Baptism of Our Lord B 2021

I want to begin today with a story of a man, a perennial common man who could fit the name of every single one of us here today, but for the sake of today lets call him Alex. When Alex was young he had dreams of simultaneously becoming a famous musician, a rich lawyer, the prime-minister of Canada, and the deadliest special forces soldier in the world. Alex had been told by his mother that he can be and do whatever he set his mind to, and Alex’s mind is overflowing with wants and desires. Alex wants it all, and by golly he’s going to get it – or so he believes. But by the time Alex’s great grandchildren are 16 years old, Alex knows that he can’t even go to the bathroom by himself. We come into this world as babes – unable to go to the bathroom by our own will or power and we go out of this world just the same. So it is with the Christian life. The Baby cannot by their own reason or strength believe in Christ or come to Him, and they have not yet developed the fanciful idea that they can. When this baby is an old man near death he again is left without any fanciful idea that he can by his own ability come to salvation, because he has seen how weak we are as humans, how sinful, how ignorant, how powerless under the weight of our own fallenness. The baby and the octogenarian together know truth of the spiritual doctrine of our inability – “I have fallen and I can’t get up.” Yet Christ does not leave the lowly Christian alone to die the eternal death, but He snatches and gathers them into His arms, Baptizing the baby, and communing the elderly – forgiving them all their sins, and strengthening them unto eternal life. This – is the message of today.

And John appeared. These are the words that our Gospel reading begins with today. The suddenness of these words captures perfectly the hustled nature of of Mark’s Gospel. There’s no long explanation of who John is. There’s nothing about his parents or his birth in this gospel account. For sure, the gospel of Mark can leave us feeling a little bit discombobulated. Known as the fast-paced gospel it’s written in a way that cuts directly to the point. In doing so it has cut out a lot of the context on John and his office as the forerunner that we have in other accounts of the gospel. But what we do have here in Mark is the context of John as a messenger sent into the wilderness to prepare the way of Christ. As is common with OT prophets of which John is one, he comes to us in the wilderness. He isn’t speaking from a high throne in the city centre, but from a barren, wild, unkempt, and hostile place. This is a dirty and gritty context for John to be ministering in. And John himself is a dirty and gritty individual, clothed in camel’s hair, eating bugs. This John is a wild character. But what other kind of a man could carry out the task laid before him? Since John’s birth it was prophesied over him that he would prepare the way for the Messiah. Perhaps you know the words of the Benedictus, the Song of Zechariah, “you my child shall be called the prophet of the most high, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His way.” Even before they were born Luke recounts for us that John recognized the presence of His unborn Lord while they were both still being formed from within their mother’s wombs.

John’s whole life had been nothing but preparing to prepare the way. Now that time had come for this wild man to do the wild task of welcoming in the wild God. So he entered into the desert and he began his work. The Song of Zechariah prophesied over him tells us what that work was; “to give knowledge of salvation to the people of God in the forgiveness of their sins.” And that is just what he did. He proclaimed to all a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. But this Baptism of John, it is not to be confused with the Baptism of Christ. You see, in the time of John’s ministry the Jews had a custom of entering gentiles into the Israelite community by means of baptism. This baptism was a ritual cleansing whereby they would signify that flesh and soul was being cleansed of its ceremonial uncleanness, and that they were coming into the congregation of holy people. This signified that when a gentile was converted he was cleaning himself of his pagan gods, his pagan customs, his lawlessness etc. But when John proclaimed this baptism he was flipping this practice on its head. To understand this it’s helpful to look to John’s condemnation of the Jewish leaders and religious elite who were pleading their ethnicity as cause for eternal security wherein he said; “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. 10Even 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.” John was saying here, do not presume that it is only gentiles that must repent or only gentiles that must convert. Yes you may well have the circumcision of the flesh, but you must needs have the true circumcision, the circumcision of the heart. It is here that we find the Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. It is here. It is in this desert. This barren-place. It is not a place of hope, of life, of opportunity. It is a place of hopelessness, death, and absence of opportunity. The Barren-place, is where hope is lost. Either everything went wrong in your life and you ended up in a barren place, losing everyone and everything, left in isolated solitudinal emptiness. Or maybe it’s the coming across a barren place that has made you lose hope, having perhaps witnessed a horrific tragedy; a natural disaster, the death of a loved one, and the fleetingness of our security nets and walls of safety. But God does love barren things does He not? Barren lands; Sinai, Horeb, Israel, the whole middle east. Barren women; Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, the mother of Samson and the mother of John the Baptist. And what normally comes from Barren things? Well nothing of course. Yet, it is exactly from these barren things, these barren places, these barren people that God brings fruit and life where there is nothing. The people of Israel had forgotten that they were and always have been a barren people. They forgot that they were the seed of a 100 year old man and his 90 year old barren wife and use their title as Abraham’s seed as a sign of superiority of themselves over the gentiles, when in reality being Abraham’s seed, by flesh in birth, or by promise in the spirit, or by both, means that you are the fruit of something utterly barren, the children of impossible promise, a work of divine creation. Our existence is a show of God’s power of creation as we saw it read to us from Genesis – not our worthiness or superiority over others. To reference John once again, this shows little more than that they have within themselves the worthiness of the stones on the ground. They are dust. We, are dust. Have we too forgotten this? Yes. Every day we forget this.

