The Light and Life That is Christ’s Baptism (and Yours)

Sermon delivered on Epiphany 1B, the Baptism of Christ, Sunday, January 11, 2015 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 1.1-5; Psalm 29.1-10; Acts 19.1-7; Mark 1.4-11.

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

There are several sermons in this morning’s lectionary readings. But since we celebrate the baptism of Christ today, I want us to focus on his baptism and ours. To better understand what we are witnessing in Christ’s baptism—for example, if Jesus was and is sinless, why did he submit to John’s baptism of repentance?—we need to look at the whole narrative of Scripture and what better place to start than in the beginning with Genesis? How convenient this just happens to be our OT lesson this morning (they don’t call me The Sermonator for nothing).

In these beginning verses from Genesis we are told that the Spirit of God, i.e., the Holy Spirit, swept or hovered over the darkness and face of the waters (or nothingness). With a quick reading of this passage combined with our other texts, we are tempted to say that it is the Holy Spirit who creates. But that would not be correct. A careful reading of the text does not warrant this conclusion. God does not create by his Spirit, he creates by his Word. God spoke and then there was light and we need to pay attention here or we will miss an important point about the nature of that light. The light that God spoke into existence is God’s life-giving light that is set over and against the darkness and chaos of nothingness. Just as God did in the beginning, God continues to speak into the nothingness, especially the nothingness of death, to bring order and life and meaning and purpose out of the chaos of darkness. So right from the beginning we see Scripture affirm that when God speaks, he does more than inform. He brings things into existence and gives life.

This is the light biblical writers like Isaiah talk about and which we emphasized during the Advent and Christmas seasons and also now during this season of Epiphany (e.g., Isaiah 9.2, 60.1). Of course, the ultimate manifestation of this light is Jesus himself, the light of the world, the light who shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it (John 8.12; 1.5). And unlike the natural light God created later in Genesis 1.14-19 (sun, moon, stars), a light that falls on everyone whether they are good or evil (cf. Matthew 5.45), this light that God first spoke into existence only shines on those to whom God chooses to give it. That is why only in the creative light of God can we find life out of death, light out of darkness, and that is why we as Christians believe that only in Jesus can we find our way back to the Father.

But what about the Spirit? What role is he playing in this account? When the writer of Genesis tells us that the Holy Spirit hovered over the face of the waters he is reminding us that the Spirit is the creative force who sustains the life and creation found in God’s light as well as the power who restrains the forces of chaos and darkness. So right off the bat we are told that God is not an absent God who is uninvolved or doesn’t care about his good creation. To the contrary, God is present to his creation and creatures all the time and in a very intimate way in and through the power and person of the Holy Spirit. This is consistent with what Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 when he talks about the resurrection of the body on the last day. Just as God did at the beginning of creation, God spoke and raised our Lord Jesus from the dead (cf. Romans 4.17). And so God will do for us on the last day. In a mighty act of new creation, we will be raised from the dead and our newly transformed bodies will be animated and sustained by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 15.44a). This wonderful symmetry found in Scripture’s beginning and ending narratives surely is no coincidence. Hang on to this as we look at Jesus’ baptism.

And please, before we leave Genesis, let me appeal to you not to read Genesis as a scientific account of how God created the heavens and earth and so engage in irrelevant and fruitless arguments that have very little to do with the actual text. Rather, let us acknowledge Genesis for what it is: a deep and wondrous statement of faith that, “In the beginning God.” In other words, let us as Christians acknowledge that we believe God is our Creator and let the scientists as best they can figure out how his creation works (realizing their findings will always be incomplete because there is a reality in this cosmos that simply cannot be quantified and measured). Doing so will save us a lot of needless doubt and worry about the truth of Genesis’ creation narratives by wrongly using criteria that are not appropriate or equipped to ultimately judge the veracity of statements of faith like the one we find in the creation narratives.

Of course we know the goodness of God’s original creation was corrupted by human sin and the evil it unleashed. That is why God called his people Israel through the patriarch Abraham to embody his healing light and love to the world. But we also know that Israel was part of the problem and so in God’s inscrutable wisdom and according to his plan from all eternity to rescue us, at just the right time God came to us as a human, as Jesus of Nazareth, to rescue us from the ravages of the darkness and chaos of evil, sin, and death (cf. Galatians 4.4-5), and now we are ready to look at the baptism of our Lord.

