Sermons

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Washed Out
January 12, 2003
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
4th in a sermon series on the Gospel of Matthew
Matthew 3:13-17

This morning…we plunge back into the gospel of Matthew, where we will stay most of next 6 months. Over Advent, we read the “infancy narratives” of Jesus’ birth out of Matthew. This morning’s passage comes just after the recounting of the ministry of John the Baptist, who attracted the people of Judea to come for a “baptism of repentance.”

The line of people stretched down the hill to the banks of the muddy river. One by one the people stepped into the murky water, and voiced their repentance for how they had lived…confessing their sins, they longed to be clean. They wanted it bad enough, I guess, that they would put up with an eccentric traveling preacher, John, who smelled bad and roared his displeasure at the insincere. One by one, their toes squished through the mud on the river’s edge and they stood in water until the Baptist pushed them under…and the Jordan washed over them, one by one.

Was anything different when they came out of the water? They were soaking wet, to be sure…robes, hair, beards (on the men). Were they different people? They felt bad about how they had lived: acted, spoken, thought. They were repentant. John’s was a baptism of repentance. Were they forgiven? Or just sorry? How did they know?

One by one the line of people moved forward until what were probably two second-cousins stood looking at each other, the Baptist and Jesus. And the feistiness and arrogance drained out of John, and he said “No! No, this is all backwards…I am the one who needs to be washed clean, not you.”

Why DID Jesus come, after all? The divine child is a man now, ready to begin his public ministry. He is a man, the book of Hebrews says “who was tested in every way as we are…but without sin.” Why, then, did he come on this day to the river, if there was no need for him to repent, no “sin which clings so closely,” as it does to us? Wouldn’t that be like taking a newly washed car back through the car wash? Why HAD he come?

“It’s okay,” he says. “Let it go ahead and happen this way now. It needs to start like this.” And so John become the first in a long line of preachers with a healthy inferiority complex: “I’m not worthy to baptize you…I’m just like all these others.” And Jesus might as well have smiled and said, “You’re right.”

Jesus. The Christ. God’s Messiah. The Long-Awaited One, the Savior, the Holy One of Israel finally arrives, reaches manhood, and begins his ministry by…what? An act of power? No. A healing? No. An incredible sermon? No. Confronting the hypocrisy of the establishment? No. Threatening the Roman oppressors? NO. By being the next one with mud squishing through his toes, ready to get washed over. Jesus starts his ministry, Dale Bruner says, by “standing in a river with a bunch of sinners.” It’s not the last time that Jesus will surprise people by coming in submission and humility. Not the last time he will experience the earthiness of human life. Nor the last time he will consent to do what rightfully should fall to others.

Sometimes God has a funny way of doing things.

Do you realize…these are the very first words out of Jesus’ mouth in the whole gospel of Matthew? “Let it be so for now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Why DID Jesus come to the river if he didn’t need to repent? Out of utter humility, certainly. In obedience, no doubt. And maybe, if we agree with Martin Luther, it was “as if Christ wanted to say, “although I am not myself a sinner, yet nevertheless I now bring with me the sin of the whole world…so that I am…the greatest sinner of the whole world.” It’s not the last time Jesus will bear the loads that belong to others on himself. “…it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Maybe real righteousness, right-standing before God, has to do with more than just our own behavior…maybe it means I take on responsibility for those around me as well.

Matt Friedeman lives in Jackson, Mississippi, and is involved in work in the city there. In August of 2000, he wrote this story: “Several months ago I was on a TV show to discuss with other panel members recent problems plaguing the Jackson MS community. The city council was in disarray because the council president and another councilman were headed off to jail. The council president was caught making shady deals with a strip club in relation to a rezoning ordinance. The panel moderator looked at me and asked, “Matt, whose fault is all of this?”

Suddenly I became agitated. I prepared to tell her in dramatic on-air fashion that we are a nation of laws and that the council president trampled on those laws. If we were looking to place blame, there was only one place to put it -- smack dab in his lap as he sat in his well-deserved jail cell.

This is what I was going to say, but I never got the words out. One of the panelists sitting next to me was a gentleman named John Perkins -- author, teacher, community developer, and national evangelical leader. Before I could respond, Perkins answered, “It’s my fault.”

All heads turned his way. He elaborated. “I have lived in this community for decades as a Bible teacher. I should have been able to create an environment where what our council president did would have been unthinkable because of my efforts. You want someone to blame? I’ll take the blame. All of it.”

Maybe righteousness…isn’t just how WE live. Maybe we are bound to the others around us. It certainly was true of Jesus. Sometimes God has a funny way of doing things.

