The Baptism of Our Lord
Texts: Matthew 3:13-17;
Acts 10:34-43; Isa 42:1-9
YouTube: https://youtu.be/VYrn1A3xASs
IN MEMORY OF RENEE NICOLE GOOD: GOD’S RELENTLESS
FIGHT AGAINST THE TERROR OF NATIONALISTIC PURGES
If today’s Second Reading sounds familiar, it might be because it’s the most used text in the three-year lectionary. We also read it on Easter Sunday in all three years — so four times in all. No other text is read more often in our Sunday morning worships.
It is also a ten-verse slice in one of the longest stories in the New Testament, taking up chapters ten and eleven in the Book of Acts. Both of these facts add-up to this story about Peter and Cornelius being one of the most important stories in the Bible. So instead of just this ten-verse slice today, let’s tell more of the story.
Acts 9 ends with, “Meanwhile Peter stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner” (Acts 9:43). Joppa is a city on the Mediterranean Sea in what is now Tel Aviv. A short ways up the coast was a Roman town, Caesarea, where the Roman governor had a palace and spent most of the year there. We are told that the Roman centurion Cornelius is in Caesarea; he was probably commanding a regiment of soldiers, protecting the Roman governor. When I visited the Holy Land 26 years ago, we flew into Tel Aviv and began our journey by driving a short ways up the coast to Caesarea — which are now ruins. The story of Peter and Cornelius begins with them a short ways apart on the Mediterranean coast, Peter in Joppa and Cornelius in Caesarea — about one hour’s journey today by bus but one day’s journey back then on foot. I checked it out on Google maps: an hour 14 minutes by car or bus, and 13 hours on foot. Only three hours by bicycle in case you’re wondering.
That’s the setting. The plot to follow is very much directed by God’s Spirit. We’re told that at three in the afternoon Cornelius “clearly” sees a vision of an angel from God, telling him to send three men to Joppa, inviting, compelling Peter to come to Cornelius’s house. In Joppa, Peter’s going to need some preparation for that invitation, because there’s no way that any Jew would simply go to a Gentile’s house, making themselves unclean.
So at noon the next day, shortly before the three men from Cornelius are to arrive, Peter goes to the roof of Simon the tanner’s house to pray. We’re told he’s hungry, just as he begins to have a strange vision of a great sheet coming down from heaven with many animals on them. The Lord says to Peter, “Rise up, Peter, sacrifice and eat!”1 “Sacrifice” being the kosher way to butcher an animal for eating. The problem is that the animals on the sheet are themselves unkosher, unclean. So Peter responds to the Lord, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean” (Acts 10:14). To which the Lord responds, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This exchange where the hungry Peter is told to eat but refuses happens not just once, not just twice, but, you guessed it, three times. By this time, it’s probably about three in the afternoon, when the vision ceases and the three men from Cornelius appear at the door where Peter is staying. They stay overnight and travel to Cornelius’s house the next stay, where Peter has his “Aha! moment.”
Upon arriving, Peter shows that he get’s the lesson he was being taught in the vision. He proclaims to Cornelius and his household, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (Acts 10:28). In today’s portion of the story, as Peter begins to preach, he says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35).
Before we mine a bit more from this story and what it might mean for our moment in history, let’s first think about the number three. Three in the afternoon. Three men are sent to Peter from Cornelius. Three times Peter is told to sacrifice and eat, and he refuses. Can you think of another important moment in Peter’s life that involves the number three? Think back to the Passion of Jesus. Yes, in the courtyard to the Jewish Council, where Jesus is on trial, Peter is confronted by three people who connect him to Jesus and three times Peter denies knowing Jesus. The rooster crows and Peter runs out, weeping bitterly.
This time, years later, Peter is confronted again three times but ultimately passes the test. He refuses the Lord’s command three times in the vision. But afterwards he comes to understand what God wants and needs from him and acts on it. This is important because it shows us the forgiveness of sins as a process, as a life-long reality, more like being adopted as a son or a daughter — which is forever. Peter’s greatest sin was to deny Jesus three times at the hour of his greatest need. But living in that forgiveness means he does better next time. Forgiveness isn’t just a one-time thing each time we need it. It is a lifetime process of becoming God’s child, of learning to be a better human being in this world. In this story of Peter and Cornelius, it is how long after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Months? Years? Yet Peter is still learning what this all means. Living in the forgiveness he knows he has from Jesus has opened him to being able to learn as he goes along. He still makes mistakes in this process of learning to be human in a better way. The promise of always being forgiven helps open him to that process day by day by day.
