Baptismal Sermon- Joshua (god Saves)

Vicar Eric Baptismal Sermon “Joshua (God Saves)” Good Shepherd Sunday Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! I’ve been looking forward to this day for some time now. Originally I was excited because I thought I’d finally have a Sunday off, but as you can see, that didn't happen! I think it is exciting for every parent the day their child is baptized. But I think Tiffinie and I are especially excited, given the extent of Joshua’s sinfulness. You may be thinking, “wait a minute, he hasn’t even been born for month yet and you’re already talking about his sinfulness?” In a word, “yes”. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this child has been plotting and scheming against his parents since the womb. Over the weekend of December 30th, I preached a sermon at my vicarage congregation about finding peace. I started off the sermon by describing the lack of peace Tiffinie and I had been getting over some of Joshua’s in-womb antics, and this was all the way back in December! Apparently Joshua didn’t like what I was saying about him, so while I was preaching, he decided to try out some Jackie Chan moves on Tiffinie’s innards. If ever a child needed to be baptized, it is Joshua. I could tell you about the time he sent us on a 1 AM joyride to the hospital, only to decide “now’s not the time.” Or how he thought it would be funny to put threaten my job security… You see, there was this one weekend right around Tiffinie’s due date that my supervising pastor needed me to preach at all five weekend worship services because he was going on vacation. The pastor actually told Tiffinie’s belly, “Look son, if you care at all about diapers or health insurance, you will wait until after your father preaches to come.” So of course Joshua thought he’d teach us all a lesson by waiting several weeks to come out on Holy Week- only the busiest church week of the year. So my supervisor had to cover for me after all, and it looks like I’ll be a

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vicar for a long, long time. I could go on about all the trouble this little one has caused us already, but you get the point. If ever a child needed to be baptized, it is Joshua. Martin Luther thought of baptism as being a type of exorcism, probably due to his own experience with children (he had six himself!). In the order of baptism Luther prepared in 1526, twice he makes reference to exorcism. His baptismal liturgy begins with the pastor blowing three times under the child’s eyes, saying, “Depart thou unclean spirit and give room to the Holy Spirit.” His baptismal liturgy concludes also with a command for the unclean spirit to depart in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Luther did omit the exorcism portions in his 1529 version of the baptismal liturgy, likely due to the fact that Scripture does not speak of baptism in connection with exorcism. But it’s not hard to see how Luther and the pre-Reformation Catholics thought of baptism as a type of exorcism, especially if they dealt with children on a regular basis. Now some of you (especially those of you who haven’t had children) may be thinking, “How could anyone call such an adorable little baby like that a sinner?” Now, I’ll be the first to admit he’s a handsome little devil- he is his father’s boy, after all. But we must never forget that Satan wraps sin up in the most attractive ways he can think of! He wants sin to look pleasant; otherwise, we wouldn’t touch it! You may remember some of these scenes from The King of Queens, Bedazzled, and The Matrix; they show some misconceptions of Satan and how he tries to make sin look attractive. Let’s take a look.1 Satan wants sin to look attractive, not like the barrel of a gun. And this whole idea of the devil in a red suit with a pitchfork is a mythical or even comical creature, and is not based on fact. This makes Satan appear less threatening, and hell as more of an alternative to heaven than as eternal damnation. But Satan likes this; if we saw sin as deadly rather than attractive, we’d probably do a lot less of it.

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Doug thinks the devil has “red skin”; Elizabeth Hurley as the devil; woman in red dress/looking down gun barrel.

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Some will argue, “Sin is Adam & Eve’s problem. After all, I didn’t eat the apple!” But Scripture provides a response to that objection. Genesis 4 records the account where Adam & Eve’s firstborn son, Cain, murdered his younger brother Abel. Nobody had to teach Cain to sin. He inherited the sin of his parents, as do we. Last time I checked, nobody has to teach their children to sin. They do it all by themselves! And in Joshua’s case, it’s been happening since the womb. Now I don’t want to give you the impression that I am doing all this finger pointing at Joshua and blaming the world’s problems all on him. Sure, he’s part of the problem, but so are we. And that is why we also need baptism, whether you still need to be baptized or simply need to return to the grace God offers daily in baptism. I mentioned we don’t need to be taught how to sin; but we do have to be taught how to be good. And maybe that’s really the only difference between us and Joshua, or us and the uncivilized tribes of the world, for that matter. If we get caught doing something wrong, we know we will be punished. But that doesn’t make us better people, it just makes us more subdued.2 The truth is we all drive differently when there is a cop behind us, don’t we? A friend of mine was recently pulled over by a cop for blowing a stop sign and the cop asked him, “what’s the matter, didn’t you see the stop sign back there?” My friend answered, “No, the problem was I didn’t see you back there.”3 So we are really all in the same boat as Joshua: poor, miserable sinners, in need of some serious grace. So now maybe you understand a little better why I said I was so excited about this day. Now that Joshua is baptized, I can look forward to a perfect, well-behaved, demon-free, sinless boy, right? Obviously, that’s not true. True, baptism is a washing away of sin, or to put it theologically, baptism is a drowning of the Old Adam, but the Old Adam is a good swimmer! What we do have in baptism is the assurance of God’s faithfulness and grace for our whole life.

