The Vocation of St. Jesus the Baptist

In Christ Jesus, by your Baptism into Him, God is your true Father, and you are His own dear child.  He loves you and is pleased with you.  He hears and answers your prayers, pours out His Spirit upon you in peace, and gathers you to Himself, through Jesus Christ, your Lord.

Not only has the one true God become true Man in the Person of Christ Jesus, conceived and born of St. Mary; but, see and hear what this incarnate God does for you, in His own flesh: In the Love of the Father and the Holy Spirit, for you and for the redemption of the whole world, He takes His place with all the people in the waters of the Jordan.  To be more specific, He takes His place with all the sinners in their sinful predicament.  Though He is without any sins of His own, He submits Himself to the Baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, for the salvation of sinners.  By doing so, He enters upon the Way of His Cross; He takes upon Himself your suffering and death.

At the same time, and also for the salvation of all the people, it is in His Baptism that He receives, as true Man, the Spirit and the Promise of the Father.  His eternal Sonship is now also received and realized in His humanity.  The Holy Spirit comes down from heaven, in bodily form, like a dove, to rest and remain upon His Body of flesh and blood.  So is He anointed as the Christ or Messiah, to be the “Prophet, Priest, and King supreme,” and to baptize His people with the same Holy Spirit.

As the King, He takes responsibility for you, and for all the citizens of His Kingdom; He takes the government upon His shoulders, as we have heard and confessed throughout Christmas Tide.  He is the Prince of Peace after the heart of His own God and Father, and an everlasting Father in His own right.  For He is the New Adam, the Head of the New Creation, which lives in Him forever.

As the merciful and great High Priest in all things pertaining to God, He prays and intercedes at all times, for all the children of men; He sacrifices Himself, His Body and His Blood, to atone for the sins of the world; and He opens up heaven to all who believe and are baptized into Him, by the way of His own Baptism, His Cross and Resurrection.  In His prayer and His sacrifice, and through the waters of His Baptism, He brings you to the Father in and with Himself: reconciled to God; adorned in His righteousness, innocence, and blessedness; and blameless in body and soul.

And as the Prophet, who is the very Word of God made Flesh, He is the Voice of the Father to you.  He preaches the Gospel to you, which is the forgiveness of all your sins in His Name, and by this preaching He bestows the Spirit of His Father upon you.  With His Breath, He gives you His Life.

All of this, which He does for you, flows from who He is: Not simply who He is by nature from eternity — though that is the foundation for everything else — but, now also, who He is called to be in His human flesh.  That is to say, He does what He does, for you and for all, according to His Vocation as the Christ, the Lord’s Anointed, and as the true and perfect Man; as the promised Seed of the Woman, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of David, and of Mary; and as the true Israel of God.

Arising and emerging from the waters of His Baptism, as such a Man of God, He prays with the voice of faith; even as He also then preaches with the Voice of His Father.  In all things, indeed, He lives and He dies, He rises and ascends, in the love and the good pleasure of His Father.

Even more to the point at hand, He proceeds on His Way — from the Jordan River to His Cross and Passion — by the Word and Spirit of His Holy Baptism; which is to say, specifically, by faith in this promise of His Father: “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.”

On this basis, by such faith, He lives in love for His Father, and in love for His “many brethren,” who are children of God by His grace.  Not only that, but He lays down His life for you, as well, in order to atone for all your sins by His death — in the confidence that His Father will raise Him up again in peace — just as surely as He enters, and emerges from, the waters of His Baptism.

All of this He does and He accomplishes, for you and for “all the people,” in and with His Body of human flesh and blood: in order to save you for life everlasting with God in both body and soul.

And everything He thus accomplishes, fulfills, and receives in His flesh, He also credits to you, gives to you, and pours out upon you by grace, by His Word and Holy Spirit: With His Voice, which is the preaching of His Gospel; and in bodily form, that is, by visible and tangible means of grace, by the Sacraments, as “the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in bodily form like a dove.”

As the Word of God and human Flesh are one Christ, so are water and the Spirit one Baptism in His Name.  For the Lord your God is with you in the waters, even through death and the grave, into the Resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.  Therefore, as you pass through the waters of the Red Sea out of Egypt, and as you go through the waters of the Jordan River into Canaan, He is there with you; for He has been baptized for you, and you are baptized into Him.

