Baptism of our Lord

Matthew 3:13-17 - Baptism of Our Lord - January 11, 2015         
There Must Be Something in the Water

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I recently heard a new song by a popular country music singer named Carrie Underwood.  I’m not really a fan of her music, but the theme of her song really impressed me, because it deals very clearly with a Christian theme, which itself is pretty remarkable for a song that has over 5 million views on YouTube.  It’s called Something in the Water, and refers very directly to the Sacrament of Holy Baptism.  I think it’s commendable for someone in today’s increasingly hostile climate to sing a song like this.  But, as has always been the case with country singers who sing about God, it also has much to be critiqued.  

She begins her song by saying she’s stuck in the drudgery of a sinful life: “No way out, no one to come and save me; wasting a life that the Good Lord gave me.”  Then someone told her, “I’ve been where you’ve been before.”  He then opened her eyes and told her the truth, saying, “Just a little faith, it’ll all get better.”  So then she says that she followed the preacher man down to the river: “And now I’m changed – And now I’m stronger – Oh, there must’ve been something in the water.” 

Like I said, there’s much to be commended here.  It’s pretty clever.  But as it often is with popular Christian songs, it’s not always what’s said (although it very often is) as much as what remains unsaid.  So now as I use parts of this song as a sort of outline, I’m going to pick it apart a little bit at a time, and also point out where it makes some good points. 

Songs like these tend to focus highly on what we experience rather than on the bare truth of the matter.  That can be fine in a song that’s kind of telling a story.  But know that this experience doesn’t need to ring true for everyone.  And so we can’t look for an experience in order to feel the same way that the confident and rejoicing singer feels.  The truth, however, applies no matter what.  And this is why Lutheran hymns are so doctrinal.  It’s not because they’re irrelevant this way, but because it’s the only way to safeguard their relevance to you.   Our hymns don’t invite you to join in an experience that you may or may not understand.  Our hymns invite you to listen to what God says.  And that’s a good thing.  Now, it’s the truth that applies no matter what.  It’s the truth that we have wasted the lives that the good Lord gave us.  It’s true that there is no way out and no one on earth to save us.  This is the result of sin.  But to be clear, our sin is not just a ruined opportunity for something good that could have been.  What, after all, would be the opposite of wasting your life?  Spending it wisely?  Doing everything you were supposed to do?  Fulfilling the law?  Think about it.  How can one spend the life he has in any other way than by wasting it if he can’t even live his life without sinning? 

Baptism is not just for those who are burnt by life.  It’s for those who are born spiritually dead and bound for hell.  We are born in sin.  We are conceived in sin.  In a manner of speaking, our life is wasted the moment it begins.  It isn’t just when we are particularly down and out because of our bad decisions that we need the pick-me-up of God’s amazing grace.  No, we need his grace from the beginning to the end of our lives.  Paul Gerhardt preaches it well in his hymn, All Christians Who Have Been Baptized:

You were before your day of birth,
Indeed, from your conception,
Condemned and lost with all the earth,
None good, without exception.
For like your parents’ flesh and blood
Turned inward from the highest good,
You constantly denied Him. 

This experience applies to you.  So what is needed?  We need a Savior.  It’s no doubt true that in our darkest hour our need for salvation becomes the most clear.  And this is God’s doing.  But we need to know what our darkest hour truly is.  It’s not just when we realize what we have done and left undone – oh, this can be discouraging enough.  But it’s all the more when we recognize what we are – what we have no power not to be: poor miserable sinners.  Our confession of sins reflects this.  We begin and end with a confession of what we are, and in the middle we confess what we’ve done.  Our sins are the symptoms of our sinful nature.  Bad trees bear bad fruit.  And the tree that bears no good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 

So what do you need?  You need the righteousness of another.  You need the fruit that Jesus, the good tree, has borne.  You need the perfect life that you have never been, nor will ever be this side of glory, capable of fulfilling.  You need not your life to turn around to put a smile on you.  You need Jesus.  He did not waste his life.  He spent it wisely.  He spent it by offering himself into the fire of God’s wrath in your place. 

In the song that I’m critiquing, I maybe shouldn’t be too hard on it for not specifically pointing us to Jesus.  It’s sort of implied.  And that’s part of what makes it so clever as a popular song.  But we need to do more than imply as Christians in the church.  We need to be explicit.  We need to understand why and how it is that the waters of Baptism actually give us what we truly need.  We need to know what is in the water.  Jesus is in the water.  This is what’s so significant about his Baptism.  He has placed into the water of our own Baptism exactly what sinners need – sinners who have no power in themselves to stand before God. 

It is as Paul Gerhardt says:

In Baptism, we now put on Christ—
Our shame is fully covered
With all that He once sacrificed
And freely for us suffered.
For here the flesh of His own blood
Now makes us holy, right, and good
Before our heav’nly Father. 

John knew that Jesus was without sin.  He said that he was the one who needed his sins washed away, not the other way around.  But Jesus who had no sin of his own insisted: “Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”  Notice that Jesus says us.  Not me.  Us.  It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.  He and John fulfill all righteousness.  How?  Because by being baptized in the Jordan by John, Jesus manifested (epiphany) the great exchange between sinners and God that he became a Man to accomplish.  He was baptized not because his own righteousness was not complete and perfect – oh, it was – but because all righteousness was not complete and perfect.  Your righteousness, my righteousness was not complete and perfect.  Jesus could have lived a thousand perfect lives in obedience to the law, but it would have done us no good if what he did were not offered to us as a covering for our sin.  The world’s justification is nowhere to be found or accessed unless Jesus gives it to us.  He gives it to us in Baptism.  He puts in the water. 

