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In the name of Jesus, amen. Dear saints of God, we rejoice this day that Jesus sits enthroned as king forever. That’s the words from the gradual, Psalm 29, verse 10, and we should rejoice.
It was a tumultuous week this week. It’s been a tumultuous year this year. Things are not always good. There’s a lot of distress, a lot of sickness, a lot of trouble. It seems like we live in dark days. It’s good for us to remember that everything that we have, good and bad, nice, peaceful days, difficult, troublesome days, that all of it comes from the hand of Jesus who loves us. Jesus is in charge still. The Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as King forever.
The Apostle Paul reminds us in Ephesians chapter 1 that Jesus ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father to rule and reign all things for the sake of the church. Now this is a stunning promise and it’s for us to believe that everything that is, is what is best for the Lord’s church.
Now, this doesn’t mean that if we can make things better, we don’t try to make them better. When we work on what things would be like in the future, tomorrow, or later this afternoon, or when we have choices, we want to keep the Lord’s law, we want to follow the Lord’s will, we want to make things better. And if we have a choice, we’d rather be healthy than sick.
We’d rather have a home than be sleeping on the streets, or whatever. We’d rather things be peaceful than things be tumultuous when we have a choice. But that also means, when we trust the Lord, that wherever we are, whatever the situation where we find ourselves, we are content. We know that the Lord is giving it to us for our own good.
We talked about this back at Thanksgiving time, the difference between thankfulness and gratitude, gratefulness. Thankfulness recognizes the goodness of whatever’s in front of us. Gratitude recognizes the goodness of the one giving the gift. Thankfulness is thanking your mom for the Twinkie. Gratitude is thanking your mom for the Brussels sprouts. You might not recognize the goodness in the gift, but you do recognize the goodness in the one who gives it to you. That’s the point.
When we receive troublesome weeks like we had last week, when we receive sickness, when we receive a pandemic, when we receive strife, whatever it is, we receive it from the hands that were nailed to the cross for our salvation. And we thank the Lord for it. And we know that whatever is, is what is best for us, the Lord’s people, for his church.
It means we can look back over this last year, for example, over the pandemic, and we could say the pandemic was a blessing for the Lord’s Church. Because everything that the Lord gives is a blessing for His Church. We might not see it, but we know it by faith. The Lord sits enthroned over the flood. The Lord sits enthroned as King forever.
And so, we walk by faith and not by sight. Through the midst of these dark days, we walk by faith knowing that the Lord Jesus loves us, and whatever we have is just what He wants us to have, including the great gift of baptism, which is what we want to talk about today.
We have in the gospel text the account of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. In fact, the text starts with this wild story of John the Baptist who was dressed in camel skin. You just think, what a wild man he would have looked like. He’s got a big leather belt, he’s preaching in the wilderness, Bethany beyond the Jordan. It’s one of those biblical geography things; there’s two Bethanies.
There’s Bethany that’s just on the other side of the Mount of Olives next to Jerusalem where Lazarus lives with Mary and Martha, his sisters, where Jesus and the disciples stayed a lot. That’s one Bethany by Jerusalem. But there’s another Bethany that’s down on the east side of the Jordan River, across on the other side from Jericho, probably right where the people would have crossed over the Jordan River into the Promised Land. That’s where John was baptizing, down the street from Jerusalem, down through the wilderness, and preaching.
And his preaching was thunderous. I mean, with locust breath, he was preaching the law to the people. Who? You brood of vipers, he says. Boy, John, you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? The axe is already at the root of the tree. Repent! It didn’t matter who came out to him. Soldiers, Pharisees, scribes, ruling people from the Sanhedrin, the rich and poor alike. He cut them all down. Repent, he says.
John was holding up the mirror of God’s law to all the people’s faces, showing them their sinfulness, their uncleanness, their failures, their breaking of God’s law, and then he was baptizing them for the remission of sins, to forgive all, to wash it all away.
Now into the midst of this, the midst of this preaching and this washing, Jesus comes from Nazareth, up north in Galilee. Jesus comes down to his cousin John to be baptized by him. And John looks at him. This is in the Gospel of Matthew. John looks at Jesus and he says to him—here’s my paraphrase—what are you doing here? You don’t need to be baptized by me. I should be baptized by you. John knows that Jesus has no sin to wash away.
