What Are You Doing in the Water?
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Terror and dread fall upon them;
because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,
till your people, O Lord, pass by,
till the people pass by whom you have purchased.
In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when he said,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.’ ”
Now John wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Scripture: Matthew 3:1-17
Sermon Title: What Are You Doing in the Water?
As the bulletin points out, we’re moving into a time in our worship service in which God speaks and shows his gospel. That wording is to bring us back to the Heidelberg Catechism’s emphasis on how “The Holy Spirit produces [faith] in our hearts by the preaching of the…gospel” and the “Sacraments are visible…signs and seals…[to] make us understand more clearly the promise of the gospel. So, our minds in all that follows are to be fixed on the good news of Jesus Christ. The baptism we receive from God in his Word and that we practice in the body of believers cannot be correctly or properly understood apart from faith and our Savior.
Before we go to God’s Word, we turn to the Catechism questions and answers 69 and 72. I’ll read the questions displayed on the screen, if you would join on the answers. “How does holy baptism remind and assure you that Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross benefits you personally? In this way: Christ instituted this outward washing and with it promised that, as surely as water washes away the dirt from the body, so certainly his blood and his Spirit wash away my soul’s impurity, that is, all my sins.” “Does this outward washing with water itself wash away sins? No, only Jesus Christ’s blood and the Holy Spirit cleanse us from all sins.”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the new trend in our neighborhood is families getting a pool. A family that lives diagonal behind the parsonage set one up last year and we saw it going up again just in time for the extreme heat a few weeks ago. They’ve got two girls a little older than my daughter, Addison. Then our next-door neighbors got one, too; there are six kids in that house. While pools can be great fun, they also require caution—being safe and smart to avoid injury or worse. But if you’ve ever been in a neighborhood with a pool, who can use the pool and when gets tricky when there are neighbor kids who want to go in them, too. Addy is tall enough but Brooks, not knowing how to swim well, is not big enough. So, me, being an occasional softy, got one of these smaller pools, 10’ x 6’, not even 2 feet deep that’s good for him to enjoy.
It’s right behind the deck, so it’s pretty easy to keep an eye on, but most of the time if I’m home and they’re out in the pool, I’m keeping an ear on them. I’m listening. Sometimes with shouts or shrieks or giggles, I’ve wondered what they’re doing in the water. I’ll go investigate and usually am just told, “We’re having fun, dad!” As long as there are no blood or tears, that answer’s good enough for me. I remember, too, when I was younger, middle school aged, our neighbors had a permanent above ground pool, and they let us use it. Whenever I learned how to somersault underwater or do a handstand, I wanted to practice that. Sometimes I’d get ready ahead of my parents or the neighbor, and I’d get in by myself and be doing that. Even at that age, I wondered what I looked like to an onlooker. Was I even doing these things the right way, or was I just some big kid rolling around under the surface?
That brings us to our first point this morning, not what was little Dan De Graff doing in the pool, but what was John doing in the water? The simple answer is he was baptizing people. What does that mean, though? Where did that action come from? Those of us who have grown up in the church get so used to certain practices and traditions that we sometimes unconsciously conclude that they’ve been around forever and of course we know what they mean. Especially if you’re hearing this message and you’re young in age or haven’t been in the church much or haven’t gone deep into God’s Word, maybe you don’t know about baptism.
What was John doing? In our English translations of the Bible, we don’t find the word “baptism” in the Old Testament—this is the first time. Going to the Greek, the original language, we have three words, which you can see on the screen. The first is “baptisteis,” which describes John as a baptizer or baptist, one who performed baptisms. We also have “baptizo,” which is the action of baptizing, and the most root form is “bapto.” The action that word identifies is to dip in or under, to immerse—our Baptist brothers and sisters and those of you who may have some of those leanings aren’t wrong in their practice. It also means to bathe or wash.
Let’s be clear, John wasn’t just giving people baths in the Jordan River; that’s not why people were coming to him. But what became understood as “baptism” was this cleansing or purifying with a ceremonial purpose. I’ve come across different ideas of what this historical ceremony exactly was. I recently came across that some believe there was a washing “on the eleventh day after birth” that became standard among Jews by Jesus’ day. What seems to be more fitting, though, is that it’s believed the Jews began a baptism during the intertestamental period, the several hundred years between the Old and New Testament times. It was for proselytes. If you were not Jewish by birth, both ethnic and religious, but you wanted to convert to the faith, you had to be baptized. You had, so to speak, to be washed clean of your past and into a new identity.
So, when John entered the scene, the ritual he offered, was not completely foreign. The meaning of his baptism, however, was different. He was not offering a sign of one’s entry into the Jewish community. Rather it’s what we find in verses 1-2, 6, and 11, “John the Baptist came, preaching…and saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near’…Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him…‘I baptize you with water for repentance…’”
This man named John came, we heard, to “‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” If we can switch gospels for a moment, Luke 1 presents his backstory. He was the son of aged parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, who had been barren. Zechariah was told by an angel of the Lord that his son would “‘…will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord…He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth. Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God. And he will go before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’” That was God’s pronouncement for John’s life before he was born. After John’s birth, his father, filled with the Holy Spirit, prophesied further, “‘…You, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High…to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God…’”
When he grew up and went to the Jordan River, John’s purpose was to help people know they could be forgiven of their sins, and even that they can be saved. They could have this hope, this promise, not because of what they would do for themselves, but because of God’s mercy. As I said at the wedding on Friday, the characteristics of God presented in his Word aren’t far away, disconnected from us. No, God’s mercy that John was proclaiming and giving a sign of was to be seen in the person of Jesus, in his life and his work. The water didn’t give forgiveness or salvation, but rather he gave the message that as water washes away dirt from the outside of the body, that is a sign of what God can do to cleanse and purify and save all who repent and believe.
