[Special note: this sermon was given on the Sunday when Grace Methodist Church was celebrating its 150th anniversary. We had former pastors coming to share and a large amount of special music. As such, the sermon was shorter than usual]
If you prefer to watch or listen to the sermon rather than read it, it can be found at this link, which will take you directly to the sermon:
Today, we have a lot of guests to commemorate and celebrate 150 years of Methodism in Marcus and in the surrounding area. Because of that, it is worth sharing a few words about how it is that we got to reading this particular passage on this particular Sunday. For almost the entirety of the past six years, we have worked our way, passage by passage, through various books in the New Testament. Those who have been here over that period of time have gone through, in order, Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the Gospel according to Matthew, the letter of James, the book of Hebrews, Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, his first letter to Timothy, the letters of John, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and his second letter to Timothy. Just a few weeks ago, we started through the Gospel of Luke.
We jumped forward, for now, over most of the first passages, because they will fit in perfectly with the seasons of Advent and Lent. We just spent the past two weeks considering the ministry and teaching of John the Baptist. When I first looked at what passages would fall on what Sundays, I got a little nervous because I thought, “Oh my goodness, we cannot possibly look at the genealogy of Jesus on the day we have so many guests here.” And then, once I thought about it, I realized that it is actually a perfect passage to consider, because it does what we are doing, which is paying careful attention to how the past informs the present, about how the faithfulness of God in days gone by undergirds and encourages us to be faithful in our turn today.
Luke not only draws a connection between what God was doing in and as Jesus with the long history of God’s people, as Matthew also did, he goes the next step and makes it clear that the work that God is bringing to its culmination in Christ is not just the fulfillment of all the promises made to the Israelites, but he continues back in time past Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, and moves back to the earliest people. Just as it was not a coincidence that, when Matthew was writing primarily to Christians of Jewish ancestry, he traced the lineage of Jesus, he did so through the kingly line and back to Abraham. It is also not a coincidence that Luke, the Christian of Gentile ancestry and writing primarily to Gentile Christians and having traveled with Paul in his ministry to the Gentiles, shows that Jesus is not only the savior of the Jews, but he is also the savior of the Gentiles. The past is never really gone. It always continues to impact us, even when we don’t realize it.
Because of all the things going on this morning, I need to keep my remarks relatively short, so I am going to get right into one of the most important parts of this passage. We have remarked, in recent weeks, about how John the Baptist would absolutely have looked the part of an Old Testament Israelite prophet. The things that strike us as completely strange would have been absolutely the very things that made people think that he was who they all thought he was. We read that the crowds were coming, that tax collectors were coming, and that soldiers were coming and all of them asked what they needed to do.
In today’s passage, we read that “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too.” It is easy to miss things, especially if we aren’t looking for them. As Luke tells the story, Jesus was, to the outside observer, just another person in the crowd. People weren’t expecting anything from him the way they were expecting things from John. John was on the lookout for the one who would come after him but most people wouldn’t have noticed anything strange about Jesus until he was baptized.
In that moment, we get one of the most clear Trinitarian passages in the entire New Testament. We have Jesus, the Son and Word of God being baptized, the Holy Spirit descending on him in the form of a dove, and the voice of the Father acknowledging him publicly and emphasizing their connection. We only get all three at the same time every once in a while but those moments are always hugely important.
It is important to highlight something about Jesus’ baptism. Earlier in this chapter, we read that John had gone out into the country around the Jordan river and he was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now, though, we have Jesus coming to be baptized. With everyone else, we can assume, quite rightly, that they are going into the river, confessing their sins. However, it is a crucial part of our faith that Jesus did not have sins to repent of.
I don’t remember where I first encountered this idea. I am sure that I am not the first person to see this connection. Once I saw it, I knew that I could never unsee it. The more I consider this crucial event in the life of Jesus, the more I am convinced that it is meant to draw our attention to a very particular part of the Old Testament. Every year, the nation of Israel celebrated a special day, the Day of Atonement, known by its Hebrew name “Yom Kippur.” This is the day when atonement was worked out for the people. Everything else people did was important for following God but this was one of the crucial rituals that the people did in order to do what God had commanded them to do in order to maintain the covenant on their side.
