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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
The text for our meditation this morning comes from all three readings for the baptism of our Lord. You may be seated.
To be connected to God is an amazing and I would dare say terrifying thing to ponder. When we hear the words of the creation account in Genesis, we must marvel at the power of a God who can bring matter into existence simply with his voice. What an awesome, awe-inspiring, and extraordinary God. But when one contemplates the vastness of this universe and realizes that the God who creates such a universe must be infinitely more vast than his creation, it can make one feel a bit insignificant. What could such a God want to do with me? How could such a God even know an ordinary person like myself? I, a poor, miserable sinner, can’t compare to an omniscient, omnipotent, holy God. How can we make ourselves known to him, much less find a connection to him?
But God isn’t like that. Oh, he’s all-knowing and all-powerful and holy, but he’s not distant or detached from his creation. Though we find ourselves unable to connect, much less commune with God on our own, in his mercy, he connects with us. We just celebrated the incarnation of this eternal God at Christmas. God being born in time to a human mother. Emmanuel, God with us. Not God out there somewhere in the vast universe where we can’t find him, but God with us. A little baby God lying in a manger. Nursing at his mother’s breast, Joseph and Mary brought him to be circumcised. He celebrated the Passover with them. He became obedient to them. God became flesh, lived among us, died, rose again, ascended.
And this Jesus, who is fully God, remains fully human. When we look at his life, by all accounts, he seems fairly ordinary, kind of like us. And today in our gospel lesson, what would at this point probably have been a fairly ordinary scene: John the Baptist out in the wilderness baptizing every sort of person who came to him. Normal people. And who should show up but Jesus? John’s baptism, we are told, is a baptism of repentance. People came to John confessing their sins. So why was Jesus there? He had nothing to repent of. He had no need to be purified. He is the one of whom John said, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.”
But it is Jesus, not John, who stoops down. It is Jesus who comes to John and stoops down into the Jordan to be baptized by him, just like all the other ordinary people. That’s Jesus’ modus operandi, if you will. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He talks with ordinary people on the side of the road. He dies an ordinary criminal’s death with two ordinary criminals crucified next to him. He never shies away from his humanity. He doesn’t dismiss the ordinary and never dismisses an ordinary person. He comes as God in human form so that he may bring us humans back to God. Amen.
In his humanness, he reconnects us with the divine. Even though much of what he does seems to most people’s eyes to just be pretty ordinary, like this baptism in the Jordan. A baptism that Jesus certainly didn’t need for himself, but we needed his baptism. But it’s not all ordinariness, is it? His was a life without sin. None of us has any idea what that’s like—to be without sin? Sometimes we act that way, all high and mighty, perhaps better than those people out there who aren’t sitting among us here, but not Jesus. In humility, he goes to the Jordan to be baptized with John’s baptism of repentance, with no sin to confess.
I wonder sometimes what we might do if we had the power of Jesus, if we had the power of God. I suspect we’d probably use it to make a show of ourselves—not Jesus. He goes to the Jordan to be baptized. But this seemingly ordinary baptism, baptism that the people have witnessed for who knows how long, has an extraordinary conclusion. A conclusion in which we receive a glimpse of the true identity of this one who is being baptized—this not-so-ordinary man.
“This is God’s beloved Son,” the Father declares. This is the eternal Son of God in communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever, forever and ever. This ordinary baptism of repentance is transformed into something else. It’s something else because now Jesus comes baptizing with the Holy Spirit. Baptism is not some purification rite that we go through over and over again. It is a washing away of sin that we inherited from Adam and all the sins committed since. It is a regeneration, a renewal in which the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us.
The baptism is even more than that. It’s a connection—a connection with the God in whose name we are baptized. In Romans, St. Paul describes the connection that is made between God and us at our baptism. Something that looks from the outside to be rather ordinary, as we just sang in the hymn, has a profound spiritual effect. Our baptism unites us with Christ’s death. The death he died becomes our own. His death destroyed the power of sin—not Jesus’ sin, of course, but ours. That spiritual death that he died, the death that you and I should have endured on account of our unworthiness, that took place right here at your baptism. Not a violent act for you. Jesus took the violence of God’s wrath on himself.
And through baptism, we’re not only intimately connected to Jesus’ death, but St. Paul says to his resurrection as well: “…just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” Jesus was baptized. We’re baptized. Jesus died the death of a sinner and suffered the wrath of God, and we—well, we’re baptized. Jesus rose from the dead in glory. We will rise from the dead with our bodies transformed like his glorious body. That’s how we are connected to God. Our lives are intertwined with Christ’s through our baptism. He suffered because of who he was and what he taught, and so too may we. He died physically, and so too will we.
But that separation from God that he experienced when he bore the weight of the world’s sin on his shoulders, we will never experience that. That was dealt with here. That extraordinary death, we were carried through, through the waters of baptism. That water drowned our sin, and we were rescued from it.
The water in Noah’s day destroyed sin, and Noah and his family were brought through it. The water destroyed the evil and the vengeance of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea, and Israel was brought through it. Each time there’s a baptism here at St. Paul, we hear this beautiful prayer by Luther that ties all of these things together. Luther writes this:
“Almighty and eternal God, according to your strict judgments, you condemned the unbelieving world through the flood. Yet according to your great mercy, you preserved believing Noah and his family, eight souls in all. You drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh and all his hosts in the Red Sea. We pray that you would behold the baptized according to your boundless mercy and bless him with the true faith by the Holy Spirit that through this saving flood all sin in him which has been inherited from Adam and which he himself has committed since would be drowned and die. Grant that he be kept safe and secure in the holy ark of the Christian church, being separated from the multitude of unbelievers and serving your name at all times with a fervent spirit and a joyful hope, so that with all believers in your promise, he would be declared worthy of eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Ours is no ordinary God, to be sure. He is a God who creates with a word and who restores and brings to life with that same word. He comes as a man born to ordinary parents and yet dies an extraordinary death—a death to end all deaths—and rises to new life again. He is baptized in the Jordan to fulfill all righteousness, so that your seemingly ordinary baptism might connect you to him.
How can water do such great things? It’s not the water indeed that does them, but the word of God which is in and with the water, and faith which trusts that word of God in the water. For without the word of God, the water is ordinary water, and no baptism. But with the word of God, it is a baptism—that is, a gracious water of life, and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Spirit.
In the name of God, in whom you were baptized, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen.
