Remember Your Baptism to Remember Your Hope and Future

Sermon delivered on Sunday, Epiphany 1 (The Baptism of Christ), January 13, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 43.1-7; Psalm 29.1-10; Acts 8.14-17; Luke 3.15-17, 21-22.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today we celebrate the baptism of our Lord and will have an opportunity to renew our baptismal vows later in the service. Accordingly, I want us to look briefly at why we should care about Jesus’ baptism as well as our own. In this context, I also want to address a serious question that I was asked last week concerning the new creation theology about which I regularly preach. Specifically, is the hope and promise of new creation just another form of advocating a live-to-die or escapist theology?

To understand the importance of Jesus’ baptism, we have to go all the way back to the creation narratives in Genesis 1.1-2.25. (Don’t worry. This is not indicative of how long it’s going to take me to preach this sermon.) There we read that God created his world and its creatures good and that he created humans to be his image-bearers so that we would be God’s wise and loving stewards of his good creation. In other words, God has always intended to rule his world through his human image-bearers and this was possible as long as we were content to allow God to be the Creator and we his creatures.

But as Genesis 3.1-19ff makes painfully clear, humans were not content to be subordinate to our Creator. We wanted to be God’s equals and when that happened, things went south in a hurry for God’s creation and creatures. Our refusal to live under the conditions God set for us caused us and the entire creation to be cursed and we have lived with the terrible consequences ever since, death being the most severe of those consequences. Just this past week, for example, there was another school shooting fresh in the aftermath of Newtown, CT and the CDC announced we now officially have a flu epidemic in this country. Closer to home, Governor Kasich signed a puppy mill law into effect, a sad indication that our stewardship of God’s creatures is woefully inadequate that make laws like this necessary in the first place. And a quick look at our ever-growing intercessory list reminds us that all is not well with us and our families and friends. We all know that we live in a world that, while full of beauty, is just not quite right.

But even in the midst of the darkness and despair that human sin and rebellion have caused, God remains gracious and faithful to his human creatures and creation, and intends to put things right again. Yet Scripture also makes it clear that God has always intended to use human beings to help him do that and that is why God called Israel to be his holy people through Abraham. That is what the rest of the biblical story is about—how God called Israel to bring his healing love and redemption to God’s broken and hurting world. But we know that Israel was as broken as the people God called her to help God redeem. And so as we saw during Christmastide, God became human himself in the person of Jesus to do for Israel what Israel could not do and be for the world so that God’s plan to rescue and heal his world could proceed as he always intended.

This, of course, brings us to today’s gospel lesson where we see Jesus being baptized by John and anointed by the Holy Spirit to fulfill his work and mission as God’s Messiah (anointed one) to bear the sins of the world and bring about God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. In submitting to John’s baptism of repentance, Jesus, while sinless, was nevertheless identifying himself with the people he had come to rescue and he was doing it in a powerful and symbolic way. Whenever we read Scripture we must pay attention to signs and symbols and the symbolism they represent because the writers intend for them to speak to us as loudly and clearly as words. Luke (and the other gospel writers) want us to see that in Jesus’ baptism we are witnessing the commission of God’s Messiah so that in his ministry, death, and resurrection, God was doing what was needed to restore his good but fallen creation and bring salvation to those with the good sense to accept God’s offer to life and new creation in Jesus.

And because Jesus’ baptism signaled the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s eternal plan to defeat the powers and principalities that are corrupting God’s good creation and to rescue us from sin and death, our baptism becomes massively important because it represents our entrance into God’s family so that we can live with a hope and a future. Scripture makes it dreadfully clear that there will be nothing but judgment and death for those who are implacably opposed to God’s rescue offer to us in Jesus; and for anyone who claims to love God and others, this is grievous to ponder. But for those of us who are baptized into Christ, judgment and death is not our destiny, not because we are better or more deserving than others, but because we are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection (cf. Romans 6.3-11; Colossians 2.11-12). When we are baptized into Jesus’ death we acknowledge by faith and in the power of the Spirit that not only are we freed from our slavery to sin and death, we also believe with the NT writers that through Jesus’ death on the cross, God has defeated decisively the powers and principalities and will one day consummate that victory, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind.