Thus, you receive Christ Jesus, His God and Father, and His Holy Spirit, in your Holy Baptism: Not only the Son of God as your Savior, but His Sonship as your own, by the gracious adoption of God.  For just as Jesus is anointed by the Spirit to be the Christ, so are you anointed by the same Spirit to be a Christian.

This is who and what God calls you to be.  This is your first and foremost vocation.  Not your job, nor what you should be doing, but who you actually are in Christ Jesus: God’s own dear child, His beloved son or daughter.  What you do, and how you live, as a Christian, flows from that identity, in whatever particular place God has stationed you in the midst of your pilgrimage.

So often, you are tempted to define yourself, to evaluate your worth, and to discern the meaning and purpose of your life, on the basis of what you do and accomplish.  But that is really backwards, inside-out, and upside-down.  It is a basic form of works righteousness, which simply cannot give you life or save you.  It leads to pride and arrogance, or else to despair on account of your sins.

Repent of your sins, and do good works of love, to be sure.  But do not define your life by either.

No, dear child of God, it is not what you do, neither your works nor your sins, that define your life.  Rather, by the Word and Spirit of God, you are a new creation, a new person, a new man or woman: Indeed, you are a child of God, a beloved and well-pleasing son of God in Christ Jesus.

And now it is who you are, by His grace, that defines and determines your life in His peace.  For you live by faith in His Word and Promise.  You live by the Holy Spirit, who has been poured out upon you generously through Jesus Christ your Savior, by the virtue of your Holy Baptism in His Name.  You live in the sure and certain confidence of your dear God and Father; for you are His true child, and He loves you, now and forever.  You live in the hope of the open heaven, which Christ Jesus has opened to you by His Cross and Passion, and in His Resurrection from the dead.

Do not be afraid.  He is still with you in the waters, and He will bring you safely through.  As death no longer has any dominion over Him, neither does it have dominion over you.  You live in Him.

Here, then, is how you live as God’s own dear child: I urge you, first of all, to pray, as the Lord Jesus prayed throughout His earthly life and ministry, and as He ever lives to intercede for you.  Pray, with all boldness and confidence, as the Lord Himself has taught you and invited you to pray: in the certainty that you are heard and answered.  Do not suppose that it will do no good, nor as though you must bargain with God or twist His arm to help you.  But pray as a child to your Dad, to your true God and Father in Christ, who loves you and withholds no good thing from you.

And as you sanctify your days with the Word of God and prayer, do your job, fulfill your duties, carry out your responsibilities, and love your neighbors well, in whatever particular tasks your dear Father has given you to do.  Not as though your life depended on it, but to please your Father, and to serve and care for your family, for your brothers and sisters in Christ.  Your place in His family is not at stake, nor His love and good pleasure, which are yours for the sake of Jesus, your Savior.  But your good works of faith and love are pleasing to your God and Father, because you are His own child, and because you are pleasing to Him in that same Lord Jesus Christ, His beloved Son.

The Truth of the matter is in the Word that He speaks to you in the Gospel, and in the Flesh of Christ Jesus, in which that very Word is fulfilled for you: Repentance and faith, the forgiveness of all your sins by His Cross, and the righteousness of God in His Resurrection from the dead — all of these are accomplished for you in Christ; and everything that belongs to Him, is now yours:

His Father and His Sonship are yours.  His Spirit and His holiness are yours.  His heaven, and His Life everlasting in body and soul, all of this is yours, now and forever.

For the God and Father of your Lord Jesus Christ has given you the new birth of water and His Holy Spirit, and has forgiven you all your sins by the Gospel of His Son.  So shall He also keep your body, soul, and spirit blameless, unto the Day of Christ Jesus, your Savior, when He comes in glory to judge the living and the dead.  The One who calls you is faithful, and He shall do it.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The New Creation in the Baptized Body of Christ

Here is the New Creation that God the Father makes by His Son and with His Holy Spirit.  It is in the Body of Christ Jesus, the incarnate Son; and the Life of the new heavens and new earth is in His holy and precious Blood.  For He has come in the flesh to receive and bear the Spirit on behalf of the children of men; in order to pour out the Spirit upon them, and to give them new birth as children of God.

This is what He has done for you, and given to you, by the washing of water with His Word in Holy Baptism.  In this way, by this means of His grace, He has manifested Himself to you, and made Himself known to you.

