Luke 3:15-22
January 12, 2025
“As the people were filled with
expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether
he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize
you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy
to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy
Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his
threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will
burn with unquenchable fire.’
So, with many other exhortations, he
proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had
been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all
the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting up John
in prison.
Now when all the people were baptized, and
when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was
opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.
And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am
well pleased.’”
When
I was growing up baptism was usually explained to us as the Holy Spirit using
the water to clean our souls the way that we use water to wash our hands and faces.
The explanation began by
saying that we are born with a kind of sin within us that goes along with being
human. Even a baby, who has done nothing
wrong, is tainted by the overall tendency of the human race to sin. I understood what was being said there, and
it makes some sense. The great
theologian Augustine of Hippo pointed out that babies are inherently
self-centered. They do not have the
capacity to look beyond the moment nor beyond their own immediate needs. That’s normal. There comes a point, however, where that
total self-centeredness turns into selfishness, into a me-first outlook, into
sin. Kids have to be taught to
share. Kids have to be taught empathy:
“How would you like it if she did that to you?”
Baptism is a sign that,
as a child of God, we are under the kind of parental care that not only
corrects us when we need it but teaches us to ask those questions of ourselves,
and connects us to a community of faithful people who share a commitment to seeking
the kind of maturity where we see that we are not ourselves the center of the
universe, but part of God’s wider project of creation. I have all sorts of beefs with Rick Warren’s
book The Purpose-Driven Church that was so popular a few years back, but
one thing I admire is the clarity and directness of its opening sentence: “It
isn’t all about you.”
The
Roman emperor Constantine, the one who first made Christianity the official
religion of his empire, was not baptized until he was about to die. He put it off and put it off for years,
because he considered baptism this way.
As emperor, he would do things that were clearly sinful and he did them
knowing so. He figured that he could do
all the sketchy things that went with the brutality of Roman rule as long as he
could, then at the last minute be baptized so that his sins would be erased
right before he went to judgement. That
seems like exploiting a loophole in the system.
Now, God’s grace is
certainly there for us no matter what. It
is there to be shared, though, not to be hoarded. It is there to enable us to follow Jesus, not
to enable us to continue in the same old ways that have landed us and others in
the same old trouble time and time again.
John compared what he did to what Jesus does
“by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but
one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong
of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and
fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and
to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with
unquenchable fire.’” [Luke 3:16-17]
That’s not so much a warning of the wrath to come as
it is a description of the difference that the Holy Spirit continues to make in
human souls and human lives as part of the redemption that Jesus brought into
the world.
If we are baptized only
because we are sinners, why did Jesus, who was sinless, go to John to be
baptized? Matthew’s account of Jesus’
baptism recognizes that
“John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I
need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” [Matthew
3:14]
Clearly there has to be more going on than a simple
ritual act of forgiveness. Jesus joins
his ministry as the Savior with our own lives, and brings us in line with the
Kingdom of God that he establishes not just in the abstract or in the time to
come or in eternity, but here and now – among us.
He
set himself aside, and took his place among ordinary sinners, and
“when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus
also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the
Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came
from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” [Luke
3:21-22]
Every first-grader knows what it means when one or two
kids cannot settle down and the teacher announces that nobody in the class will
be going to recess until everybody in the class is quiet. That made me angry then and it makes me angry
now. Why should I get punished because
of what somebody else has done? We all
come to accept that this is how the world is – that’s true. A factory upstream releases pollution into a
river and everybody downstream feels the consequences. It’s not fair. But it’s a good analogy for the way that we
are all tangled up in sin, even if it isn’t our own. And God does not just wash his hands of it or
stay out of it. He steps in to set it
right.
Then
he asks us to do the same thing: to set ourselves aside and, in doing that, to
live out who we really are as God’s own children, growing up into the likeness
of his Son, Jesus. Paul put it this way
in his letter to the Philippians:
“If then there is any encouragement in
Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion
and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same
love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish
ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than
yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the
interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ
Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” [Philippians 2:1-11]
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