A Sermon based on Mark 1:4-11
Delivered to St. Timothy Lutheran Church
January 11, 2015
Last week, my wife Cindy and I endured the vagaries of air
travel, took time off and spent a bucket of money visiting a family in the Ft.
Worth, TX area.
As you might guess, it wasn't just any family – it was the
family of our daughter, Leah, consisting of herself, her husband and their
three children.
Now, why did we take all the trouble to do this? There are
plenty of fine young families here at St. Timothy, plenty of beautiful children
to enjoy right here without inconveniencing ourselves...Why not just be content
with seeing them?...
Those of you who are grandparents are surely rolling your
eyes about now. Why do you go to visit your family? Because it's YOUR
FAMILY. DUH! Those children are part of
you – they carry your bloodline within them. And the husbands and wives who are
your in-laws are also part of your family by virtue of marriage. ( Sometimes that's nice, and
sometimes that's a challenge...)
At any rate, your family is part of you and that makes those
people extremely special to you. … In a nutshell, that's what we're talking
about today: Family.
The Baptism of Jesus publicly and officially recognized Jesus
as God's Son, conferred God's special blessing upon Him, and prepared him to
begin his ministry as the Messiah. In essence, the same is true for us: In
Baptism, we are officially and publicly ushered into the Family of God, given
God's Blessing and prepared to walk in the ministries God gives us to do.
Now, this could be the end of our message today (and many of
you would rejoice at that prospect...) But there's much, much more to
understand about this basic truth – much that I think will bless you. In fact
I'd like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to ponder and proclaim
this message. I hope that I can convey even some of the blessing I experienced
in researching this sermon, which I entitle “Walking Out Our Baptismal Vows”.
Let's begin by examining this notion of a Vow.
Synonyms for the noun Vow are: Oath, Pledge, promise, bond,
covenant, commitment, or profession. As a verb, 'to vow' means to Swear, pledge, promise, undertake, engage – or in
archaic English, to plight: as in the old marriage vows: “I plight thee my
Troth.”
For our purposes, we are particularly interested in the
notion of Vow as an Oath or Covenant. We also want to bring in the word
Sacrament because it conveys an important sense of all of these words. We'll
start with the word “Covenant”.
A Covenant binds two
parties together as family; it creates a family relationship where none existed
previously. A Covenant is different than a contract in that a Contract
exchanges goods or services for money or other goods. It says “I will exchange
this for that”. In contrast, a Covenant is an Exchange of Persons.
A Covenant says, “I am yours and you are mine.”
God's characteristic way of dealing with his people down
through the ages has been to make Covenants with them. Beginning in Genesis
chapter 6, we read about God's judgment upon mankind and His dealings with
Noah:
“For behold, [says God] I will bring a flood of
waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under
heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But
I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark,
you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. (Gen 6: 17,18)
To ratify the Covenant Noah built an
altar to the Lord and sacrificed animals
to Him. God accepted the sacrifice, and promised
that never again
would there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Gen. 9:11).
In Genesis 15-17,
we read how God appeared to Abram and made a Covenant with him, changing his name
to Abraham and promising that he would become the father of a multitude of
nations.
Like Noah,
Abraham prepared a sacrifice, splitting the sacrificial animals in two. God
then accepted these sacrifices by burning them with fire.
In both cases the
covenant was 'cut' by means of a sacrifice.
And in both cases there was a Sign to accompany the Covenant. To Noah
and all humanity, God gave the Rainbow as an everlasting sign never again to
destroy the world by water. (Gen. 9:12-17).
To Abraham and
Sarah, God gave a son, Isaac, as a child of the Promise, and then established
the Sign of Circumcision to indicate that a Covenant had been cut. All of
Abraham's male descendants had to be circumcised to participate in this
covenant. If not, they would be cut off from his family; the Covenant was
considered broken. (Gen. 17:9-14).
So the pattern of
Covenant is: Promise, Sacrifice, Sign. And the purpose is to create a special
family bond between God and man.
The effect of a
Covenant is to Bind the two parties together. God binds himself to us, and we
to him through Covenant.
And this is where
the ideas of Oath and Sacrament come in.
An Oath is the
invocation of God's Name as a witness to
truth. As we invoke His name, God becomes an active partner in our actions.
When we testify
in court, we solemnly “swear to tell the truth the whole and notion but the
truth, so help me God.” When we make the sign of the cross on our bodies, we
pray, “In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” and we conclude
it with the Hebrew word 'Amen', which indicates solemn acceptance of the
covenant oath and its terms.
On God's side,
since there is no one greater to swear by, He swears by Himself (Heb. 6:17)
The Ancient
Romans used the term “Sacramentum” for the sacred oath sworn by men on entering
the Roman military. It was understood that swearing the Sacramentum, changed
the status of a man from Civilian to Soldier under absolute obedience to his
officers. Without the Sacramentum, one could not become a soldier, and the
soldier could only be released from the Sacramentum by death or being
demobilized.
In Lutheran theology, a sacrament is
"a divine covenant of grace and blessing transmitted in the visible
form." It is a combination of the Word of promise with a sign.
So now we have the links
established. A Covenant establishes a
family relationship between God and man. The Covenant is 'cut' or sworn by
means of a sacred and binding Oath, which God Himself institutes and activates.
