Water and Fire

Transcript

According to Luke, chapter three. The Gospel according to Luke, chapter three. And when you found that, go ahead and stand for the Gospel reading this morning.

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All right. Notice these words here as found in. And by the way, the reason we say the Gospel according to is because there's four Gospels, as you know. And so this one is according to Luke. Notice these words this morning as the people.

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And we're going to jump around a little bit. So it's Luke 3, 15, 17, and then 21 and 22. Notice these words. This is the word of God. As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, I baptize you with water.

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But one who is more powerful than I is coming. I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire his winnowing fork in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire drop down to 21. Now, when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.

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And a voice came from heaven. You are my son, the beloved with you. I am well pleased. Lord, thank you for this powerful reading of your Word. We pray now that the Holy Spirit, who inspired Luke to.

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To write and who was present at your baptism in bodily form as a dove, would descend upon us here in this place to rest upon us. We pray in your name. Amen.

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Do you know what the word of the year was for 2024? Because I get a Word of the Day from Merriam Webster. Does anybody else get that? Maybe a show of hands? No?

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Okay. Well. Yeah. Nerd alert, Right? I don't mean to be a nerd.

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I just. I find words fascinating, okay? And, in fact, Jessica just. We were singing along the song, you know, wert. She said, wert.

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A word. You know, I said. Yeah. It's an old English word. W E, R, T.

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We just sang it, right? And. And so she looked it up because she doesn't trust me still. And it's archaic, right? Which means it's old.

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And just like I said, old English. I try not to make things up. If I don't know them, I'll tell you. But if I do. Hey, there you go.

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And so I'm kind of into words, and so I get a word of the day Well, I got an email at the end of the year. It said, look, here's the word of the year, the whole year summarized with this word. And they had a metric for how they did this, but we won't go into that. And it's this polarization. Polarization.

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That's what the word of the year was. And here's what it said. It said in a funny kind of way, here, notice it says polarization. It's an idea that people on both sides of the political spectrum happen to agree on.

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Right. Polarization. They both agree that this. Okay, all right. So to polarize, if you don't know, is to divide, to divide into two sharply distinct opposites.

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Sound familiar? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of our world is like that, isn't it? A lot of our problems are because of polarization. So we can all kind of get on board again and agree with this.

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Maybe perhaps an assessment not only of 2024, but maybe of our life in general. There's a lot of polarization in our life. And the worst kind of polarization, of course, is that that divides us from God. And thankfully, because of our text today, Jesus baptism shows us that now the heavens have been opened and there is now a way to be one with God. There is a way to be not divided and polarized from God, but in unity with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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This, dear friends, is ultimate unity. It's one thing for us to be in agreement. It's another thing to be in agreement with God about the self and about others. That is to say, trusting and loving God and then turning around and loving others for the sake of God. This is why Ephesians Paul will say in Ephesians 4, 5, 6, he says, there is one Lord.

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You remember this. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. Now, that deserves a whole sermon for itself right there. Those two verses, we're not going down that rabbit hole, though, okay? Because that one's so deep, it never ends.

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Instead, today we want to look at Jesus baptism this first Sunday after the epiphany. Epiphany, the revealing of God, sometimes called the theophany of God, as what is revealed here is not just Jesus, but rather also the Father and the Spirit are present. So it is a theophany of the Holy Trinity, the Christian God, the one and only God, God of the universe, and hopefully God of your universe.

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Now. So let's begin just with maybe asking, what is baptism? And of course, you Talk about polarization, huh? Sometimes baptism has polarized Christians, but unnecessarily. For, again, let's return to Ephesians.

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There's one baptism, okay? One baptism. And. And this is Christian baptism. And of course, baptism just in Greek, simply means to submerge or completely submerge or to even has the idea of drowning, okay?

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And this is why when we do sprinkle or pour as also our options for baptism, we do it over the head to simulate and to symbolize drowning. I never have told you this before, but when I baptize an infant or a baby, that's exactly what I try to emulate, is a sort of drowning. I do it above their face. Now, granted, hopefully nobody's listening and think this is masochistic kind of behavior or some sort of psychopath. No, no.

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We're just simply letting the water fall over the face. Nobody's gonna drown. Okay? Have you ever seen how the Orthodox do it? They get the baby naked and they dip the baby three different times into the water.

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The whole baby? The whole child. Okay, look it up on YouTube. Not right now. Not right now, like Jessica, but.