John had been preaching, I baptize you with water, but the one who comes after me, who’s greater than me because he was before me, the one who I’m not even worthy to stoop down and tie his strap on his sandal, he’s going to come and baptize you with the Holy Spirit. So John sees Jesus and says, you want to take over? You want to start baptizing? That’s what you’re here to do.
But Jesus—and again, this is Matthew chapter three—Jesus says to John, permit it to be so now; this is right for us to fill up righteousness. It’s a riddle, what Jesus says, and here’s the best I know how to understand it. You’ve heard me preach this before because I just can’t think of a better picture, so bear with me.
Maybe next year I’ll think of a better illustration of this, and so I’ll have a different sermon. But you gotta imagine it like this: the Jordan River is running between two hills, and on one of the hills is a flock of sheep, and they’re filthy sheep. They’re smelly, stinky. Their wool is matted with tar and filth and muck. They smell, they’re bleeding, they’ve got sores. They’re limping along, weak, staggering, disgusting sheep.
And John takes them one at a time, he dips them in the river, and he pulls them out, and the sheep come out clean, really clean. Every spot is washed away, every stain is cleansed, every wrinkle is straightened out—they even smell nice. He puts them on the other side of the river.
Now you’ve got to, one after another, John is taking these filthy, nasty sheep, dipping them in the water, putting it on the other side, cleaning the sheep, dipping the sheep, washing the sheep, washing the sheep. And then in the middle of this crowd of filthy, disgusting, mangy sheep, there’s one who walks down to the edge of the river to be baptized, who’s perfectly white and radiant. Not a spot on him. In fact, the dirt bounces off of him. He’s so clean.
He’s so bright, you can’t hardly look at him. He smells like roses. He’s a beautiful, clean sheep. And John says, you don’t need this. This lamb says let it be so now; thus is it fitting for us to fill up righteousness. Okay, so John takes him and dips him in the water, and when he does, all of the filth and muck of all the other sheep that’s swirling around in the river, like an oil spill, goes onto him. He takes it all; he absorbs it all, so that now as he’s placed on the other side of the river, he’s the mangiest, weakest, smelliest of all of them, and John points at this one and says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, you see?
So that Jesus, in his baptism, begins his work of redemption, begins the work of bearing our sins and carrying our sorrows so that he can give us life and peace and joy in the Lord’s name. He begins his work as the Savior. The word Christ is a Greek word. It means to be anointed. It’s the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means the same thing, to be anointed.
When you were put in office in the Old Testament, for example, when you were inaugurated and enthroned as a king, you would be anointed with oil by the prophet. Or if you were ordained into the priesthood to become a high priest or even a medium priest or whatever, any kind of priest, you would be anointed with oil for that office. So the word Messiah and the word Christ means anointed one.
And this, dear saints, when Jesus is baptized, is when he’s ordained into the office of Savior of the world. Jesus woke up this morning of his baptism, and he was named Jesus of Nazareth, and after his baptism, he was called Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. He begins his work that would end on the cross and in the empty tomb.
There’s a prayer that’s in our baptismal rite; we’ll have a baptism next Sunday. God be praised. There’s a prayer in the baptismal rite that Luther wrote for the small catechism for the baptism. He says that in baptism, in your baptism, O Lord, you cleansed all waters and made them fit for holy baptism. Because the sin that’s washed away in your baptism is the sin that Jesus died for on the cross.
So there’s a great exchange. The Lord doesn’t just send away your sin, He takes it away. He takes it upon Himself so that He can forgive us and give us His righteousness. Now this means, and stick with me on this, because of what Jesus has done, because of His baptism, because of His ministry, because of His suffering, death, and resurrection, that when you are baptized, the Lord can say the same words that He said to His Son.
When Jesus came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him, the Spirit anointed Him, and then heaven cracked open and God the Father spoke. There are three times in the entire New Testament that God the Father speaks, and this is the first one. God the Father says, you are my beloved Son; with you, I am well pleased. And because of what Jesus has done, God the Father says the same thing to you in your baptism: I know you.
