The Father is pleased with your baptism

Luke 3:15-17, 21, 22 The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ. ¹⁶ John answered them all, "I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." ²¹ When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened ²² and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."

Your teenage daughter has won the lead role in her school’s musical. Your middle school son beat everyone in the conference track meet. Your 4^th grade child has all A’s on his report card. Your Kindergartener brought home a wonderful finger painted picture of your family. You take the programs and awards and report cards and paintings and you display them on your refrigerator; you make shadow boxes; you share the news via email; you text your friends; you have the kids call Grandma; you post the video on Facebook. You do all of this because you are well pleased with your children.

God the Father was well pleased with His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. Now, to the crowds that were gathered around the Jordan River that day, Jesus was nothing special. John was the special one. They were all wondering and asking if he could possibly be the Christ. John emphatically said, “No! But He is coming, and coming soon. And He is so much greater than I that I am not even worthy enough to do the most menial and lowly of tasks – untie His shoe.

So the crowd did not notice when Jesus came out to the Jordan that day. He was just another pilgrim, a Galilean, a Nazarene. Yet this pilgrim had come on a longer journey than that! For this One standing among the crowd had come down from heaven as God promised would happen. For this One standing among them that day was God Himself, Immanuel, standing in solidarity with His creatures. Standing with the human race against the evil one. His holy divinity combined with our lowly humanity. One of us, yet not one of us. Which would soon become evident.

For when Jesus is baptized, Luke reports, three things happened: heaven is opened, the Holy Spirit descends upon Him in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father could be heard from heaven announcing, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” Yes, here is the One who is greater than John. A man who is also God’s Son. He has already been announced by the angels, worshiped by the shepherds and adored by the Magi. He has received His name of Jesus because He will save His people from their sins. He has shed His first blood for humanity in His circumcision. Now He is all grown up and ready to carry out His work of salvation. And that pleases His Father in heaven.

The Father is so pleased that He doesn’t just hang up a shadow box or announce it a few people via social media. The Father rolls back the clouds and opens the sky so that the angels and archangels and all the saints already gathered in heaven might look upon this wonder in the making. The wonder of God as man, taking man’s place in the water. He is already taking the sin of us sinners. The water of His baptism means that the wood of His cross is not far away. Just as the curtain in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom when Jesus died on the cross, opening our access to God and the Holy of Holies through the blood of Jesus – so too, already here in Jesus’ baptism, heaven is torn open. His work of salvation has begun.

God in the Flesh is baptized! Humanity is cleansed, reborn, restored. The new Adam, the new head of humanity is baptized for the world, and in Him the whole world covered over in a gracious Flood. As God once baptized the earth in the Flood, and promised with the rainbow never to destroy the earth with water again, so here God immerses the whole world in the Person of His Son. When Jesus was baptized, the world was baptized in Him.

We need to see the Son being baptized. We need to witness heaven being opened. We need to hear the Father’s proclamation of pleasure. Why? Because of our sin. The Father is not pleased with you. He sees all the filth, rot and gunk you view and post on the internet. He is ashamed of your adulteries. He is insulted by your idolatries. He is appalled by your apathy. He is sickened by your selfishness. He is pained by your prejudice. He is disgusted by your dereliction of duties.

The other day in confirmation class I asked the students if they were good people. Every one of them assured me that they were. But I assured them that they weren’t. Nor am I a good person. And neither are you. Without Jesus in the Jordan, heaven remains closed to us. As closed as it was for our first parents after they went from actually being good and perfect people to becoming sinful and damned people. They were expelled from paradise into a world of death – a world of thorns, a world of pain and rebellion, a world of struggle and suffering. You’ve felt it. You’ve lived in it. You’ve groaned under it. You’ve contributed to it. The thorns of sin, the struggles of life, the pain of selfishness, the mourning of death. But what can we do? Without the washing of Christ, the gates of heaven are closed and guarded by fearsome angels with flaming swords.

But at the Jordan that day, heaven opened again! That is a phrase we should not take lightly. When heaven was opened before, God sent a flood to destroy sinful mankind from the face of the earth. He literally poured out His wrath upon humanity. This time God does not call down thunder or thrown down lightning. But He calls out His pleasure. Now God is using the flood of baptism – not to destroy sinful mankind, but to destroy sin.