Before we move on, why was Jesus baptized? If what John did connects to confession and repentance of sin, was Jesus actually sinful? Is the church, are Christians, hiding that and lying when we say he was sinless. No, there are no secrets being kept here. There’s at least two theological pieces attached to that moment, attached to what Jesus said in verse 15, “…‘Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” First, Jesus’ baptism was even more a symbolic act that he, who was fully God and fully human, associated with humanity in our fallen status. He received the sign of purification not for himself, but on our behalf. Second, as we see the Holy Spirit descend like a dove on him, we’re to understand that this act was an anointing into his ministry. This was the time for him to begin actively preaching the kingdom of God that John had prophesied and that he was ushering in. This is what John was doing in the water.
Let’s move to our second point now and this broadens our scope beyond just Matthew 3: what is our baptism? Is it different to be baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” compared to what John did?
There are several times baptism shows up in the book of Acts. One in particular jumps out, the beginning of Acts 19. Paul went to Ephesus and, “…He found some disciples and asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’” They had no real idea of what he was talking about. “So, Paul asked, ‘Then what baptism did you receive?’ ‘John’s baptism,’ they replied. [Then] Paul said, ‘John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.’ On hearing this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them…”
At least as we look back into the early church’s practices, there were times when baptism was only associated with repentance. The person being baptized wanted God to forgive them, they believed he could forgive, and yet because the gospel of Jesus Christ hadn’t spread yet, they didn’t have the full sacrament. That’s what “John’s baptism” is referring to—it looked ahead to God’s Messiah, to the Christ, but it didn’t have Jesus and what he did in his death and resurrection in full. This goes back to what I said a couple weeks ago: it’s not enough to just think of God as some being out in the universe or outside of the universe, waiting for us to admit our sin and apologize. We need Jesus, we need faith in the one who God sent, and with him we can know and trust that we have received the Holy Spirit.
That’s the other way it’s different, not only do we know the forgiver, the redeemer, but we know the Spirit he gave us. What is the Holy Spirit up to then? The Catechism speaks to it, but so does the Belgic Confession in Article 34, “…Just as water washes away the dirt of the body…and also is seen on the bodies of those baptized…so too the blood of Christ [washes away our dirt] internally, in the soul, by the Holy Spirit. It” meaning the blood of Christ, but also the activity of the Spirit “It washes and cleanses [our soul] from [our] sins and transforms us from being the children of wrath into the children of God.”
The change that happens for a true believer who has been baptized is not an external change. When we baptize Feya, she’s not going to look different than she does right this minute. But we do believe, and we hope that in time, with faith, there will be an internal change with an external effect. That will come about not simply of her own doing, but because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This is where Christians and denominations gets into its fun debates about whether or not infants should be baptized, and there’s arguments on both sides. There are points in the New Testament when the action of baptism does seem to be the trigger, the cause, the “you have this done and God will respond with the effect of giving you the Holy Spirit.” At Pentecost in Acts 2:38, “Peter [said], ‘Repent and be baptized…And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” In Acts 19, we heard Paul baptized them, then laid hands on them in prayer, and they received the Holy Spirit. Baptism seems like a necessary thing to do in order to have the Spirit and be saved. Yet there’s at least one passage, Acts 8:14-16, where we read the Samaritans “had accepted the word of God” and “had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus,” but they did not have the Holy Spirit until “Peter and John placed their hands on them.”
The baptism we practice in the name of Jesus, or the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not the thing, but it points to the thing. If we have true faith or develop that, we can be sure the promise spoken in baptism that our sins will be washed away, our souls cleansed, is truly for us. It’s not just that God can forgive. Rather, as Paul wrote Timothy, “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” It is all about the work of Jesus Christ and his Spirit.
That brings us to our final point: out of the water, but still a work in progress. This is brief. The Christian life doesn’t find an end in the sacraments. We don’t get baptized just to mark it off some religious list. The same could be said for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but sticking to this one today—baptism is not the end.
There’s one more key baptism passage, Matthew 28:18-20. It’s the Great Commission, “…Jesus came to [his disciples] and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’” Baptism isn’t an end to disciple-making nor is it the end of being formed as disciples. It’s also not the end of obedience.
In receiving the mark of baptism, whether they’re a young person, an adult, or an infant, the person baptized becomes a member of the church. They join brothers and sisters who are growing in what it means to be redeemed by Christ. That’s not, or at least it should not be, a solo journey, where we’re all on our own figuring things out. They join the body of believers, who have the opportunity and the duty to help one another.
This aspect of baptism does seem to have a bit in common with Christians in other traditions who practice dedication. Especially with infants and children, God’s people promise to join parents in the task of preserving what is signified; they join as friends, as future Sunday School and Catechism teachers, as schoolteachers, mentors, GEMS or Cadets or AWANA leaders, and people who simply may have the opportunity to influence that young one who we hope is a son or daughter of God. The community has the work of joining God to emphasize his claim on this child’s life; preserving the truth God is at work. When that’s accepted, like we saw last week in public profession of faith, the community, the congregation, the church rejoices with that person. That person continues to be a work in progress, growing, developing, and maturing in Christ.
With this big picture, we hopefully have a better understanding and deepened faith for how everything ties together in what God has given the church as well as in what he is doing. Baptism is so much more than showing off our babies so that we can “Ooh” and “Aah” over them and laugh as we see their reaction to the water. It is a precious moment, but it is too rich to simply gloss over. Let us always be mindful of what lies at the heart of this sacrament—that Christ’s blood alone can wash us clean! Amen.