January 13, 2008
Baptism of Jesus
Pastor Harry Mueller

It has been a wonderful week and I am on a high as I come to preaching today. First we had a great group of people here yesterday in Tidemann Hall as we thought about and discussed the bible. It seems to me is would be an answer to any pastor’s prayer to have the kind of group we did yesterday who are willing to give up a Saturday morning and join others in such an endeavor. In addition, Martha and I had fun hosting the church council at our house last Tuesday and now this weekend we have Leti Sagasti here visiting us. Leti was an exchange student from Argentina who lived with us from 1999-2000. Lastly, I was asked last November to write the daily devotionals for the Luther Seminary web page called, God’s Pause. They have been appearing this week and I’ve been getting e-mails and phone calls from people around the country, who have been reading them. So this has been a great week for me. Plus, I have had this story about the baptism of Jesus on my mind since last December when I wrote the devotions.

In one of the devotionals I mentioned that I once served a congregation in which we had about 50-60 baptisms a year. They were a fertile bunch. We actually were a young congregation and we had a lot of adoptions too. So I gathered parents and godparents together each month and we had a chance, as we approached a baptism, to talk about the meaning of baptism. People would ask: why do some churches dunk a person under water and others just sprinkle a little water? Or they would ask, What about me, I was baptized as a Catholic do I need to be re-baptized as a Lutheran? On and on the questions would go. I loved this because I thought if we can help parents with their understanding of baptism then when their children grow they can help teach them. And they must teach. There was one question that I absolutely loved. It was the question, Why did Jesus need to be baptized? He didn’t sin! I loved this question. I loved it. It gave me a chance many times to retell a story I had read in the old Lutheran Standard magazine.

There was a nurse who worked with new born children. It was either at Fairview or St Mary’s hospital. She was a good Christian woman. She was very sincere. And in the course of her work she baptized many children at the hospital. If there was any little crisis with a child in her unit she baptized the child. She was responding to the old fear and concern that if a child dies before they are baptized will they be accepted into heaven? One day she came to her pastor in great distress. She confided that she had mistakenly baptized a Jewish baby!!! What should she do? It gave rise to the article which grew out of the pastor’s counsel to her. She had been thinking of baptism as a necessary thing before death. To put it in my words…It was like cheap fire insurance. If you die before you are baptized you’ll go straight to hell. But her pastor helped her understand that baptism was for life not for death. It comes at the beginning of life in the community. It comes so that we can live with the awareness of God’s promise in our lives. Oh, how I loved to talk about this with the parents. Oh, how I loved to impress upon them that we need to teach our children this. It is especially important with teenage suicide rates rising year after year. There are kids who feel hopeless. Baptism is for the beginning of life in the community and it is the beginning of a life lived in the light of God’s promises. This is what we teach children and we want them to know and feel.

So the question: “Why was Jesus baptized?” was fun. It was Jesus stepping into the flow of the river and into the flow of God’s involvement in history with us. When Jesus stepped into the river he stepped into the water as had Moses. Moses was the liberator who brought people out of Egypt. When Jesus stepped into the water he joined the flow of history beginning with Moses and declared that this liberation was not just for Israelite men. It was for women, children, lame, deaf, blind, Samaritans, and slaves. It was for all. Jesus joined into course of God’s involvement with us.

Or when Jesus stepped into the Jordan he joined with Joshua who had stepped in to the Jordan and led people into the land of promise from the wilderness. Jesus was saying and demonstrating that the promise was for all people. It was for Jews, Gentiles, slave,free, male and female, straight, gay, rich and poor.

Jesus also was stepping into the history of his predecessor Elijah, who had stepped into the water. Elijah was the one who had the temerity and strength to confront the king. When Ahaz had called Elijah a “troublemaker” because of his complaints that the king was not setting the right priorities and not caring for the sick and the poor then it was Elijah who said right back to the king, “No it is you King, who are the troubler!” Check this out it is in the book of Kings. Jesus stepped into this history in his baptism.

So when Jesus stepped into the water he stepped into all this history. In so doing all the history of God’s grace that had flowed toward us continued and Jesus lifted it to a new dimension. And it is very important to affirm that it will not stop. We need to teach and preach that. God’s grace will not stop flowing.

I have two more short stories to tell that illustrate this truth. When I took my first call as a pastor in the Pacific Northwest, Martha and I rented a house right on the edge of Puget Sound. The great North Wet. We could look out our bedroom window and see the tide water coming in and going out. It was that close. It was a beautiful setting but it had one problem. On the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of December, every year we lived there, when the moon’s pull on the tides due to the changing equinox and usually low pressures due to the stormy weather the tide water would come up and up and up right over the bulkhead and right into the basement. There was nothing you could do to stop it. It came up and over the stones, through the foundation and right into the basement. We learned that we couldn’t stop it. We had to adjust to it. We got everything up and out of the way of the salt water for the six hours or so that the tide was there. Then it would repeat the next high tide.

I saw this in another place some years ago. When I was doing the interim in Cottage Grove there was a man in the congregation who lived right on the edge of the Mississippi river down here by Cloud Island. That spring there was a lot of snow and a fast melt than the river flooded. He asked if there were people who would come to his place and help sandbag. As I stood there helping sand bag and watching the water rise I again was impressed how little we can do to stop the rising water. When it starts coming it just keeps coming and coming and coming. As I looked across the wide expanse of the Mississippi there I thought about God’s grace. My friends God’s grace is like that! It keeps coming and coming and coming and you can’t stop it. Why was Jesus baptized? Jesus stepped into the flow of grace that had been coming through Moses, Joshua, Elijah and it flowed through him and it is still flowing. He lifted it to a new dimension and we can’t stop it.

God’s grace is upon you.

Amen.

Pastor Harry Mueller