The Baptism of Our Lord
Texts: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22;
Isa 43:1-7; Acts 8:14-17
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UTq21KEgdOk
See the Sermon Notes as a summarized form of the sermon
BAPTISM: NOT JUST A TICKET TO HEAVEN,
BUT AN INVITATION TO JOIN GOD’S AGE-OLD PROJECT
OF HEALING THE HUMAN SIN OF “NATIONALISM”
Forty years ago I sat for my oral examination to be ordained. One of the questions went something like this. You receive a frantic call from the husband of one of your parishioners you know to be expecting the birth of a child. Their baby has just been born with serious medical problems. He asks, “Can you come right away and baptize our newborn?” But while you’re on your way to the hospital the baby dies. Upon your arrival, the grief-stricken parents ask you to baptize their now deceased child. Do you perform the baptism?
I can’t remember exactly how I answered, but it was something like this. This is a moment when pastoral care trumps everything else. It’s not a time to weigh the theology of baptism and whether or not it’s proper, according to the rules, to baptize a dead child. This is a moment of unimaginable grief, the sudden loss of a child. If these parents indicate to you that baptizing their child would bring them some comfort, then that’s what you need to do. If considering what that baptism means theologically is also appropriate, that can wait for a later time — as part, perhaps, of you ongoing grief work with these parents down the road. But at that moment of tremendous loss, the most important thing is to use a rite like baptism, with those words of promise and salvation, to bring comfort.
In the subsequent forty years of ministry, I thankfully never had to face that precise scenario. I have been called to baptize infants born with medical issues, most of whom recovered and did fine. The one time when the newborn did die several days later, having been born with a serious case of ‘water on the brain,’ was one of my most intense and painful times as a pastor. It happened a number of years ago, and I’m not sure if I was fully prepared to help that couple with the magnitude of their loss, because I myself was still in the process of coming to what I now find to be a better, revitalized Gospel message. My answer remains the same for that scenario of my oral exam forty years ago. Pastoral care dictates that you begin to give comfort to grief-stricken parents by granting their request to baptized their dead child. But pastoral care is in itself an ongoing process and, many weeks down the road, speaking with those parents about what the baptism of their child meant can itself be part of the healing process. If, that is, the meaning of baptism is part of a larger healing Gospel message of grace.
That’s what I want to do with you this morning. To make sure that what baptism means is part of what I consider to be a revitalized Gospel message. Because baptism is an area of faith that I believe can be destructive, or obstructive, to healing if we think it means what has often been taught about baptism in the church over the centuries. Let me cut right to the chase: if a primary meaning of baptism is that it is God’s promise to send you heaven when you die, saving you from eternal damnation, then that meaning of baptism is incredibly destructive to the healing and salvation of the true Gospel. I’ve come to see that whole business of eternal damnation as part of a false Gospel. Think about those grief-stricken parents in the scenario. If upon losing their child, without having received the promise of salvation through baptism, they believe their child might also be subject to eternal damnation, what does that do? It adds another heavy layer of grief upon their already unimaginable grief. And it need not be so, because I believe that that version of what baptism means has been nothing less than sinful for the church to lay upon people.
Here’s the big problem with it: it relies on a sorely deficient picture of salvation. It seems to reduce the picture of God’s salvation in Jesus the Messiah to the moment right after death. Do you go to heaven or to hell? Salvation, in many corners of the church, has been reduced down to that moment. Will God save you from eternal damnation? I’ve come to believe that this whole scenario of God sorting us into heaven or hell when we die is actually counter to the Gospel. It is anti-Gospel.
I hope, after a year of my preaching, that you can see why. Shrinking our picture of salvation to the moment after an individual dies, when our eternal fates are supposedly decided — on something as spurious as what we may or may not believe about Jesus, no less — is a much graver error than simply missing the bigger picture. That particular shrinkage to the crucial moment after death ends up actually distorting the Gospel so much that it works against it.
We can see why when we expand our picture of salvation to its true biblical proportions. A first account of sin and its consequences is laid out in compressed form in Genesis 3 through 11 — after the account of creation in the Genesis 1-2, where God has created us to partners in the project of bringing the creation to harmony and fulfillment. But instead, Genesis 3-11 sketches out how our human sin gets in the way of God’s creative intentions, working against them. So the story of salvation begins in the next chapter, Genesis 12, where God chooses a couple, Abraham and Sarah, and their descendants, to be bearers of God’s promise of salvation. They are not blessed for their own sakes. They are blessed for the sake of all the families of the earth.