Otherwise, because of sin and death, you did not know Him; you would not and could not know Him.  Nor could you have found your way to Him or figured Him out.

But, see here, He has come to you.

From before the foundation of the world, He has known you in His love; and so has He come down from heaven to raise you up with Himself, to give you Life with His God and Father.

It is for such Life and Love that He conceived you in your mother’s womb and gave you birth; and for such Life and Love that He has recreated you and given you the new birth of Holy Baptism.

Before you ever called upon Him, and before you even knew to pray, or how to pray, He has answered your prayer and met your deepest need and longing with Himself.

He has done away with death by taking away the sins of the world.  As the Lamb of God, He has borne them in His Body to the Cross, and He has given Himself into death as the Sacrifice of Atonement.  He has poured out His Lifeblood, for you and for all, to redeem you from death, and to grant you His own divine Life by the Spirit.

It is for this purpose that He comes to St. John, to be baptized by him.  He enters the waters of the Jordan in His own Body of flesh and blood, conceived and born of St. Mary, in order to achieve and establish the salvation of the world.

On the one hand, He receives your sins, and the sins of the whole world, into His flesh; so that, by the shedding of His Blood, all those sins should be paid for, and death thereby undone, the devil defeated.  In this respect, He is baptized into your death; because He makes His Body mortal with your sins, in order to open the way for your mortal body to pass with Him through death and the grave into the Resurrection of the Body and the life everlasting.

Therefore, on the other hand, He receives the Spirit of His God and Father into His flesh; so that His own flesh and blood — bearing the Spirit to and from the Cross, and in His Resurrection from the dead — His own flesh and blood should become the first fruits of the New Creation.

In this, also, His divine Sonship from all eternity is realized in His humanity, so that He might become the firstborn of many brethren.

As pivotal as the Baptism of Jesus was for Him, for His Life and Ministry, and for His great work of Salvation, so pivotal is your Baptism for you.  In those waters of the font, your body of flesh and blood has been cleansed of all your sins and set free from death.  And at the same time, you have received the Spirit of Christ Jesus and the gracious adoption of His God and Father.

This now is your life, even in your flesh here on earth, and as it shall be in the resurrection of your body forever and ever.  For the flesh of Christ is your Anchor in the Paradise of the New Creation, your Stronghold in the new heavens and the new earth.  What He has already accomplished, once for all, by His Baptism into death, is fully yours by your Baptism into Him.

Therefore, your labors are not in vain, no matter what you may seem to be accomplishing (or not) in this fallen world.  Nor do you bear children for calamity — whether your infants live but a few days or to a ripe old age.  Because you and your children are the blessed offspring of the Lord.  It is no longer the legacy of sinful Adam, but the inheritance of Christ, the Second Adam, which belongs to you by His grace.

That is no fickle or arbitrary thing, but a sure and certain promise, a sure and certain hope, in His own crucified and risen Body.  As you are baptized into His death, so do you live in His rising.  And as the Spirit remains upon His Body, so does the Holy Spirit, the Author and Giver of Life, rest and remain upon you.  And so shall He raise you up at the last, even forevermore.

In the Body of Christ, God the Father has built a House that stands fast and shall not fall.  And you now live in that House.  So, too, the Body of Christ is the Father’s true Vine, in which His whole Vineyard lives and grows and prospers.  And from His Vine you drink the sweetest Wine of all, which is the holy and precious Blood of Christ, as of the Lamb unblemished and spotless.

So does the Lord your God rejoice over you with gladness in the midst of His Holy City, His true Jerusalem, in heaven and on earth.  For you are His beloved and well-pleasing child, and He shall permit no evil, nor any harm to befall you, in all His Holy Mountain.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I Baptize with Water that You May Know Christ

Concerning himself, John does not want to speak.  He is the voice who cries out about Christ the Lord.  So when he speaks, he would speak only of Him.

When pressed for an answer, John chiefly confesses who and what he is not.  In particular, he is adamantly not the Christ; nor is he worthy to assume that office and role.  For he is certainly not the Redeemer of Israel; nor would his whole body and life be adequate or able to redeem anyone from sin and death.  Rather, he too relies upon the Christ to whom he points with his preaching.

Nor is he Elijah.  Although, it is true that he comes in the spirit and the power of Elijah, as the Lord spoke by the Angel Gabriel, concerning St. John, at the annunciation of his conception and birth.