OK, now we are ready to understand this story for our time and place today. Especially on this day that we celebrate baptism, both Jesus’s and ours. If an element of our understanding helps us to see how much we have not understood, and keep on failing to understand, we claim the promise of forgiveness in our baptisms in order to open us to new understanding. Peter years later was still coming to understand anew. We centuries later can still be opened anew to what God is calling us to do in this centuries-long process of God’s working to transform our humanity. To help us know what it means to be a child of God.
We can see it in God’s call to his servant Israel in Isaiah 42. We like Israel are called to “bring forth justice to the nations.” Centuries later Jesus answers that call in his baptism. John the Baptist doesn’t yet understand the call. He is understanding baptism more in terms of being washed from sin and tries to get Jesus to baptize him. But, no, Jesus tells him, this baptism-thing is about fulfilling all justice. It is still about that call to servant Israel to bring forth justice to the nations. His whole life, death, and resurrection are about fulfilling that call to justice for the nations. And then calling others to follow in the Holy Spirit.
Years later, in the promise of forgiveness, Peter is open to that call of the Spirit to understand anew what justice to the nations means. “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean,” he says. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
OK, now it’s our turn. Twenty centuries after Peter, we are still learning within this process of forgiveness of sins, of being adopted as God’s daughters and sons. The operative sin here is us supposedly Christian nations having fallen back into nationalism, that is, into the way of seeing the world where our nation is the clean and pure one and all other nations and peoples are impure.
Purity is the hallmark of all nationalisms. Hitler convinced the German people last century that only their blood was pure and that others, especially the Jews, were the polluted ones who had invaded them and needed to be purged. More than ten years ago our current President began his campaign centered on purging the impure invaders from our land. The Mexicans. Other brown people from the Americas and from “shithole” countries. They are like vermin who have invaded our land and must be purged. These are not my words. They are our President’s words.2 And I bring this up not to focus just on him but on all of us to the extent that we’ve gone along with it and not clearly named it as what it is: namely, the same old nationalistic purging that has plagued humanity throughout our history. The kind of purging that Peter was being diverted from, because we are to learn as God’s children how God makes us clean.
And this week we saw where these purges inevitably and tragically lead. For a year now this purging has terrorized communities of brown peoples across our land. This past week that terror enveloped a white person, someone more like us, just because she dared to stand against this purging. This week Renee Nicole Good was executed on a street in Minneapolis by an ICE agent simply for opposing him. She was standing in the call to bring forth justice to the nations by calling out the false claims that everyone from a nation of brown people is impure and must be purged. Without any consideration of whether they might be a good person. In other words, no due process. She was murdered for it and labeled a “domestic terrorist.” But I ask you, “Who are the terrorists?” Who has been bringing terror to the streets of our cities this past year, especially in communities where brown people reside? Isn’t it the ICE agents? And isn’t it a tragedy upon tragedy that it takes the murder of a white person to perhaps prompt more of us to understand and to respond?
I ask these questions not to induce guilt and shame — though small amounts of those things are not a bad thing if it helps us to respond. No, I ask these things first of all because you and I are baptized into livelong forgiveness of sins. Of learning how to be a child of the true God. We are baptized into a promise of being opened to the nature of our sins and the call to become human in new ways that finally bring peace. It’s not only a lifelong process for each of us, but it is a process that goes back millennia to a Hebrew prophet named Isaiah calling God’s servant Israel to bring forth justice to the nations. And we keep getting it wrong. We keep falling back into these nationalistic purges. It comes to a climax in the baptismal call of Jesus, who let himself be murdered by nationalistic forces in order to open us to the ensuing work of the Holy Spirit’s to help us to continually understand anew the deadly falsehoods of nationalism. That somehow some people are pure and others are not.
No, we all have sinned. And we all are being forgiven in a process of becoming human that brings us together. A process of becoming human that leaves behind once and for all the purging of the impure Other. In celebrating baptism today, let us follow in the footsteps of our Lord, and of our fellow citizens like Renee Nicole Good, to stand against the terror of nationalistic purges. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 11, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/VYrn1A3xASs
Notes
1. My translation. Most translations read, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!” (NRSV). But the Greek word for “kill” is thyō, which is the specific word for “sacrifice.” See James Alison, You Can, If You Want To: Navigating Christian Faith, Conscience, and Matters LGBTQ+ (Bloomsbury, 2025), 164-65.
2. Google it and find many comparisons. See for example, Anne Applebaum, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini,” The Atlantic (Oct 2024).