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Right. You know, don't use your phone right now, okay? But instead, look it up later. Orthodox baptism, it's the whole baby underwater. Okay?

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We're not doing that here, but instead, we're. We pour it over. And what does the baby do? They do like this, right? They're surprised.

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You know, it's almost like you're drowning, which is kind of the point of submerging in the waters. You go down into the waters. This is what baptismo has to do with submerged under the water. And as you know, we're not water creatures by nature, so that if we're under the water, we're going to die, which is why we then have to come up out of the waters. Right.

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Or stop waterboarding the children. Right. Just kidding. There's no waterboarding here. Instead, we stop the pouring and the child, and then they.

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Like me, normally, most of them aren't crying. Have you noticed that most of the time they don't cry. We get the picture before they do. Even if they do so, they are surprised, however, and we should be surprised. Baptism is a going down and then a rising up.

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It is a going down to death and then a resurrection of life. This is the symbolism, but also the physical reality of a human being underwater. Okay. And then coming back up into new life. And, of course, this symbol is all over the place in our movies and our books.

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You know how it works? The storm Comes, and then the new day begins. Right, and we see this across religions as well. Water is often used as a movement into something new. And this is across the board.

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So the symbolism is strong, not only in nature, but in the scriptures, because you'll remember that early on, there's a baptism of the entire world, isn't there? Which is the flood. The waters cover and death comes, and then new life. You also then move on maybe to another one, which is the Red Sea, right, where they've been in slavery to Egypt. And now because of God delivering them, what happens?

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They pass through the waters of the Red Sea into what? New life, a new relationship with God. They're headed to the promised land. And then maybe think even further down the line of when the priests were carrying the Ark of the Covenant out of the wilderness now into where? The promised land.

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And they come to the Jordan, and it dries up, and they cross on dry ground, passing again through the waters of baptism. And then, of course, now we come to Jesus and John the Baptist, who our scripture today says, everyone was sort of filled with this expectation. They knew something was up here. Is now an undeniable prophet in the wilderness, much like Elijah, and he's the new Elijah, and he is speaking the word of God, and people are coming out into the wilderness to join him for the forgiveness of sins. And then Jesus comes, which should shock the socks off of us, shouldn't it?

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We just kind of. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's cool. Jesus shows up. But these are who was coming out to see John. Let's just put it this way.

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Sinners, sinners. Why is Jesus out here then? Well, John's got the same question we have, doesn't he? He says, no, no, Lord. No, my Lord.

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You know, you should be baptizing me, not the other way around. You are the sinless one. And yet Jesus comes to identify with sinners.

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And it's fascinating that the place he chooses to do it is in the Jordan River. Now, you can look this up also later if you don't believe me, because sometimes that happens.

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But the Jordan Valley is the lowest place on the face of the earth where a human can stand. In other words, if you want to go below sea level, you can go to Death Valley. We saw it. You're below sea level at Death Valley and a couple other places, but here you're way below sea level. In fact, it's the lowest place that a human can stand on the face of the earth and still be standing on ground, so to speak.

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And the Jordan then leads into what? The Dead Sea? Because we're talking about this valley is dead. Because it's mainly minerals, where hardly anything lives in that thing, except for at the microbial level. Jesus chooses to go down into the waters of the lowest place on the face of the earth.

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Do you get the symbolism here? He comes all the way down to save us, all the way down. And this is why we proclaim out of our mouths, and we just did moments ago, that he even goes further than that, because he doesn't stop with on the earth. He descends to the dead itself and then rises again. Baptism, right?

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He goes down and then he comes up the catabasis and anabasis in theology, or the descent of the Son and the ascent of the Son. He comes all the way down from heaven to become, as we've said before, a zygote, and then is gestated in Mary. To be born of Mary, to be a little baby and then toddler and then boy and then teenager. I got some of those. And then young adult.

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And then he dies and goes to the place where all sinners go. He takes the punishment of death. Him, the sinless one, the one that does not have Adam's curse upon him. Think about that. He takes death upon himself and he chooses to die.

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His life is not taken from him. That's why we say he gave up his life. Remember? You know, you hear it in the liturgy every time we do communion. You heard it Christmas Eve and last week.

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It's the same thing. He gave up his life on the night that he gave himself up. No one took his life. He gave it up to identify with us sinners who are under the curse, who are condemned to die. He went all the way down.

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And this is why, for us Christians, baptism is the symbol for all of us, the symbol of new life, new life in Christ. New life. Because it's the new birth that we're talking about. Not those just born of the flesh of Adam, but born of the Spirit, born again.

