Say 'Yes' to the Dress

Opening Prayer

Let’s open with prayer. If you have a prayer concern, just offer it up out loud in this space. It can be a situation, a need, a family member or friend. When I sense we are finished I will close out our prayer.

Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Introduction

Last Thursday began the season of Epiphany, meaning “to appear”. This season celebrates the revelation of Jesus as the Savior of the world.

During Epiphany will do a series called The Hope of Glory. For the next few weeks will look at what the manifestation of Jesus means, and what it means for us.

This is also the season for making promises, isn’t it? We call them New Year’s Resolutions. We pledge to get in shape, lose weight, eat better, get more sleep, spend more time outdoors, stop smoking, and the list goes on and on. Have you made any resolutions this year? How are you doing?

My experiences with NY resolutions have been pretty much an exercise in futility! That’s a nicer way of saying that I blow it every time! Most of us do. We make these promises to do better, but then our old habits win out and we’re left feeling like failures - which drives us back to eating everything in sight!

Today we focus on the baptism of Jesus, and our own baptism, and I wonder if we ever feel the same way about baptism as we do about our blown resolutions. We believe in Jesus, we prepare for baptism, and we make these promises regarding our faith and intention to follow Jesus. We often refer to baptism as our “declaration of faith”. And we do all this with good intentions and a real desire to live up to the promises we make at baptism. But then life happens and temptations come and we blow it. I don’t know about you, but I have not lived up to the ideal that I expressed in my baptism.

This can leave us feeling like failures in the eyes of God. We can carry a vague sense that He is not pleased with us. That we’ve let him down and disappointed him.

But what if our baptism was less about the promises we make to God and more about the promises He makes to us in baptism?

This morning’s message is called “Say ‘Yes’ to the Dress”. I’ve riffed off of HGTV’s series where you following a lady as she tries on different dresses until she finds just the right one, saying ‘yes’ to it. And this is a good mental picture as we think about our baptism and what God promises to us through it. In the ancient church, usually on Easter morning, those who were to be baptized would gather. They would remove their clothing (men and women separately) walk down into the baptism pool to be baptized, and then climb the steps leading out the other side, where a deacon would meet them with a white dressing gown that they would wear. This all symbolizes the transformation that the HS makes in that person as they pass through the waters of baptism. They say ‘yes’ to a new dress. But more important is what God promises to do to them and in them, and what he has promises to do to and in you.

This morning as we look at the baptism of Jesus, we see a prototype of what God says to us as we follow Jesus in baptism. You probably have not lived up fully to the promises of your baptism. The good news is that baptism is more about the promises God makes to you!

Identity

As Jesus comes up from the water, Luke portrays this intimate moment between Father and Son. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Here God affirms the identity of Jesus. His eternal Son, the one who has come to accomplish my saving work. In one sense, the identity of Jesus is not in question. The Son has existed as the Son for all eternity. But now God makes a royal pronouncement of Jesus as the Son of God.

This echos Psalm 2, a psalm read at the coronation of Jewish kings, which begins “You are my Son, today I have begotten you”. Kings were considered “songs of God” in the sense that they were the instruments by which God carried out his good intent for the people. it is in this sense that God now makes this royal declaration over Jesus. Here is the one whom I will work through to bring about my saving purposes for humanity.

In this we see a pattern for our own baptism.

To make God known (vs. 10-18)

Though the world came into being through Jesus, the world did not know him. When he came, we didn’t recognize him. We were like the Mona Lisa, completely ignorant of the face of our Leonardo di Vinci. And so “the Word became flesh and lived among us”. He came, he was born, to reveal the fullness of God’s grace and glory. He was born so that which was totally incomprehensible to us could become comprehensible. The Creator became like his created. Moses gave us the Law, the OT. The Law is good, and it reveals something of who God is. But in comparison to Jesus, it is only a dim light. Jesus is the fullness of God’s revelation to the world.

