{"id":6726,"date":"2022-01-10T15:53:57","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T14:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theologie.whp.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/?p=6726"},"modified":"2022-01-10T15:53:57","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T14:53:57","slug":"romans-61-11-luke-315-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/romans-61-11-luke-315-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Romans 6:1-11 \/ Luke 3:15-22"},"content":{"rendered":"

9th<\/sup> SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, 2021 | A Sermon Based on Romans 6:1-11 and Luke 3:15-22 | by Paula Murray |<\/h3>\n

When it comes to daily life, sometimes it seems like we\u2019re going nowhere on Interstate 95 for 24 hours with thousands of other travelers hoping not to starve to death before the ice melts, or we\u2019re zipping along at 95 miles an hour on California\u2019s 405 praying fervently that no one suddenly hits the brakes.\u00a0 Christmas is the holiday 405; Epiphany is more of a going nowhere slowly experience.\u00a0 I hear now the sound and fury of pastors and lay folk who love the season of light that is Epiphany, and that is all well and good for you who understand the season and its purpose.\u00a0 That is not the case for a lot of people whose sense of the season is that time between the over the top glories of Christmas and the purplish austerities of Lent.<\/p>\n

So, let us begin at the beginning, so to speak, meaning the whys and wherefores of the Church year.\u00a0 Or, to put it more simply, why bother?\u00a0 After all, those evangelical and Pentecostal churches don\u2019t do the Church year so why should we?\u00a0 Well, guess what, evangelical and Pentecostal churches and others like them with informal liturgies do indeed \u201cdo\u201d the Church year; they just do a more attenuated version of it, focusing on the birth of Christ and His death and resurrection.\u00a0 The Church year is not some sort of waste your time falderol that bored churchmen thought up over time.\u00a0 Literally, we follow the Church year to follow Christ.\u00a0 Believers are disciples of Jesus Christ, meaning we are students and followers of He who is the incarnate Son of God.\u00a0 We \u201cdo\u201d the Church year to follow Jesus, because we cannot literally follow in His footsteps like the original disciples did. We instead follow Him through His Word from infancy to ascension so that His nature and His work on our behalf and the Father\u2019s are revealed to us.<\/p>\n

The word epiphany in fact means revelation or manifestation.\u00a0 The day of Epiphany and the season of Epiphany together constitute one long string of revelations, each telling us more and more about Jesus and the events of His life, both earthly and heavenly, all of which lead to our salvation and the creation\u2019s redemption.\u00a0 What God is doing for us is laid out for us to see, not only that we might know and discern the will of God but also that we might ourselves participate in the Light that is Christ Jesus.<\/p>\n

Light is the instrument by which we are led through the mysteries of God\u2019s work in His Son.\u00a0 The light radiating from the angelic hosts, the light of the star that led the Wise Men to the small country hosting the holy Child, the Light Himself, sent into the sin-stained darkness of the world, all of this reveals to us what God is about, and why He is about it.<\/p>\n

We missed the first of these light-soaked revelations, Epiphany Day itself, which is on January 6.\u00a0 This is not a day the observance of which really transfers well to the next available Sunday.\u00a0 That\u2019s clearer in other lands, where the day of Epiphany has always been celebrated with enthusiasm and joy.\u00a0 In those other lands, Epiphany is often called Three Kings Day, for Scripture\u2019s telling of the journey of the kings or magi or wise men, whatever their true number, to find the long prophesied infant King.\u00a0 Under the light of the singular star that shone over Jesus\u2019 crib in Bethlehem, they journeyed far and long from what is now Iran so that they might worship the child king and savior, and leave their some<\/p>\n

In latter days faithful men and women scanned the quadrants of the skies for information about that singular star that we might better understand the revelations of Epiphany.\u00a0 Others, instead, spent their efforts mining the biblical texts and other supporting witnesses for what the star meant.\u00a0 These days, some academics are all about denying the existence of such a singular beacon and subverting what it teaches us.\u00a0 But we are not world-weary academics or cultured despisers of Christianity.\u00a0 So, we believe that star shone above a lowly stable in a small town in a country that garnered little to no respect from the citizens of large and wealthy cities and nation.\u00a0 We believe it, and we want to know what the light of that singular star reveals about our Redeemer and we want to walk as disciples of Jesus Christ the path lit by that singular star.<\/p>\n