The Covenant carries with it a Sign and there are consequences for keeping and
breaking the Covenant. In the life of the Church we enter into and renew
Covenant with God by means of a 'Sacrament'- an oath we swear that permanently
changes our status.
This notion of Covenant is
perhaps the most important in the Bible. We speak of the Old Covenant, or
“Testament” in Latin. In the days of the Old Covenant, a New, Everlasting
Covenant was promised through Jeremiah (31:31). Jesus later affirmed that this
prophecy was being fulfilled: “This is the New Covenant in my blood...” he
declares at the Last Supper (Luke 22:20).
This leads us to another
feature of Covenant making: eating a meal after the ceremony.
As part of the
Passover and Exodus from Egypt, the people of Israel sacrificed a lamb, put the
blood on the door,
and then ate the roasted lamb.
If you didn't eat the lamb,
you would not be protected from death. As with circumcision, those who failed
to partake were cut off from the family.
Very interesting, you may say,
but what about the Sign of the New Covenant?
… In a word, it's Baptism.
Whereas in the Old Covenant,
the cutting of Circumcision signified membership in the Covenant People of God,
in the New Covenant, Baptism now ushers us into the Family of God, signifying
washing from sin, death to the old self and rebirth and newness of life.
In his first epistle, Peter
indicates that Baptism corresponds to the family of Noah being brought safely
through the flood waters. (I Peter, 3: 20,21).
And in Romans 6:4, Paul
declares that “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into
death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of
the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
It’s from this verse we get the imagery of WALKING out our
Baptismal Vows.
But wait a minute, you might object, wasn't Jesus already
God's Son?
Wasn't he sinless? Why did he have to be Baptized?
And the answer to those questions is Yes, he was sinless –
but Jesus made a decision to actively identify with our sins. If
you will, he made a faith-based salvation decision for God and was baptized to
indicate his acceptance of the mission God had for him. Jesus chose to be
baptized by John, but it was God the Father who did something during that
Baptism; namely, He approved and publicly accepted Jesus as His Beloved Son. He
also equipped and empowered Jesus with the Holy Spirit, who came down upon him
as a Dove.
In the Larger Catechism, Martin Luther discusses the
interaction of Divine work and human faith:
“Baptism,” says Luther “is nothing else than water and the Word of God
in and with each other, that is when the Word is added to the water, Baptism is
valid, even though faith be wanting. For my faith does not make
Baptism, but receives it. Now, Baptism does not become invalid even
though it be wrongly received or employed; since it is not bound ... to our
faith, but to the Word.”
This is a rather amazing thought – that an action I
participate in – with the wrong motives, or without faith is effective just
because it is God doing the work!
This then, becomes part of the rationale for baptizing
infants.
Luther again: “Thus we do also in infant baptism. We bring the child in the
conviction and hope that it believes, and we pray that God may grant it faith;
but we do not baptize it upon that, but solely upon the command of God.”
So too, if any one comes to Christ as an adult, we follow
Christ in Baptism, in obedience to His command and trusting in the power and
work of God, not in our own faith, which after all, is itself a gift from God.
(Eph. 2:8).
But the really good news is that as we follow Christ in
Baptism, we become, like Christ, Beloved of God!
Just as Cindy and I love our grandkids because they are part
of us, so too God loves us because we have become His Kids by the Sacrament of
Baptism.
In some ways this is almost too good to really comprehend. We
have trouble believing that God loves us unconditionally when we are prone to
sin and failure. But it’s precisely because of our Baptism that we can rest in
this confidence.
“...what a great,
excellent thing Baptism is,” says Luther, “which delivers us from the jaws of
the devil and makes us God's own, suppresses and takes away sin, and then daily
strengthens the new man, and is and remains ever efficacious until we pass from
this estate of misery to eternal glory.”
All of this is God’s own doing. The old hymn expresses this truth:
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name. ...
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name. ...
His oath, His covenant,
His blood
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
Nevertheless Doctor Luther insists that “if we would be Christians,
we must practice the work whereby we are Christians.” This is what we mean by
Walking out our Baptismal Vows. It involves consciously “putting to death the
old Adam, and then focusing on 'the resurrection of the new man” … in such a
way that 'a truly Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once
begun and ever to be continued.”
If then, our Christian life is a daily baptism, a daily death
to self and daily becoming alive to God, so too God the Father is daily pleased
with us, and daily affirms that we are His Beloved children. I encourage you
Beloved brothers and sisters to take to contemplate this. Take an hour sometime
to just sit still and think about God's blessing in your life. Claim it as your
own.
It will be rather difficult at first. There are many voices
coming at us daily that accuse and tear us down – and it's very tempting to
listen to those voices and internalize them. But always bring to mind the Word
of God, “You are my Beloved”. His Word is always True – even when you don't
feel it to be so.
As you live into this awareness of His pleasure, that sense
of blessing should begin to bubble up and spill out to others – giving them a
sample of God's intended blessing for them as well.
This is God's intended Covenantal pattern: He blesses us so
that we might be a blessing to others (Gen. 22:18) and that all the ends of the
earth may fear him ( Ps. 67:7).
Do this and you will truly Walk Out your Baptismal Vows!
AMEN and again AMEN.
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To listen to this sermon, please follow this link: http://www.sttimothy.com/sermons.shtml
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