“No one has ever seen God” John writes. There are places in the OT where it says someone saw God. Moses saw God - or at least his back - as he hid in the cleft of the rock. The elders of Israel saw God on the mountain of Sinai when they received the law. Daniel, in a dream, saw God, or as he called him, the Ancient of Days. Isaiah said he saw the Lord seated in his Temple. Yet John’s point is still true. Whatever image someone may have thought they saw of God, they were only seeing a dim candle of who God really is. For it is only in the face of Jesus that we see the full radiance of who God truly is.

He made little of himself so that he could make much of you. By little, I don’t mean that becoming embodied like us was degrading. God is very pro-body. He created us to be embodied, and our eternal state is to be embodied in an incorruptible body. Bodies are good, and Jesus taking a body was not a degradation. He didn’t become less by becoming human. Rather, by little I mean that he humbled himself. He left his glory so that he could make us glorious. He suffered being unrecognized and rejected, so that he could make the Father known and so that we would find full acceptance. Jesus became a child so that you could become a child of God.

A crown of beauty

Jesus came to show us who the Father was. But his birth wasn’t just so we could gain knowledge about God. He came to restore the image of God in us. To restore the goodness and beauty God had intended for you from the beginning. That which was lost by the first Adam has been reclaimed by the second.

We hear this in the prophetic imagination who foresees what God would do for his people through the Messiah.

Isaiah 61:10–62:3 (NRSV)

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch. The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

This is a prophecy about the Messiah, but it is also what the Messiah will do in you as well. Listen to what he says:

He clothes you with salvation. He has covered you in a beauty befitting a royal wedding day. Many of us carry around a sense of shame or loss over our past. We sometimes feel a dirtiness that no amount of soap will remove. We feel unworthy to come to God. And yet this is precisely the reason Jesus came! And by faith in him he clothes you to stand without shame or fear in the presence of his Father.

He vindicates and will vindicate you. Some of you feel like you have perceptually been on the short end of the stick in life. You have been put down by others. Mistreated, despised, rejected, treated as unworthy. Whatever degradation you have experienced, whatever humiliation you have gone through, God declares you to be of infinite value to him. His incarnation proves this. And if you are this valuable to him, then he will raise you up and defend you in the sight of those who have treated you as an enemy.

He gives you a new identity. This is a common theme in Scripture, the idea of God giving a new name. God gave Abram, meaning “father”, the new name of Abraham, “father of many” when he promised him that he would father a great nation. He changed Hoshea’s name, which means “salvation”, to Joshua, meaning “God is your salvation”, thereby assuring Joshua of God’s presence and support as he led the tribes into the Promised Land. He changed Simon’s name to Peter, meaning rock, because it was his faith that would be the rock on which Jesus builds his church. In Scripture your name is your identity. Whatever is in your past, whatever people used to know you as, God has changed your name. You are not who you used to be.

He restores your beauty. That which you thought of as lost is being remade. That which you think is beyond redemption God will heal and restore. As Jesus shines so will you shine.

The incarnation is important because tells us something about God:

He wants to be known and therefore he came in person.

He is a redeemer, choosing to heal his creation instead of starting over.

He loves to the extreme, and is committed to do whatever it takes to rescue you.

He is humble and comes humbly to still be with you even now.

But the incarnation is important because it also tells us something about ourselves:

You have inestimable value and worth to God, regardless of the worth others may put on you.

If God wants to be known, then it must follow that you were made for relationship with him. And that this is the only place where you will find fullness of life.

You have a greater destiny than you may know. I know this often sounds cliche, but you were made for more.

The incarnation tells us in no uncertain terms that God IS with us. In the coming of Jesus he is with us in a very specific way, unmaking the curse of the Fall, redeeming us from the death consequences of sin, and restoring us to that place that he always envisioned for his human creation. When you look at a manger scene, don’t give in to nostalgia. Don’t only see the poor, meek and mild baby. See the God who sees you, and who pursues you all the way to wherever you are. He made little of himself so that he could make much of you.

Ministry time...

Communion

God is with us. As we gather around this table this morning he promised to be with us in a particular way, embodied in bread and wine as the signs of his flesh and blood given for us. Here we re-participate in God’s saving work which he has accomplished through Christ and we hold fast to the mystery of the faith: Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

Words of Institution

The Lord’s Prayer