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Adapted from Miller, Blue Like Jazz Adapted from a story in Reader’s Digest

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We may stray from God, but God will never stray from us. In baptism, forgiveness of sin, rescue from death and the devil, and eternal salvation is given to everyone who believes God’s promises. In Baptism, God promises us that he will never abandon us no matter what, and he puts our name on the long list of saints in Christ Jesus who have gone before us. Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and baptism illustrates well the fact that Jesus is our Good Shepherd. That famous Psalm, Psalm 23 says: The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. 2 He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, 3 he restores my soul. David probably wasn’t thinking about baptism when he wrote this psalm, but God often uses our thoughts and actions for a greater purpose than we intend. Where but in baptism does God lead us beside quiet waters and restore our soul? Revelation 7 also uses the imagery of water when it says, “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water.” In baptism, the Lord acts as our shepherd, giving us forgiveness of sin, rescue from death and the devil, and eternal salvation. In our Gospel reading Jesus identifies himself as the shepherd David spoke of in Psalm 23 when he says, “I am the good shepherd… my sheep listen to my voice, I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” Just take a moment to think about this truly remarkable promise that God makes us in our baptism. We will live forever. We are saved from sin, death and the devil (pause). Tiffinie and I chose the name “Joshua” because it reflects the nature of God and his promise in baptism. Joshua means “God saves”, which is exactly what God does in baptism. This salvation is made possible because of Jesus’ death on the cross, as the apostle Paul says: …don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.4

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Romans 6:3-4

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God is not generic or abstract, but he comes to us in the flesh of Jesus, who lived and died for us, so that we could gather together and celebrate the new life he gives us in the waters of baptism. But we mustn’t mistake baptism for some magical ritual. If it were, we could simply fill up a bunch of water balloons and instead of dropping bombs on Iraq, we could drop some water balloons in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and have a revival! But that’s not how baptism works. It’s not helpful to baptize just anybody we can reach with the fire hose. We normally only baptize children of Christian parents because there is an important teaching component of baptism that can only happen in a Christian household. Often times we forget about this, and baptism turns into an occasion for something other than the child’s entrance into God’s family: we worry more about what we or the child are going to wear to the baptism than teaching him about Jesus; people come to church who normally wouldn’t only to “see” the child baptized but haven’t taken Jesus seriously enough to really know his teachings (or they just reject him outright); the sponsors often fail in their responsibility to promote the child’s spiritual well-being, instead focusing on buying them special gifts on holidays and birthdays; and the party often overshadows the baptism itself. But hear what Jesus has to say about baptism in Matthew 28: “Therefore, while you are going, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you.” Did you notice how Jesus connected baptism to teaching? God gives us his grace in baptism, but how are we to take hold of those promises unless we have faith in them? And how are we to have faith in these promises is we don’t even know what they are? And how can we believe in a God that we don’t even know? This is why baptism must happen in a Christian context. As Jesus said, the work of baptism is not done. We continue to teach, and this is why confirmation and continuing adult study are important. If we only baptize and stop short of teaching, we might as well go ahead with the water balloons. 5

Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” That’s how it is with faith, too. Today more and more people are taking faith for granted, not having their children baptized, not teaching them about Jesus, not taking them to church. We can’t assume that just because we were raised in the faith that our children will also believe. We didn’t pass our faith to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we could find that it’s too late, and we’ll wish that we’d taught them about Jesus. Being a baptized child of God changes the way we live our lives. We continually receive the grace God first gave us in our baptism each time we confess our sin and repent. That is why Luther said, “the Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism.”5 We already saw how the apostle Paul connected baptism to Jesus’ death,6 but his point is that we must not take advantage of this forgiveness Jesus offers. He says: What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? 2 By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 3 Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.7 And so it is not as if we can simply receive forgiveness and go on sinning… in baptism, we died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? This means we must not simply confess our sin, but we must also repent of it. We must be sorry enough over our sin to change our sinful ways. This is what it means to live out our lives of faith as baptized children of God. I’d like to leave you with a story I heard a while back about a boy and a priest that shows how absurd it is to use grace as an excuse to sin more. A boy went into a confessional box and 5

Martin Luther, Large Catechism: 4, 65 Romans 6:3-4 7 Romans 6:1-4 6

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told the priest, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I kissed an older girl.” “Who was the girl?” the priest asked. “Oh no, Father, I couldn’t tell you; I wouldn’t want to damage her reputation.” “Was it Brenda O’Malley?” “No, Father.” “Fiona McDonald?” “No, Father.” “Ann Brown?” “No Father, I cannot tell you.” So the priest said, “I admire your perseverance, but you must atone for your sins. Your penance will be five Our Father’s and four Hail Mary’s.” So the boy went back to his pew and his friend asked him, “How did it go?” The boy said, “I got five Our Father’s, four Hail Mary’s, and three good leads!”8 Each time we confess our sin, God washes it away and invites us back into the grace he first gave us in our baptism. But true confession involves repentance, which means we can’t go on living in sin. As we grow in our baptismal grace, God continually conforms us to his image as we grow in love and service. And so we live not for ourselves, but for God and others, living out our baptismal faith. We do this until the day when we are gathered around the throne of the Lamb, who will be our shepherd for all eternity. May God guide us in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake, and always lead us back to the quiet waters of baptism when we falter. Amen. And now may the peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

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Story adapted from www.sermoncentral.com

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