We begin our walk and our lessons today with the story of the Baptism of Jesus.\u00a0 The holy Child has grown up, matured in years and wisdom and faith as the last lines of last week\u2019s Gospel reading asserted would happen, and now His ministry begins.\u00a0 It begins for Jesus as it begins for us, with Baptism.\u00a0 Not that Jesus, the Incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity requires baptism for His salvation.\u00a0 Having never sinned there is nothing for His heavenly Father to forgive Him, and as God the Father claims Jesus as His beloved Son in Whom He is well pleased, we know that, having come from the Father, Jesus will return to the Father when His earthly role in our salvation is complete.\u00a0 So, Jesus\u2019 Baptism in the Jordon River did nothing for Jesus.\u00a0 He had no need to signify any regret for His sin nor any need for mercy from God or from humanity.\u00a0 But it did marvelous, wondrous, gracious things for us, who are sinners and desperate with it.<\/p>\n

For His Baptism, in wondrous fashion, encompasses our own, for sinners such as ourselves, who are baptized generations later, are gathered by way of Word washed water and joined with Jesus in His death and resurrection.\u00a0 Remembering that Jesus was crucified, that might seem an unpleasant experience.\u00a0 But what it means that we whose lives are bounded by death are freed from death\u2019s dark chains by Christ\u2019s own marvelous Light.\u00a0 Listen to this longish quote from St. Paul in today\u2019s Epistle reading from Romans 6.\u00a0 \u201cFor if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. 6<\/sup>We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7<\/sup>For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8<\/sup>Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. 9<\/sup>We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. 10<\/sup>For the death He died He died to sin, once for all, but the life He lives He lives to God. 11<\/sup>So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is really clear for St. Paul, whose love of long imbedded phrases makes him a bit difficult to read sometimes.\u00a0 It is basically this, united with Jesus in His death, we have died to sin, for the dead do not sin.\u00a0 But, we are also united to Jesus in the resurrection that followed His death, meaning we, too, are alive to God in Christ Jesus.\u00a0 Note that Paul puts Christ before Jesus\u2019 given name.\u00a0 He does that to emphasize what Jesus does for us.\u00a0 He is our Christ, and Christ is the Greek version \u00a0no longer puts an end to us.<\/p>\n

In fact, Paul says from the beginning that baptism is for us a new beginning, \u201cfor just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.\u201d\u00a0 Even now, long we hope before death fails in claiming us, we may live daily in the light of that singular star that shone over Jesus\u2019 crib, experiencing in the everyday events of life the grace of God poured out upon us.\u00a0 And then, share that grace with others.\u00a0 Remember, the Prayer of the Day says this of us, that we be sent out as agents of grace in God\u2019s world.\u00a0 Grace is not merely God\u2019s gift to us, but through us, God\u2019s gift to His creation.\u00a0 Think yourself small, unimportant, a cog in some sort of cosmic machine? Oh no, you are, as are all the baptized, a means by which Christ illuminates His presence in God\u2019s creation.\u00a0 If Christ be our Light, then we are His flashlight, shining a path to hope for those still trapped in darkness, the despairing, the needy, the lonely, the anxious.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Paula Murray<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

9th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, 2021 | A Sermon Based on Romans 6:1-11 and Luke 3:15-22 | by Paula Murray | When it comes to daily life, sometimes it seems like we\u2019re going nowhere on Interstate 95 for 24 hours with thousands of other travelers hoping not to starve to death before the ice melts, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,41,157,108,110,824,844,3,178,109],"tags":[],"beitragende":[],"predigtform":[],"predigtreihe":[],"bibelstelle":[],"class_list":["post-6726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lukas","category-roemer","category-beitragende","category-current","category-engl","category-kapitel-03-chapter-03-lukas","category-kapitel-06-chapter-06-roemer","category-nt","category-paula-murray","category-predigten"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6727,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6726\/revisions\/6727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6726"},{"taxonomy":"beitragende","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/beitragende?post=6726"},{"taxonomy":"predigtform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtform?post=6726"},{"taxonomy":"predigtreihe","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/predigtreihe?post=6726"},{"taxonomy":"bibelstelle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theologie.uzh.ch\/apps\/gpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bibelstelle?post=6726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}