But this would be impossible to believe if God had not raised Jesus from the dead to launch his promised new creation and give us a preview of our future as Jesus’ people. Jesus’ resurrection reminds us that it is God who rules over creation, not the dark powers and principalities. It reminds us that despite how bad things might appear to be—and there are days when things appear to be plenty bad—we worship a God who gives life to the dead and who calls into existence things that are not. This is not a live-to-die theology because our resurrection hope is meant to sustain us right now for the living of our days. When in the Spirit we believe in the resurrection of the body, we have reason to celebrate and rejoice right now, precisely because the resurrection reminds us that it is God who is sovereign in all creation, not the powers and principalities, and because we know that we who were dead are now alive, lost but now found, and that there are celebrations going on in heaven right now over this (cf. Luke 15.1-32)! Our resurrection hope is meant to equip and sustain us here on earth so that we can be the people God calls us to be—God’s people called in Jesus the Messiah to help participate in God’s task of healing and putting to rights his broken world. More about that in a moment.

Baptism in itself does not guarantee that we will live faithfully as people with a real hope and a future. Baptism is simply the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible reality that God has graciously accepted those of us who live in the Messiah as members of God’s family. And like earthly families, once we are born into God’s family in the power of the Spirit at our baptism, we will have to spend the rest of our lives learning how to act like a family member. It goes something like this. When I was a teenager my mom would tell me to “remember who you are” before I would go out. In other words, she was telling me to act in ways that would uphold our good family name and not bring shame and dishonor to it. Likewise at our baptism. When we are brought into God’s family, God reminds us through his people, through Scripture and the sacraments, and through the power of the Spirit to remember who we are and Whose we are, and to begin to act accordingly. In biblical language this is called repentance and it is one way we can celebrate our resurrection hope and future as we remember our baptism. We learn to say no to a world of dark pagan immorality—a world of lust and loneliness and despair and greed and self-centeredness—and dare embrace an alternative lifestyle in the power of the Spirit, a lifestyle characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, generosity, and self-control (cf. Galatians 5.19-25). We dare believe that these character virtues are possible to develop because we develop them with the help of the Spirit, the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, who brought order and life to God’s creation, and who will raise our own mortal bodies. Of course it is impossible for us to develop these character virtues on our own, but that’s part of the beauty of our resurrection hope! We don’t have to try to do the impossible. We are promised the abiding presence and help of the Spirit! That is the whole point behind our NT lesson from Acts today. It is the Spirit who gives us the power to live as members of God’s redeemed family and who assures us that Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished what the NT writers claimed they did. All this reminds us that we have work to do right now in the power of the Spirit. Our mission statement sums this dynamic up perfectly. We are changed by God to make a difference for God. We are to be God’s beacons of light and love and hope to his dark and frightened world. We are to do this because in Jesus’ resurrection, God reminds us that his world and its people are important to him and so it should be important to us as well. This isn’t escapist theology. To the contrary, it focuses our work here on earth and brings meaning and purpose to our lives.

Of course we are not always going to get things right. We humans are easily distracted and profoundly broken. But just like it is with our earthly families at their best when we misbehave, so it is with God’s family. When on occasion I misbehaved as a teenager, even after my mom reminded me to remember who I was, I could expect to suffer the consequences. But one of those consequences was not expulsion from the family. For that to have happened, I would have had to consciously thumb my nose at my family and all the values for which it stood and walked away, steadfastly refusing to ever consider returning or asking to be readmitted as a family member. Just so with those who are in Jesus the Messiah and God’s real family.

So when we invite you to come up and renew your baptismal vows in a few minutes, I hope you will do so with the words from Isaiah on your mind and lips. Don’t be afraid for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters I am with you, and the rivers shall not overwhelm you. When you pass through the fire you shall not be burned and the flame will not consume you. As you renew your baptismal vow, splash the water all over the place and let your mind come to grips as best it can with the wondrous love that is behind these awesome and gracious promises so that you can have a hope and a future, precisely because you have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.