadowed his death, resurrection and ascension, so our baptism signifies our participation in those events in him. We’ve died with him. We live with him. We are baptized in Christ not into him. The end result is that freely, on his merit not our own, he gives us his Spirit who unites us to himself so that we hear the Father’s voice saying to and in and through and to everyone of us, “My beloved children. I am well pleased.” Jesus takes us into himself freely. We are in him whether we want to be or not. The Holy Spirit is given to us whether we want him or not. The Father speaks to us personally saying you are my beloved child whether we what to hear it or not.

The Triune God of grace has created new reality, the New Creation, new existence for us through becoming human as Jesus Christ and his taking our sin upon himself and dying with it and then being bodily raised and ascending to the Father in our humanity. This new humanity is humanity in which the image of God has been restored. I am inclined to say that the moment when Jesus came up from the water is the moment in which it is fully revealed that the Trinity has restored his the image to humanity.

Jesus is the lamb which God has sent who takes away the sin of the world. He doesn't just cover it over so that God doesn’t have to look at it. He takes our sin away. He takes it away by the very means of uniting us and it to his very self. No longer are we nor need we be alienated from God. He is with us, in us, always. If ever we feel the fearful need to get ourselves right with God to cure the angst of shame or feel that God is against us we need only point to Jesus baptism and say, “He’s done it all. God is for us not against.”

Our new existence in Christ is that we live in the Communion of love who is the Trinity. We live in the moment of the opened heavens. Set your minds on that. The more we live in the new reality the more it changes us. Worship. Pray. Read the Scriptures. Do kind things. Sing hymns and psalms to yourself. Live in the new reality. Indeed, that’s what Jesus meant when he said repent and believe the Good News that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Faith is not a decision to believe and repent of our sins so that we can be forgiven and go to Heaven when we die. Faith is what arises in the wake of the revelation that as Jesus Christ God has saved humanity from sin and death and indeed given himself to us in such a way as to take us into the grace-filled Life of his very self. Invest your life to this new reality God has brought about through Christ Jesus. It is truly proper to live in the love of the Father freely given to us through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit. Amen.