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The Baptism of Our Lord, 01/13/2019
Sermon on Luke 3:15-17.21-22, by Evan McClanahan
Isaiah 43:1-7, Psalm 29, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
This week I heard of an attorney in California who walked over 700 miles to make a point: he was certain that at least a dozen people were currently imprisoned even though they were 100% innocent. This lawyer, and a team of other lawyers, interns and volunteers, had poured through hundreds of claims of false imprisonment and had settled on the best cases for wrongful conviction. Between junk science, woeful representation, and mistaken witnesses, these 12 people were not offered their constitutional protections and ended up in jail even though they were innocent.
Now, I might as well be the poster child for “Law and Order”. Everything about me sides with the law, tradition, doing the right thing, living the right way, making the right decisions, etc. I have always held to the notion that if you do the right thing, you won’t find yourself in precarious or impossible situations, especially legal situations. So I have always been skeptical of the prisoner’s claims of their innocence. After all, as The Shawshank Redemption prisoners attest, “Everyone in prison is innocent. Just ask the prisoners.”
Still, there is no denying that, for a variety of reasons, innocent people find themselves in jail. And once they are “in the system”, it is very hard to get out. Their only hope is that someone else is found guilty of the same crime or they have a lawyer who will burn the midnight oil working on their case. The lawyer who walked 700 miles from Los Angeles to Sacramento to ask the governor for pardons for a dozen prisoners is one such lawyer.
This man’s dedication is, at the very least, admirable. I am quite certain that I would not agree with this lawyer on much of anything else, politically speaking. But I appreciate solidarity when I see it. I appreciate it when people put their money where their mouth is. I appreciate it when one who doesn’t have to help others freely chooses to condescend to work on behalf of those who need a voice. It is that kind of dedication, that kind of solidarity with other men and women that makes its way into history books and begins movements.
And it is that kind of solidarity we see at the baptism of Jesus. What we see in the baptism of Jesus is God in the form of a man doing what only guilty men do. That is to say, John’s baptism was explicitly a baptism of repentance. John’s preaching had kindled a fire throughout Israel, calling men and women to abandon their wicked ways and to turn their lives back to God. John called on Israel to have a change of mind and a change of heart and thousands responded.
But one man responded who did not need to. Just ask John, who said, ““I baptize you with water; 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.” John here does two things. First, he clearly marks Jesus as one who absolutely surpasses all men in honor. John would not even feel worthy to be the servant or slave of Jesus, as even slaves were forbidden to untie the sandals of their masters. And second, John notes that the baptism of Jesus is a different baptism. The baptisms that are done by the disciples of Jesus and the church for the next centuries are not “merely” baptisms of repentance. They are baptisms of promise.
For Jesus offers us something fundamentally different than what John can offer, or indeed, what any preacher can offer. Only Jesus, because he is God in the flesh, can offer for us true solidarity. Only Jesus, can offer us a true exchange. John or any preacher can offer the call to repentance. John or any preacher can make an announcement about what is needed. And there still remains the need for preachers to call on men and women to repent! There is a certain power in those spoken words.
But only Jesus can offer us a promise upon repentance. Because in Jesus we have true solidarity. Like the lawyer who was willing to suffer for his client, so is God willing to suffer with and for His creation. Jesus undergoes a humiliating baptism, wherein he admits to all who would see him that he is a sinner. Not in deed, of course, but in nature. For when God became flesh, he took on sinful flesh with all of its death, decease, decay and even temptation. That shouldn’t be humiliating for us because it is simply the truth. But it would be humiliating for the Son of God, who had never wronged a soul.
That is why John objects to Jesus being baptized. He knows that Jesus is different from all of the guilty parties that need John’s baptism. But Jesus, in a sign of solidarity with his people, his brothers and sisters, goes to the Jordan and becomes one of us.
And of course, this was not the only one way in which Jesus lived in solidarity with us. Indeed, his entire life was one of solidarity with us! He was born as we were. He labored as we do. He wept and had compassion for others as we do. He suffered and felt pain as we do. And he died as we do.
But his baptism is especially significant because it highlights the explicit way Jesus embraced his nature as a sinner, as one who would receive a baptism of repentance, even though he had no actual sins from which to repent.
That is why the baptism of the Church holds a promise that the baptism of John did not and could not. For being baptized into the Triune name of God is entering the family of God and receiving the work of Christ on your behalf. Baptism is not a promise we make to God. It is a promise that God makes to us, and it is a promise you can absolutely trust because Jesus was both God and man. Jesus could earn and did earn for you what you cannot and could not earn for yourself: peace with God. No one else can offer that because no one else has ever been God in human form who submitted himself not only to a sinner’s baptism, but to death on a cross as well.
I would agree with some critics of infant baptism if I did not fundamentally understand our baptism as the reception of a promise from God. Being baptized as an adult doesn’t guarantee that the person baptized won’t fall way from the faith and there is no power in a work of our own anyway. Our baptism must be a work of God in our life that has merits because of who Christ is and what he has done and because, as Paul writes in Romans 6, we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection.
In the end, the call goes out to all men and women: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!” And upon being baptized, trust in your baptism. For in it, you will find God in the flesh who has lived an entire life in solidarity with you. Amen.