I don’t know where you are in life right now, or rather, where you think you are. Perhaps you’re doing well for yourself, or seem to be anyways, you have a spouse, children, a job you love, savings in the bank – or maybe you have experienced great pain and great loss and carry that as a great sorrowful burden with you through every day. Whichever group you resonate with I tell you this truthfully, you have as much value in yourself as the dust of the earth has. This is the desert. There’s a lot of dust here. There is only dust here. This realization that you have nothing, that you are nothing. Or, if you are anything, its something bad, something that ought to be hidden, a shameful thing a guilty thing. A wretch. This is the desert. You are the desert. You are barren. This is the message of the Law. It shows us what we are not, namely, good people with a right to exist, or a reason to be loved within ourselves. It is here that all are leveled to the ground. No matter who we are or what we’ve done we are all in the very same place before God and He is in the very same place above you regardless of who you are or what you have done. There is no reason in yourself for God to love you.

But you are not alone in the desert. For John appeared. And he appeared not to mock or scorn you for being nothing. But to make known to you God’s salvation by the forgiveness of your sins. As we say at funerals and at ash wednesday, we are dust. And we repent in sackcloth in ashes. But God shouts back I love dust. Adam was formed from the dust, created in the image of God Himself and into this dust-man God breathed the breath of life – into Adam’s nostrils the Word says. Face to face God meets you in the dust, to create you in His image. In Christ, the image of the Father. In Baptism. In the spiritual desert, when we are broken by the Law, our sin revealed, our hearts contrite and our spirits poor our dryness and thirst drives us – forces us toward the waters of Baptism where that prophetic voice proclaims – I love dust. It proclaims, come and be baptized, and wash away all your sins. It is here that we find the next words of the benedictus become real to us, “the dawn from on high shall break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.” It is here from this voice calling out in the desert that makes known to us our salvation in the forgiveness of our sins that that light finally breaks through to us. It’s in our suffering and guilt, our sin and shame, our contrition, and our repentance that we find the voice of light and hope in Christ for us. And here, the Baptism from on high shall break upon us to give life to those who sit in the dry and arid desert, suffocating in the heat and drought of isolation, suffering, lock-downs, death, sickness, poverty, and every pain or sorrow that afflicts them. This Baptism is for you, this light, this life, it’s for you. You are the one who sits in the darkness and the shadow of death, in the desert, in the pain, in the suffering. And Christ, who is for you, came down to earth to you who were stuck in the muck and mire of your sin, sat in it Himself, He sat in your sin, and you in His righteousness. And as He rose, you rose with Him.

And behold, the dawn broke – and the heavens were ripped apart. Schizo – torn, not separated or unzipped so that they can be placed neatly back together after this message is conveyed, but ripped in two. This heaven that was and is so sought after by the “religious” who idolize this transcendent and exclusive VIP club rewarded to all the “good” and “righteous” saints who climbed the spiritual ladder of morality and piety is torn in two forever, the ladder is burned, and all hope of creating union with Christ through the work of our hands is obliterated forever. Why? So that He could drag you in to be with Him. This is the gospel, and the Gospel is full of “ripped-apart-ness.” The heavens, the bread, the Body, the temple veil, the chasm between God and Man, the presumptions of the pharisees, the guilt of the sinners, the plans of Satan, the chains that bind you. This is the gospel. Everything that separated you from God has been ripped apart. When Christ, the sinless Son of God was baptized into the muddy waters that countless sins had been washed away in, the rules for what was right were ripped apart. The righteous Son of God became sin for you so that in the tearing apart of His own flesh, the wounds of which He still bears, your sin might be ripped apart, your condemnation might be ripped apart, and the power of the devil over you, even the devil himself, might be ripped apart. In the Baptism of our Lord the Father reached through heaven to grab you and bring you home with Him, in Him, through Him, for Him and to Him. So that you, in Christ, are now God’s son, in whom He is well pleased. As you came to Baptism through the desert, to the surrender to Christ in faith which lays hold of grace, so Christ accomplishes your salvation in His body in the desert through His baptism. Just as the desert drives you toward Baptism, through Baptism, The Holy Spirit drove Christ into the desert for you. There He overcame the temptation of the devil and came out victorious on the other side, and began preaching, healing, and casting out demons.