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It's funny to see that in all stories that mean something to us, they have some sort of thread that we can pull on that will lead to God's story. It's true. Anything that makes you cry in a movie is going to ultimately lead you back to, you know, you see some heroic event and, you know, like, I get tore up in war movies, you know, and I'm just. I'm over there, eyes filled, right? Why?

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Because there's one who did give up his life for us. Why does that feature in all of our Love stories. It's not selfishness that we. APPLAUSE and oh man, I'm just so broke up that that guy's just so self serving. I mean, how ridiculous, right?

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No, no, it's the person who lives their life for something greater than themselves that we say, wow, wow, look at that. That means something, their life means. Why? Because it's connected to the one who gave up his life for us, the innocent one who came all the way down for us and for our salvation, not just for the forgiveness of sins.

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Think about it. A lot of people in what we call kind of American evangelicalism, maybe the dominant sort of summarizable version of Christianity is that Christ died to forgive us of our sins. But that is only part of the equation because God had already dealt with the forgiveness of sins in the Old Testament, hadn't he? Were people not forgiven in the Old Testament of their sins? God had a way to forgive people in the Old Testament and it was through the sacrificial system.

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You remember, they would make sacrifices and their sin was symbolically placed on this innocent animal and taken away. Alright, this is why, when John identifies Jesus in the Gospel of John, what does he say? What does he say? Behold the Lamb of God who what? Takes away the sin of the world.

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You see, he didn't just come for the forgiveness of sins, but to take away sin and to destroy the works of the devil. Pretty strong. But that was his mission. That's what he accomplished. What are you saying, Pastor?

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I'm saying this. He came to forgive us so he could draw us in, into the divine nature.

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This is what Peter is going to say, that we become partakers, participants of the divine nature of God.

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And that's why a story like Pinocchio can point us to what it looks like for us to be made new. We too are not living, the scripture says, dead in our trespasses, wooden, unable to enjoy the life of a real boy. And what he comes to do when he gives us his Holy Spirit is to make us and to transform us into something new.

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We become a real boy, a real human, so to speak, moving from being wooden and dead to something living with new life. That's what baptism shows. And of course, there's so much more. We could talk for days about the other. This is not a full definition of baptism, but pointing you in the direction of what baptism is.

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And it's interesting that John being a prophet, of course, out in the wilderness, that's normal. But John is also a priest. Did you ever catch that in the readings of Scripture, he's a priest. Because remember, priests, being a priest in the Old Testament was a family business. In other words, it was passed down in the family.

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If you were part of the family of Aaron or of Levi, you were going to be of the priestly lineage. And you remember, Zachariah is a priest. Yes. And Elizabeth is of a priestly line as well. And so John is a priest.

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Why is he out in the wilderness? Well, there's maybe a few reasons, but. But one is this. He's drawing us outside of the city, outside of the temple that will soon be destroyed by the way, to the true dwelling of God. Because when Jesus shows up, he says, oh, guys, right here, this one is greater.

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He's the greater prophet, he's the greater priest, the Lamb of God, and he's the king of kings, thus fulfilling all the offices of the Old Testament.

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And so here's Jesus coming to John, and the people are expecting, who's the Messiah here? And they were thinking John. But John is very clear, no, I'm not even worthy to untie the thong of his sandal, which is something in the ancient world, in the first century world that was lower than a slave would do. Lower. So he's saying, listen, this is not even.

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I'm not even comparable to the one who's coming. There's a quantifiable difference between he and I. So much so that I'm not worthy at all to even be on a playing field with him. And John specifically says, look, I just baptize you with water, okay, for the forgiveness of sins. But he is coming, and what he will baptize you with is the Holy Spirit and fire.

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And of course, we don't have time to do a rendition throughout the. And track through the Old Testament all the times that Holy Spirit and fire are together. But think of Mount Sinai for one. Think of the burning bush, where all of a sudden the bush is burning but not burning up, because the fuel for that fire is not of this world.

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Think of the three Hebrew boys, right? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. You remember them tossed in the fire. But that fire was no regular fire, for they were not burned up, but came out and were even joined by a fourth, the Son of God, and came out not even smelling like smoke. In other words, this fire is not of this world, it is of God.

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And the Holy Spirit has been called the flame of love or the flame of God, so that when the Father loves the Son, he does it through through the Holy Spirit, who is the Love between the Father and the Son.