“But I need to be baptized by you,” said John.  And so you do.  But in order for Baptism to do anything for anyone, in order for you to say, “Jesus baptized me,” he needs to make it more than a symbol of your faith.  He needs to make it the object of your faith.  He needs to make Baptism the means by which we lay hold of and receive everything he himself has done for us.  And so it is. 

Jesus teaches us what faith holds onto.  He fulfills all righteousness by taking upon himself the whole world’s sin and by giving to the world his perfect obedience.  This is why he invites all nations to be baptized.  How do we make disciples?  How does God extend his mercy beyond Jerusalem and the Jews?  By baptizing.  What’s in the water?  For Jesus, it was the world’s sin.  That’s what he got out of it.  For us, it is the perfect life of Christ.  That’s what we get out of it.  As the Lamb of God he suffered for our sins.  As God’s dear lambs we are clothed and made white in his blood. 

All righteousness is fulfilled when the righteousness of Jesus is made accessible to us when it is made yours.  This is the meaning of his words to John.  The righteousness you need to stand before God your Father is the righteousness that Jesus accomplishes.  It never becomes what you have done.  This righteousness is yours by faith.  Faith comes by hearing that your sins are forgiven.  Our sins are forgiven in Baptism.  As Peter preached on Pentecost:

“Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.”

The song I’ve been critiquing says: “Just a little faith, it’ll all get better.”  But faith is not a medicine that makes problems go away.  Faith is what grasps the full and holy cure.  It lays hold of that which is complete.  This is what Jesus invites us to embrace.  Because Jesus gives to us in the water the clear pronouncement of his Father that we are also his beloved children, and that he is also well pleased with us.  He gives to us in the water his Holy Spirit who gives us new life by faith.  As the Apostle writes,

not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Does it get better?  Well, life is certainly better when you have peace with God, when you are righteous before God by pure grace, when God does not regard any of your sin, when you know that you will live forever despite sickness, death, and persecution.  Yes, it gets better.  But only after it gets worse.  The devil targets those who are born to God.  When Jesus was baptized he was immediately driven into the wilderness and tempted by the devil.  After receiving divine approval, he suffered Satan’s scorn.  But he endured it for us.  He was tempted in every way, but without sin – for us. 

A little faith makes everything better, not because it causes problems to melt away.  It simply doesn’t.  It invites stress into our lives that only a Christian can know.  But since faith clings to Jesus, since faith always returns to its source, our faith also embraces what makes all things new – that makes all sins, and death and sorrow pass away.  He who conquered the devil with the word of God gives us the sure word that our Baptism saves us despite the lingering sin and affliction we see in life. 

“Now I’m changed.  Now I’m stronger,” sings the singer. “Oh, there must’ve been something in the water.”  What is this change?  What is the strength that Baptism gives?  St. Paul tells us what the change is: 

How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

As St. Paul also says after listing off the sins of the flesh that inherit eternal death,

And such were some of you (were). But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.   (1 Corinthians 6:11)

We are washed in the water.  As the singer says,

Felt love pouring down from above
Got washed in the water, washed in the blood
(that’s the best she gets in the song – the closest she gets to forgiveness – about the God-Man taking our sins away)

The washing of Baptism cleanses us from our wicked works and produces a change of heart and behavior because it cleanses our hearts in the blood that bought us.  It gives us a new birth in the place of our corrupt birth.  But the change that Baptism effects is a change first of all in our conscience.  St. Peter says that Baptism saves, not by removing the filth of the flesh but by giving us a good conscience toward God.  That is, it gives and assures us of our standing before God.  This is a huge change.  And it is based on this change that we live as Christians in how we think and act.  Because this change means that our sin need no longer make us afraid of God’s judgment, because we have God’s approval.  We have his forgiveness.   The life we live we live by faith in Christ. 

We see death and sin in ourselves.  But our flesh is drowned and crucified with Christ.  This means that what Jesus died to take away cannot define us.  And so it doesn’t guide us.  He who was raised in glory – he defines us.  Our glorious life is found in him.  And so this glorious life we begin to live right now – albeit imperfectly – we live by faith.  Even when we die, this is merely the opportunity for Baptism to prove true and to be completed, because it is through death Christ won our new life and so it is through death that we finally inherit what we now see only by faith. 

So we are changed.  But we don’t look at ourselves to see this change.  And we don’t look at our faith to see our strength.  Because then what happens when we don’t feel so changed – when sin rises up and we want to take advantage of the urges to feed our pride and our greed and our lust?  Then what change do we see?  Then what strength do we find?  No, we must know and affirm with certainty what is in the water.  Pure forgiveness through the blood of Christ.  A new life that is set apart for us in him who lived and died and rose for us.  It isn’t what we put into the water.  It’s what we take out of it.  This makes us what we are.  Love doesn’t come pouring down from a silent heaven.  It comes pouring from the veins of the God-Man who in Holy Baptism has instituted an ever-flowing stream of mercy.  This is where love comes pouring down: where the Father gives you his approval, where the Holy Spirit claims you as his and joins you to Christ.  As Paul Gerhardt teaches the church to sing:

O Christian, firmly hold this gift
And give God thanks forever!
It gives the power to uplift
In all that you endeavor.
When nothing else revive your soul,
Your Baptism stands and makes you whole
And then in death completes you.  Amen.