This ritual involved sacrificing a bull for the high priest to atone just for himself. Once that clearing of the ground was completed, there were two more animals, two lambs that were brought forward. One of them was slaughtered and its blood was taken into the holy of holies where its blood, its life, was applied to the lid on the Ark of the Covenant. It was at that moment, when that life was brought into God’s presence as a substitute for the life of the people, that atonement was worked out.
We often see that lamb echoed in the story of Jesus and that is quite right. He absolutely is the one who, through his own death and resurrection, then ascends and takes his own blood, his own life, to offer it on the heavenly altar in the heavenly temple. The book of Hebrews makes this abundantly clear.
What gets less attention is that second lamb, what has traditionally been called the “scapegoat.” The ritual shows us that we do not only need a substitute life, offered on our behalf and in our place, we also need someone to be designated as the sin-bearer, to bear and bear away our sin, so we can live for God. After the blood is applied to the altar, the high priest comes out of the Temple, lays his hands on the other lamb, confesses the sins of the people over it, with everyone around expected to be confessing and repenting of their own sins, and then, a man who is designated for the task, leads the lamb out of the walls of the city into the wilderness. That lamb isn’t killed as part of the ritual, but the wilderness is a dangerous place for the lamb.
We don’t always think about that lamb, but I want to read between the lines of our passage this morning just a bit. There are some huge similarities between the role of the scapegoat in the Day of Atonement ritual and what we see in the baptism of Jesus. We have a group of people all in a posture of repentance, we have one whom is designated, by God, to bear and bear away our sins. We don’t get to hear what Jesus has to say while he is praying, but we read that he is praying. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was confessing the sins of the people, just like the high priest would do over the scapegoat.
Maybe that feels like I am taking things too far, but that is because Luke interrupts the action to tell us about the genealogy. The very next words, and we will get to those next week, are, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness,” where he would face temptation for forty days. It is either a massive coincidence that Jesus is led out into the wilderness right at this moment, right at the exact time we would expect it to happen if we were meant to see a parallel between him at his baptism and the scapegoat, or it is on purpose. Speaking personally, I find it hard to believe it is merely a coincidence.
The point I am trying to make this morning, and this ties together the story of the baptism of Jesus, the genealogy of Jesus, and the special character of our celebrations this morning, is that the past matters. It does not matter in the sense that we are held captive by it, or at least it must not be the case that we are held captive by the past. It does matter, though, because none of us are who we are in isolation from the fact that we came from where we came from. Things are only in place today because people in the past put them there. We can celebrate what God is doing in this place and through this congregation but we didn’t plant this church. Faithful men and women did that one hundred and fifty years ago.
That is the thing about heritage. It is only worth anything if it continues to make a difference. If someone spoke about the pride they have about being the descendants of the ancient Babylonians, we would look at them strangely. It might not be totally clear what they mean by that. Maybe there is something worth claiming from that past, but that would be something that they would have to explain. The reason is because Babylon doesn’t exist any more. There is another city built on its ruins. To claim Babylonian heritage and not the heritage of the modern city that is there would be strange.
The reason for that is that, no matter how big the Babylonian empire was, it fell. It isn’t there any more. At some point, they lost their power and so they ceased to be a force to be reckoned with. To be clear, I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, as the Babylonians were clearly not always a force for good. The thing is, claiming a heritage only really matters if it not only used to matter but still matters.
We need to be about the business of living into our heritage of faithfulness which means that we need to be grateful for the people who came before us, for the people who worked hard and lived in faithfulness that enables us to also live in faithfulness, but we must never forget that any heritage that is worth anything is one that is worth continuing. If our grandparents were faithful, and so we don’t see the need for us to be faithful, we would be betraying that heritage and celebrating something that maybe used to be there but isn’t there any more.
Today we commemorate 150 years of faithfulness and we have heard from folks who have served in the past and we will hear from more folks who have provided leadership in the past and have gone on to provide leadership elsewhere into the present. I urge everyone here to reflect on this, not for the purposes of focusing on what has been. Rather, I urge everyone to be asking this question, seriously and deep in your hearts: What does it look like for me to be an active part of this heritage right now? What do I need to do today, this week, yet this year, or into the next year to be a worthy heir of this history? What do I need to do, who do I need to become, in order to faithfully pass this heritage on to the next generations?
We give thanks for yesterday and we celebrate it this morning, but we must never forget that we are living in today and preparing for tomorrow. Let us do so with all our might. Let us pray.
AMEN