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So that when God places His love in us, he's not placing some fourth thing in us, but he places in us his very spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Holy fire of God. Not to destroy, but to purify, to fulfill the desires of our heart. These lower desires that we get caught on. Drink, food, sex, etc. These are not to be pursued over and above the higher desires.

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If you stay down there into those baser desires they only temporarily fulfill. But this flame, this fire that burns, this desire. And desire oftentimes is pictured as a flame, isn't it? Remember Cupid? And the fire that burns breaks out this fire.

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This fire comes to fulfill all desires and correct and. And straighten our path, straighten our very lives, to sanctify us.

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So the baptism of John and of Jesus. Quite different. Quite different here. The baptism of John you can come to and you can submit yourself to, and it is done for you by another, a human. Just like our baptism, just like when taking communion.

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But the Holy Spirit being given to you in your heart, that is something only God can do. You cannot demand it of God. You can only trust and submit yourself to Him. Faith. And wait for him to put his holy flame in you.

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Have you been born again? Do you know? That flame that burns within, that satisfies all the other desires, for he is our true desire. That's why St. Augustine famously says, our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.

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How many lives have been destroyed? How many of us have destroyed our lives or relationships? Or you name it, because we were restless. We were restless. And who we're looking for can only be given by God.

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And thankfully, he does give us His Holy Spirit when we confess our sins. He is faithful and just. Notice this. To forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That's what sanctification is, a cleansing of all.

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And look, there's some things in us that they don't even come out until we're squeezed, you know, until we're bumped. And then we. Whoa. I didn't even know I had that in me. And we can try then to hide it.

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Oh, I got that under control. No, no, no. It's not about controlling sin or managing sin. He wants to take it away. He wants to cleanse us.

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He wants to cleanse that attitude. He wants to cleanse that unforgiveness. He wants to cleanse that bitterness.

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He wants to cleanse that addiction. And he can. That's the good news. He can. Don't stop Fighting.

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Don't stop asking. Don't we give up way too easy. All right, well, I'll pray for that one time.

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If it's worth fighting for, it's worth fighting for your whole life.

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But he can do it and he will do it. He's going to take care of the sin problem. We gotta get started right now. And he can do that by his Holy Spirit as he baptizes submerges. Think about it.

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Us in the Holy Spirit, that means the death of us. That's why John the Baptist again can say it best for all of us. I must decrease so that he increase. And the beauty here is that as I decrease, I become more of what I truly was meant to be. Isn't that interesting?

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It's just like love. You give love away and more love grows. Your heart gets bigger, not smaller, not empty. It's the more you give, the more there is to give. What a divine economy.

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And that is the economy of God. For he is self giving love. That's who he is. It's the way we describe his nature as holy love agape.

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All right, so I got a little rapid fire benefits of Jesus baptism that I just want to run through, okay? Now the best way to keep me going is just to say Amen. Because that means like, oh yeah, I get it, I get it. You can go on. Does anybody want to try?

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Anybody want to try to say Amen? You know, where do you have to go? You know? Okay, here we go. You ready?

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Jesus baptism does serve. I've got seven things here, okay? Number one, it affirms John's ministry. It affirms John's ministry, this ministry, that he is the forerunner, the culmination drawing all of what the prophets have said, all of what the priests were pointing to. And Jesus comes to John so that John can bear witness.

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And you know what? We also then are called to bear witness when we receive the Holy Spirit, when we've been born again, when we've been forgiven of our sins. And that's no small matter, dear friends. I mean, when you're forgiven of your sins, God chooses not to remember. This is the God who knows everything.

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And yet, if you were to ask him, hey, you know what I did back there in 2000? No, I don't. What are you talking about?

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You know how hard that is for us humans? Impossible. But with God, all things are possible. And he tells us. I don't remember it.

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I don't remember it. Man. If you don't say amen right there, I don't know where to put an amen. Because every one of us is a sinner in need of his grace, in need of his forgiveness. And for those who have received that forgiveness, thanks be to God.

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But then we're called to give it, aren't we? We're called to forgive others. And in fact, Jesus ties it to our forgiveness. In other words, if you don't forgive, I won't forgive you.

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Tall order. But he affirms John's ministry and thus the forgiveness of sins and the whole culmination of everything drawing to the true prophet, priest and king. Secondly, in the baptism of Jesus, the whole Trinity is revealed, all three persons, as clear as day. There's no way around this text. And this is why Christians are Trinitarians, whereas Jews or Muslims are not and never will be unless they convert.