Centuries later, one of Abraham’s and Sarah’s descendants becomes the focal point of fulfilling the promise of salvation. How? By dying to our sin of dividedness — which we have named this year as “nationalism.” Sin is our tendency to remain siloed into nations that work against each other rather than for each other. God raises him from the dead to begin the creation process anew with the clear mission that all human beings are to work together in love. Not continue to be divided against one another, finding reasons to send each other to hell — not some divine sponsored hell of eternal damnation, but the hells we make for each other when we remain trapped in the sin of nationalism. Places like Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Ukraine and Gaza.
Can you see more clearly now why baptism as salvation from God sending us into eternal damnation is anti-Gospel? God’s whole purpose of creation and salvation is to get us to work together in fulfilling the promise of creation. The picture of God sorting us into an eternal division after we die is the exact opposite. It is God dividing us eternally into groups that will never be healed, when the whole purpose of God’s salvation is to ultimately bring healing to all of our dividedness.
We noticed this again last week when celebrating the Epiphany, the coming of Gentile Wise men to worship the Messiah. We especially saw it in Paul’s great Letter to the Ephesians, reading chapter 3 as another statement of the true Gospel of peace. We did a quick recap. It begins in Ephesians 1, where Paul says that the “mystery of God’s will,” “as a plan for the fullness of time,” has been “to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:9-10). Then, in Ephesians 2, we read a little bit more — that God accomplishes this through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, through whom God “might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace” (Eph 2:15). Then, in Ephesians 3, Paul makes clear that the boots-on-the-ground effect of all this is for Gentiles to be included in the promise of salvation to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. In other words, salvation is a process of bringing together all human beings. It is a new way of being human that heals all our nationalistic programs of remaining divided, in mortal combat with each other.
So what does baptism mean in light of this expansive picture of salvation? It means the opposite of God sorting us into an eternal dividedness at the moment of our deaths. No, baptism is God’s unconditional love for us that, despite our sin, calls us to participate in sin’s undoing, its healing. We are called to participation in the long process of healing our human dividedness. A process that began with the promise to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. A process which came became a beachhead of fulfillment in the cross and resurrection of the Messiah Jesus. A process which continues with our invitation through baptism to empower us, to invite us, to participate in its ongoing work in the Holy Spirit.
Again, we see this especially in the letters of Paul, if we read him correctly. In Romans 6, he speaks about baptism as a participating in nothing less than Jesus’s own death and resurrection. Even if we face death, we don’t have to be afraid of it, because we have already died and risen to new life in Christ. This baptismal language of Romans 6 follows upon one of the most obtuse sections in Paul’s writings, the end of Romans 5, where Paul lays out that God’s salvation is on the level of nothing less than full-blown anthropology. He writes that there is a first way of being human, which leads to sin and death. And then in Jesus the Messiah, there is a second way of being human that leads to a new gift of justice and life. When he turns to baptism in Romans 6, then, he is talking about baptism as nothing less than the grace of having our personhood transformed by participating, through the Spirit, in the salvation wrought by Jesus’ own death and resurrection.
What does this mean? Like in Ephesians, it means God’s grace of healing our dividedness, our nationalisms — God’s grace poured out to both Jew and Gentile, in short, to all human beings. In Galatians 3, Paul makes clear that this is the baseline identity given to us in baptism:
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:27-29)
And what about Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism that we read today. We sometimes ask why Jesus needs to be baptized. But that’s with the old view of baptism as salvation in the sense of being forgiven to be able to go to heaven when we die. Obviously, Jesus, as God’s son, doesn’t need forgiveness to go to heaven when he dies. But if baptism is the invitation of participating in God’s long process of saving us from the sin that divides us, then Jesus baptism by John in the Jordan is the quintessential invitation to God’s salvation. It opens the door for the rest of us. The voice from heaven, doesn’t say to Jesus, ‘OK, you’re forgiven now. You can go to heaven.’ No, it effectively says, ‘You are my son. I’m so pleased with you. You’re ready now. Here’s my Spirit. Now go to this business, this mission, of opening my salvation to all my children.’ So, on this day that we celebrate the launching of Jesus’ participation in God’s salvation, we celebrate our call in baptism to the same thing. To participate in God’s healing of the dividedness that keeps us from fulfilling our creative purpose to help all life to flourish. As we’ve talked about all year: That means, if “nationalism” is an apt way to name the sin of dividedness, then we are not called to join the latest form of it. We are called to be part of its healing. God says to each of us, “You are my son, my daughter. I’m so pleased with you. You’re ready now. Here’s my spirit. Now go out into this broken world and bring it healing.” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 12, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UTq21KEgdOk