Given what we have just talked about regarding the goodness, orderliness, and life-giving power of God’s light over against the chaos and darkness of uncreation, and given the presence of God’s sustaining Spirit in the midst of his creation and creatures, it is not hard for us to see that in his account of Jesus’ baptism, Mark is telling us that we are seeing a sign of new creation that God is bringing about in and through Jesus. Everything about John reminds us of the light of God’s word shining in the life of his people to rescue them from the darkness of their exile from God. From John’s dress to his diet (like that of the prophet Elijah) to his location (the wilderness) to what he said and did (the prophetic message of the need to repent or change the course of one’s life to bring it in accord with God’s will for his people and God’s washing of our sin through the waters of baptism), John was playing the role of a prophet, God’s mouthpiece, God’s light. But John wasn’t just any prophet. God was using him to announce the coming of the Messiah who would act on his people’s behalf to finally put an end to the darkness of their exile.

The essential problem we see Jesus being equipped for and affirmed to address here is human sin and the separation it causes from God’s life-giving and sustaining power. Until something was done to overcome the problem of sin, we humans would forever be cut off from God. Oh sure, even the godless and wicked have biological existence by the grace and mercy of God. But this is only a tiny portion of what real life is all about, the kind of life God created us to experience. And of course, once our biological existence ceases, we still remain exiled from God without the real forgiveness of our sins. God, of course, took care of overcoming the darkness of our sin and the death it causes in the death and resurrection of Jesus. As Paul would later write, we who are baptized in Jesus share in a death like his so that we will also share in a resurrection like his (Romans 6.4-5; Colossians 2.12-13).

So here in our gospel lesson we see our Lord receiving his commission from the Father to proceed with his life-saving work. As he rose out of the waters of the Jordan the Holy Spirit descended on him to commission and empower Jesus for his work just as the Spirit hovered over the waters to sustain the light and life of God’s creation. This is emphatically not to say that Jesus became God’s Son at his baptism (the old heresy of adoptionism). That would make a mockery of his birth narratives where the Spirit overshadowed the virgin to produce the Christ child. Neither is it to suggest that the Spirit was not with Jesus before his baptism. That would make a farce of our only account of Jesus’ childhood in Luke in which he asked his frantic parents who were searching for him why they did not know he had to be in his Father’s house (Luke 2.41-52). Nor is it to suggest that Jesus came to be baptized because he needed to be forgiven of his sins. That would make a farce out of the entire NT’s testimony about Jesus!

No, the best way to understand Jesus’ baptism is to see it for what it is: a visible and public demonstration and announcement that Jesus was being commissioned to carry out the work he had been born to do, to announce to Israel and the world that the time had come when God himself would rescue his people from their slavery to the darkness of evil, sin, and death, by becoming human, dying on a cross, and being raised to life again. And Jesus would always have the power and presence of the Holy Spirit to enable him to complete his difficult mission.

But what about us? What does Jesus’ baptism mean for us in the living of our days? Well for one thing, because Jesus is God’s Messiah who represents his people (that would be us), what is true for him is true also for us. If you really want to know why God’s people can find real joy even in the midst of darkness, stop and listen to the words God spoke (there’s that verb again) to Jesus, “You are my beloved in whom I am delighted.” Because we are Jesus’ people, God is speaking these words to us as well. Think about that. Listen to the voice. Realize these words are being spoken to you despite all you might have done, despite all your mistakes and willfulness. “You are my beloved in whom I am delighted.” If we really take these words to heart and believe them, it must change everything for us in terms of how we look at God and our life. It means even though we face sickness and disease and broken relationships and all kinds of hurt in this life, the light of God’s love shines on our darkness to heal and ultimately redeem us. Not only that, we are promised the Holy Spirit to live in us, a promise that was made real for us at or around our own baptism and this is where we now turn to that strange story in Acts.