So: does anything happen in baptism? Was the baptism of repentance that John carried out just a ritual, a symbolic act to make one feel good for a day or two? Is baptism in the church of Jesus Christ today just an initiation rite into a club we call Christianity? Not if it has anything at all to do with this first baptism, of Jesus. As Jesus comes up out of the water, more happens than we can keep track of:

a) “Suddenly, the heavens opened up.” The heavens, the sky, is torn open. And there is this incredible image that the barrier between God Almighty on His throne, and the people down on earth…that barrier is ripped to shreds, and communication (we might call that prayer) is now possible. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah pleaded with God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” he says (64:1). The heavens are torn open and…

b) “He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.” Twice, then, God COMES DOWN. Once in Jesus, once in the Holy Spirit, God comes down to earth, down to human beings. Now, we humans seem to be all about trying to GO UP. The building of the Tower of Babel, the fascination with climbing the tallest peaks in the world…even our language of self-identification, we’re all about “building ourselves up.” Next week, when we look at the temptations of Jesus by Satan, 2 of the 3 will have to do with GOING UP: to the highest mountain, and to the pinnacle of the temple, and Jesus will say, “No.” God comes down…to meet human beings, at his initiation, not their efforts. The Spirit of God COMES DOWN to Jesus. The voice of Isaiah, again, from a scripture we read every Advent: “A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch will grow out of his roots, and (WHAT?) the Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him.”

c) Then “a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ ” Heaven has been opened, and God’s voice can be heard. God’s voice, as far as we know, had been quiet for some time. A long time. There is a huge silence between the end of the Old Testament, and the beginning of the New here in Matthew. 350 years perhaps, between the last breath of an Old Testament prophet speaking the Word of God, and God beginning to speak again here. But now, the heavens are opened and the people can hear God introducing Jesus, “My Son, the Beloved.”

In the synoptic Gospels, God’s voice comes directly only twice…all the others come through Jesus. It happens only here at Jesus’ baptism, and again at the Transfiguration. If it only happens twice, it must be important, and it IS. It’s like God is saying: This is it! This is the One! This is the one who pleases me, who reflects me, who comes from me! (The transfiguration adds three words: “Listen to him!”) It’s almost as though God is a proud parent, with such investment and expectations for the child, standing a little taller and with obvious deep pleasure saying, “This is MY Son, MY daughter. He belongs to me…She’s in MY family.”

There’s a also word of reminder there for us, I believe. God WILL speak. He has spoken, and he will speak. Sometimes as we journey with Christ, we go through periods where it is very hard to hear. And the quick and easy answer is that “God is speaking, but we’re not listening.”

Sure, that certainly may be true. Our hard heart may have moved up to our ears. Or we may only be willing to hear if God answers in a certain way. But it’s not always that easy. St. John of the Cross talked of the experience of the “dark night of the soul,” a prolonged time when God’s voice just didn’t seem to speak. I’ve talked with friends who have felt like they have lived that experience. I’ve talked with other people who say they want to believe in God, but they just don’t understand when their friends say, “I heard God say…” It makes them scream, “Great, but God has never spoken to me like that!” But I have to tell you…I believe God will speak. In I Chronicles 28:9 it says, “Acknowledge God…and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind…If you seek him, he will be found...” The book of Hebrews again, says, “In older times, God has spoken in different ways through the prophets, but in these last days, he has spoken in a Son.” Sometimes God has funny ways of speaking.

In the baptism of Jesus Christ, this one with the muddy feet and the dripping hair…WE have received every thing we need:

• The heavens opened so that God might hear us and we hear him.
• Jesus, the Son, who gets in the mud and water with us.
• The empowering and constant presence of the Holy Spirit.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit. God Above, God with us, God in us.

Jesus here begins his public ministry…by being humbly baptized, a baptism of repentance. At the end of Matthew, the resurrected Christ will end his earthly ministry with baptism also: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit…teaching them to do all I have commanded you, and remember: I am with you always.”
It is now not only a baptism of repentance, but a baptism of grace and forgiveness, embodied in Christ Himself. Sometimes God has mysterious ways of doing things.

All of this happens at Jesus’ baptism…and it is a good model for what happens with us in Christian baptism as well:

• In accepting God’s biggest gift, Jesus Christ, as Lord and Savior, we have access to God…the heavens are opened up.
• We receive the Holy Spirit to empower, equip…and dwell inside of us.
• We are adopted into the family of God…the God who says to us, in Christ…

  “This is my son, my daughter.”

So we stand on holy ground in baptism this morning with friends, Tom Weeks and Nicole Pezzotti. As Tom and Nicole are baptized this morning, I want to invite you to listen carefully to the questions and the declaration…and, if you have been baptized, to use this time as a way of reaffirming your own baptism.