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And then they wouldn't be a newer. You see, the conversion to Christianity demands the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so that when Jesus is baptized by John, he comes up out of the waters of the Jordan. Okay. And as he's praying, Luke says, interesting. The Father speaks from heaven.

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His voice direct. Some thought it was thunder. Direct his voice. This is. You are my son, the beloved.

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With you I am well pleased. This is God's Son incarnated in a human body. God and man. And then the Spirit descends in bodily form. Spirit, not material, in bodily form.

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Like a dove. And a dove takes us right back, doesn't it? To the flood. Yes, you remember where the dove is sent out and comes back with what? New life.

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New life. In other words, there's peace. That's why that. You know, that's why even to this day, right. A dove with a little olive branch in the still represents peace.

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Why no more polarization? Unity with God through the forgiveness of sins. Unity.

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Number three. Jesus baptism. In Jesus baptism, he identifies with sinners. And we've already talked about that. Descending into the lowest place on earth for us and for our salvation.

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Number four, Jesus Baptism prefigures his death. Jackson, are you back there? Do you have that picture of the icon of the baptism of the Lord? If you've never looked at. Remember, the icons are.

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We don't worship icons, but icons were used in the early church and later as teaching tools because people were vision. Most people didn't know how to read in the ancient world. A lot of people today in our world don't know how to read, actually. And so these visual aids were teaching us things. And so you can see here in this visual aid, a lot of the prefiguring of his death.

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It actually looks like a tomb that he's going down into here. And there's a lot about this painting that I'd love to go into, but a few notes real fast, and I'm no art expert, okay? But notice that Jesus is almost as big as the Jordan, because it's not really him going down into the Jordan and being baptized as much as him baptizing the whole world. That is to say, the water doesn't sanctify Christ, but Christ, the water, and thus all of creation for all of us. The water has a sanctifying effect, a cleansing effect.

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But for him, he cleanses the dirty waters of the Jordan. And they are dirty, by the way. And they were. You remember Naaman from the Old Testament? He didn't want to go this nasty river.

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You remember, he was told, you can be free of leprosy. Leprosy represents sin. We're all leprous. He says, I don't want. Not in this dirty water here in the.

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I've got clear waters back home. And his servant said, sir, would you just please do what the prophet said? So he dips in this nasty water and he comes up clean. See, that's the way it works for us, but it works the opposite way for Christ. He cleanses all things that he touches, not vice versa.

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Also, you have John the Baptist here on my left here, who's bowed down in worship toward the Lord and baptizing Jesus. And of course, you can see the ax, can't you? Just left of him laid at the root of the tree, you see, reminding us of that. And then you have the Jordan on the left down there, and the Sea of Galilee on the right, who are fleeing, because the psalmist says even the waters flee from him as he's baptized. They are nervous, and there's no more chaos but order when the orderer comes.

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And then, of course, the angels on the right, and so on and so forth. Okay, we'll move on. You can leave that picture up if you want, Jackson. But so he. He prefigures his own death, which gives us the ultimate meaning of baptism.

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And so when we remember our baptism, we remember our death to the old self and our new life in Christ. We reaffirm that number five. He entered the waters to sanctify water, and it's still sanctified to this day. So that when. When we ask the Lord to sanctify it, his very body sanctified it, and his body sanctifies the whole human growth from.

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From conception, all the way to death. He sanctifies the whole thing by his very life. This is why human life is sacred. Number six. He fulfilled all the Old Testament types.

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We talked about that. And then finally, number seven. He opened heaven to a world separated from God through sin. No more polarization. And so are you polarized from God Today?

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It happens. It sneaks in. There's distance. There's a divide. There's opposites.

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There's things within us that are opposite of God, contrary to his design.

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If so, today be reconciled to God. He desires not anyone should perish. Not one. That includes me. That includes you.

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Today, be reconciled. Brought into unity with God by His Holy Spirit. Jesus comes, yes, to forgive us of our sins, but to send us His Holy Spirit, another that lives within us. So that we're never alone. We're never alone.

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God with us. God above us. The Father and God in us. The Holy Spirit.

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And he also attacks on this last thing. Holy Spirit and fire. Do you have that fire burning? The fire of life, life itself. The fire of godliness, the fire of holiness, the flame of love.

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Is that flame in you, brothers and sisters? If that flame has grown cold, it's not God's doing. Repent today and be reconciled to him and receive His Holy Spirit. Be baptized, submerged, completely submerged. Entirely sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God.

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In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. May it be so. Amen.

Total Duration 00:38:50