I don’t have time to lay out fully the context for this story other than to say Luke probably included it here to introduce Paul’s work in Ephesus and to show Paul’s ongoing concern that the Spirit’s powerful presence was actively at work in the lives of individuals and the broader community. Whatever it was in those disciples that made Paul question them about the kind of baptism they received, Paul (and the other church leaders) expected Christians to enjoy the power of the Spirit in their lives so that they would be equipped to embody God’s love for them in Christ to others, i.e., so that they would embody the light of Christ to a hurting and sin-sick world that desperately needed to be exposed to that light. And apparently these disciples were not acting like they were so equipped, a fact they would soon acknowledge. This was a problem for Paul, and it should be a problem for us, because when confronted by the dark powers of this world who hate God and his people and who want to destroy us, we’d better be equipped with a power greater than our own to do the work God calls us to do.

So here is my question to us all. What if Paul were to walk into this room right now and ask us what kind of baptism we had received? How would we respond? Of course we might talk about the critical role of repentance for the forgiveness of our sins that is part of our baptismal liturgy. Among other things, without repentance in which, e.g., we refuse to forgive or we hang on to our anger or refuse to turn away from particular sins to which God directs our attention, we make it more difficult for the Holy Spirit to do his transformative work in our lives. So if we really do want the Spirit to be active and powerful in our lives, repentance prepares the way for that.

And of course we would tell Paul that yes, we’ve been baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit so that we hope we have been given the gift of the Spirit. But Paul presses us a bit and asks us if we are sure that we have the Spirit. We might hesitate at this and tell him we really aren’t sure or that we even want him. After all, most of us don’t laugh or cry or fall down when the power of the Spirit touches us. Neither are most of us full-fledged charismatics who speak in tongues or prophesy and all this can create doubts about the Spirit’s presence in us. But Paul teaches elsewhere that the Spirit gives gifts to everyone who belongs to Jesus, gifts like teaching, service, giving, leadership, and healing to name just a few (1 Corinthians 12.1-31). Some of these gifts are not all that spectacular in nature so that many of us overlook them. And sadly, some of us don’t even realize we are given gifts in the first place.

In a few moments we are going to renew our baptismal vows and this is the perfect opportunity for you to begin to engage in some serious and sustained reflection on the gifts you have been given. If you have not yet discovered your gifts, ask the Spirit to show you what they are because when you discover them you will also discover that when you use them they will make you feel alive to God and help you discover what God wants you to do to be beacons of Christ’s light. So, for example, if you have the gift of service, the next time you take that casserole to a shut-in, instead of seeing it as drudgery, remember you are using the gift of the Spirit and let him work in you to enliven you and fill you with meaning, purpose, power, and joy. There is no better way to settle into the new year and you will be amazed at what this also does for the life of our parish. And speaking of the life of our parish, consider Fr. Ron’s call last week to join our healing team, a gift of the Spirit and a vital ministry I want us to develop. Who among us has been given that gift and why are you not using it to bring power and healing to Christ’s body at St. Augustine’s and elsewhere? In light of all we have said today, it does not compute!

Think on these things, then, and for more than just a few moments. Ask the Spirit to come into your life with power to enliven and equip you to do the work he calls you to do and then learn (or relearn) to rejoice and be amazed. For it means you will have proof beyond a shadow of doubt that you have Good News, now and for all eternity, and that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is using you to bring honor and glory to his holy Name, thanks be to God! To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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

Fr. Ron Feister: Epiphany: Responding to God’s Presence Among Us

Sermon delivered on the second Sunday of Christmas B, January 4, 2015, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts for the Feast of the Epiphany (transferred to this Sunday) are Isaiah 60.1-6; Psalm 72.1-7, 10-14; Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2.1-12.

There is no text for today’s sermon. Click here to listen to today’ sermon podcast.

Albert Mohler: Newsweek on the Bible—So Misrepresented It’s a Sin

Sigh. A new year. Same tired old stuff from those hostile to the Christian faith. Sad to see people robbing themselves of real power. Mohler has a well-reasoned response. See what you think.

newsweekcover2015-225x300Newsweek magazine decided to greet the start of 2015 with a massive cover story on the Bible. For decades now, major news magazines have tended to feature cover articles timed for Christmas and Easter, taking an opportunity to consider some major question about Christianity and the modern world. Leading the journalistic pack for years, both TIME and Newsweek dedicated cover article after article, following a rather predictable format. In the main, scholars or leaders from very liberal quarters commented side-by-side those committed to historic Christianity on questions ranging from the virgin birth to the resurrection of Christ.