As parents we are not happy when our children jump in mud puddles and get their clothes dirty. But our Heavenly Parent is well pleased that His Son jumped into the Jordan to begin becoming muddied with humanity’s sins. This is what God had been working towards for all of human history. That’s why Jesus’ baptism is so important. That’s why our baptism is so important.

One of the great sadnesses of Christianity today is that the baptized do not appreciate their baptism like they should. How many of us consider baptism as some kind of magical incantation spoken over the child to protect the baby for a little while? Or do we consider baptism a command by the grandparents in order to make them happy? Or is it a way to honor our good friends and family members by making them godparents?

We may think of baptism as something that happened in the past, at the font, as a child, but it doesn’t do us any good now. We do not take into account how to use our baptism for daily living. We fret and fuss and wring our hands over our sins instead of daily drowning our Old Adam in our baptismal waters and seeking God’s forgiveness in these waters of grace. We do not want the strong medicines that Christ prescribes for us – Baptism, Confession, Absolution, Holy Communion. We would rather wring our hands and drop our heads in despair rather than fold our hands and drop to our knees in prayer. We would rather recite slogans like “just say ‘no’” instead of saying “yes” to our baptisms. We would rather work on our “problems” and “issues,” possibly go see a counselor instead of dealing with the fact that we are the problem and the issue is inside of us and we need the Counselor of the Holy Spirit to descend upon us.

We are filthy with sin. Dead in unbelief. Children of Satan. Headed to hell. And we live that way, don’t we? We get filthy with arguments with our spouse, our gossip about classmates or co-workers and our short temper with our kids. We demonstrate our lack of faith in our worry – worry which is really fear, fear that God has stopped loving us, fear that God’s power is insufficient for our needs, fear that God doesn’t know what He’s doing. We live like we are Satan’s spawn with the smut, immorality and depravity that we allow in our daily living.

But we don’t have to live like that any longer. We have been baptized. We were saved and heaven was opened to us when we were washed all over.

I heard the story the other day of a grandmother who was going to be baptized and her whole family was there to watch. They had tried to tell the 6-year-old grandson what was happening, how Grandma was dying to sin and being baptized into Christ. As the worship service began, the 6-year-old looked up at the big cross above the altar. Then he leaned over and whispered to his dad, “Daddy, how are they ever going to get Mee-Ma up on that cross?”

The great news is we don’t have to go to the cross. Thanks be to God! Jesus did that for us. But there is a sense in which, when we were baptized, we did go to the cross with Him. Paul says in Romans 6: “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. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.”

That’s what the Paschal candle beside the font symbolizes. That special candle is only lit for baptisms, the season of Easter and for funerals. It symbolizes how baptism connects us to Christ’s death and resurrection. Shianne, who was baptized this morning and Samuel whose affirmation of baptism is today, have died. Like us, they have died to their sin. They don’t have to live in it any longer. Sin no longer controls their actions. The devil no longer has any power over them. Oh, Mom and Dad, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Shianne, Samuel and all of our baptized children are still sinners. And they are going to worry, befuddle and drive us crazy with their stupidity of sins. Yet, they have been given power. The same power that was given to us that day so long ago in our baptism at the font. The power that Jesus gave us that day so long ago in His baptism at the Jordan.

Jesus died. But He lives again. Jesus’ death and resurrection are now yours. They were given to you in your baptism. Every time you confess your sins and receive Christ’s forgiveness, it is as if you are being re-baptized. The Holy Spirit descends upon you to strengthen your faith. The water of the Son washes over you. The voice of the Father speaks His pleasure upon you. In the waters of baptism, Jesus’ baptism, life, death and resurrection are now yours. You, Shianne and Samuel have the power to live a new life. A new life of freedom and forgiveness. A new life, no longer lived for self and Satan, but a life lived to the glory and pleasure of God. A new life, even though we still live in the midst of this thorny, painful world of death.

Cherish your baptism. Remember your baptism. Celebrate your baptism. Live your baptism. For in your baptism, the Father has given you a new life. In your baptism, the Father has opened heaven to you. In your baptism, the Father is well pleased with you. Amen.