There’s a voice in your own head that’s constantly telling you how bad you are, how you are not pleasing to God, how you’re a poor, miserable sinner, how you do everything wrong, how you break God’s law in what you think and what you want and what you say and what you do, and all of the goodness that you fail to do and your laziness and your greed and your lovelessness and your self-centeredness and all this stuff—constantly telling you, there’s no way that God could possibly like me, that He could be pleased with me, that He could delight in me.
But look, Jesus has taken away all of your sin, all of it, so that in your baptism, God the Father says that you are His beloved Son, His beloved daughter, and that He is pleased with you. You might not think this on your own, which is why the Lord sent you a preacher today to tell it to you. When God thinks about you, He does not frown. He smiles. He loves you. He really loves you, and He even likes you. You are His beloved child in whom He is well pleased. This is the gift that the Lord gives in baptism.
Now we heard—here’s the third sermon—we heard this in the epistle lesson, Romans 6. Romans 6 is a stunning text, and we should all write it in gold in our hearts. When we were baptized, we were buried with Christ; we died with Christ. I remember I was trying to teach a couple of boys in confirmation class this text. It’s, you know, it’s in the Catechism; it’s part of our memory work. And they were having trouble remembering the text, and I said, okay, I want you to imagine this. I want you to imagine Jesus being crucified, okay?
And I want you to imagine that you are on a cross right next to Him. That as the cross is laid down for Jesus, they lay down a cross for you. And as they stretch Jesus out on the cross, they stretch your hands out on the cross. And as they nail Jesus to the cross, they nail you to the cross. And as Jesus dies, you also die. And then, as Jesus is removed from the cross and taken down, you’re taken down with Him.
And you are carried with Him. You’ve got to pretend like you’re not dead every once in a while to look and see that next to you, they’re carrying Jesus along, and they’re carrying you along as well to the grave, to the same grave. And as they wrap Jesus in the grave clothes, they’re wrapping you in the grave clothes. And as they lay Jesus there in the tomb, they put you there in the tomb, and you’re laying there next to Jesus’ body. You’re dead, and he’s dead. You look over; he’s still dead. You look over; he’s still dead. You look over, and he’s looking back at you, and he says, you died too. Yeah, I died too, he says.
I’m tired of being dead, and you say, I’m tired of being dead, too. Jesus says, you want to get out of here? You say, sure. And Jesus sits up, and you sit up with Him. And Jesus walks out of the grave, and you walk out with Him. Can you imagine that?
Now listen to the text: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried, therefore, with Him by baptism into death, in order that just as Jesus Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. You were buried with Christ already. You died already, and you’ve been raised already.
Do you know that most people—and we’ve seen it maybe more clearly this year than we ever have seen it before—most people are scared to death to die. They’re doing everything they can to avoid the grave. They’re taking every precaution to avoid dying. And they look at you, and you say, I’ve already done it. I’ve already been in the grave, and it’s not that bad. I’ve already died.
And it wasn’t too terrible, because I died with Christ. I was buried with Christ. And there’s no death waiting for you, dear Christian. You’ve died already. The only thing in front of you is life, more life. When your heart stops beating, you see the face of Jesus. And on the last day, that body is given back to you to live forever. There is no more condemnation for those in Christ Jesus; there’s no more death for those in Christ Jesus. All who believe in me shall never perish but will have eternal life.
There’s no fear of death for the Christian because there’s no death for the Christian, only a sleep in the name of Jesus that lasts for a little while and then is over. The Lord Jesus has given this to you, and this matters. This matters for the way we live, for the way we pray, for the way we think, for the way we talk to one another, that we are immortal. We will live forever.
By the Lord’s gift of baptism, we were bound to His death and His resurrection to the life that has no end. So God be praised. God be praised that Jesus is the King who sits enthroned forever. God be praised that Jesus in His baptism made a way for baptism to wash away our sins, and God be praised that Jesus has already given us death and resurrection in our baptism and bound us to the promise of eternal life.
May God grant us joy and confidence in these truths now and always through Christ our Lord. Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