When written by journalists like Newsweek‘s former editor Jon Meacham or TIME reporters such as David Van Biema, the articles were often balanced and genuinely insightful. Meacham and Van Biema knew the difference between theological liberals and theological conservatives and they were determined to let both sides speak. I was interviewed several times by both writers, along with others from both magazines. I may not have liked the final version of the article in some cases, but I was treated fairly and with journalistic integrity.

So, when Newsweek, now back in print under new ownership, let loose its first issue of the New Year on the Bible, I held out the hope that the article would be fair, journalistically credible, and interesting, even if written from a more liberal perspective.

But Newsweek‘s cover story is nothing of the sort. It is an irresponsible screed of post-Christian invective leveled against the Bible and, even more to the point, against evangelical Christianity. It is one of the most irresponsible articles ever to appear in a journalistic guise.

Read it all.

Marek Zabriskie: Resolved: Read the Bible in 2015

660-Holy-Bible-NIVHere are 20 reasons you should considering committing to read the Bible this year:

  1. It’s the No. 1 best-selling book of all time.
  2. No book has made a greater impact on the world than the Bible.
  3. The Bible magnifies our ability to love others and to love ourselves.
  4. No book reveals more about God than the Bible, and God rejoices when we read it.
  5. Daily Bible reading centers us spiritually and is so enjoyable that you will want to encourage others to do it as well.
  6. Taking time to read the Bible for 15 or 30 minutes each day transforms our lives, our marriages, our relationships and our families. It helps us to be better parents, spouses, neighbors, Christians, workers, citizens and human beings.
  7. The Bible is the best understanding that we have of Jesus — the person who has had the greatest impact on history.
  8. There are over 2 billion Christians. One out of every three people on the planet practices Christianity. The Bible is their chief narrative. It’s worth knowing why.
  9. The Bible has inspired people to found the first universities and hospitals in Western society.
  10. You cannot fully appreciate Western culture, literature and art without knowing the Bible.
  11. Many of the expressions that we use each day come directly from the Bible.
  12. People constantly debate what they believe the Bible says without having read it. It’s worth reading it to find out what the Bible actually says.
  13. You can read the Bible every day and constantly find new things within it.
  14. The Bible will speak to you in a different way each time you pick it up and read it.
  15. Reading the Bible will push you to explore what it means to be created in God’s image, and it will help you understand God, your life’s purpose and why you were put on earth.
  16. No two people interpret the Bible in the exact same way. It’s worth developing your own understanding of the Bible and not settling for what someone else has to say about it.
  17. The Bible, prayerfully and reasonably read on a regular basis, inspires people to be better persons than they ever would be had they not taken time to read it regularly.
  18. The Bible offers the most sustained and vital value system in history, and we cannot live and impart these values to our children and to others unless we read it regularly.
  19. The Bible is like a mirror. Reading it regularly develops our conscience, helps us to arrange our priorities and encourages us to make significant improvements in our lives.
  20. Reading the Bible keeps our heads and our hearts in the right place, develops compassion and good judgment within us and prepares us to spend eternity with God.

Good stuff. I would only disagree with reason 16. While it is technically true that “no two people interpret the Bible in the exact same way,” that misses the point. There is indeed consensus (not the same as drawing unanimous conclusions) about what the Bible says and that consensus is found in how the Church has read Scripture over time and across cultures. Reading the Bible without being part of that broader reading community and history is why there are so many screwball and hair-brained interpretations of the Bible today, something that surely grieves our Lord Jesus (cf. John 17.20-24). Scripture is a complex narrative for a host of reasons and everybody needs help reading it. Everybody. So while I do agree that folks should read the Bible individually, they should also read it together as the Church and use respected commentaries to help guard against drawing unwarranted and downright bad conclusions from the text.

That said, let us not miss the overall point Zabriskie is making about reading through the complete Bible, which is rock-solid. Go and do likewise in 2015 (and then in 2016, 2017, 2018, etc.)!

Read the whole article and then get busy!