He will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children, and the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God, by his preaching of repentance and forgiveness of sins in the One who comes after Him.  For that is St. John’s special office and role as the Forerunner, who goes before the face of the Lord to prepare His Way.

In this respect, though he is not that Prophet, like Moses, who would actually be the Word of the Lord in human flesh — for that Prophet is none other than Jesus the Christ — yet, St. John is something uniquely more than any other Prophet, because he ushers in that very Word-made-Flesh in person.

Although he is not the true Light, which, coming into the world, enlightens every man, St. John is a witness to the Light, so that, by his testimony, all might come to know and believe in the Light.

That is why he baptizes — in the wilderness on the far side of the Jordan — in order that you might know, through the waters of Baptism, the One whom you otherwise do not know.

This is the Way of the Lord that St. John prepares: namely, through the waters of the Jordan River, out of the wilderness, into the Land that God has promised.

The true Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, passes through those waters on His Way to the sacrifice of His Cross in Jerusalem.  And it is by His Cross that He accomplishes — for you and for all — the repentance that St. John preaches.  So it is, that, by His death, you are turned back to God in faith, and you are turned to one another in love.

For it is by His sacrificial death that your sins are atoned for — by the Blood of God Himself — and your iniquities are all forgiven (they are remembered no more); and God’s righteous wrath and anger are spent (upon His Son in your stead) and are thereby removed from you.

This Baptism with water now saves you by this forgiveness of the Cross of Christ.  And it is by this forgiveness of your sins that you know the Lord your God rightly, and you are reconciled to Him, and you are returned to Him: to God the Father, by the Spirit, through Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son.

It is in your Baptism that the Lord God makes His Name known to you; not as your adversary or an enemy, but as your own dear Father in Christ Jesus.  So that, now, you call upon the Name of the Lord your God, and you lay hold of Him by faith in His Word and promises.

And though you are not worthy of the least of all His grace and mercy toward you, yet, by virtue of your Baptism into Christ, you are fed from His hand here at His lavish Table.  And in this great Feast, the wilderness has become an oasis of peace, and this house a holy and beautiful Temple.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Always More Gifts in the Name of Jesus

When Dr. Norman Nagel was asked, back in 1980, what the coming decade would hold for the Lutheran Liturgy, he answered in a way that was so typical of his whole evangelical theology: As always, he said, there would be God’s giving of His gifts.  Always more gifts; sometimes more than we can manage, an embarrassment of riches.  But still God keeps on giving, and what He bestows upon His people is nothing less than Himself.

Anything can be turned into a cliché, and all of its contours flattened into abstract generalities. But Dr. Nagel has it right.  For such is the grace of God, that He pours Himself out — the Father in the Son, the Spirit by the Savior — so that His divine eternal Life becomes yours, that you might live forever in His Love, and that you should be a son of God in Christ.

Though it does not yet appear what all this means, and though you cannot fully comprehend its significance, because it exceeds your imagination, hopes and dreams, there is nothing abstract or generic about this Life and Sonship, which you have been given in Holy Baptism.

St. Paul, elsewhere, describes your Baptism as a circumcision made without hands.  And today you have heard him say that, by your Baptism into Christ, you have become a descendant of Abraham, an heir of all the promises that God gave to Abraham — the promises he sealed unto him, in his flesh, by the covenant of circumcision.  Thus are you blessed by God, and you inherit, not simply a plot of land in Palestine, but a sure and certain place in Paradise with all the saints in Light.

For your Holy Baptism unites you with Christ, in His Cross and Resurrection, and clothes you with His righteousness and holiness, so that everything that belongs to Him now also belongs to you.  Just as He, first of all, by His circumcision, became the recipient of God’s promises to Abraham.

He lives by faith in those promises, as true Man, but He is also their fulfillment, as the promised Seed of Abraham.  He is the very One to whom the covenant pointed: God’s Word made Flesh.  The humiliation that He suffers, and the blood that He sheds, in His circumcision, culminates in the suffering and death of His Cross.  Then and there He makes Atonement for the sins of the world, and He reconciles the world to God; so that, in His Resurrection, God justifies the world with the righteousness of His Son.  That is what He gives to you, by grace, in your Holy Baptism.

Neither your Baptism, nor circumcision, were ever intended as works by which man would justify himself before God.  These are, rather, the sacramental signs and seals of God’s Word and promises, all of which are fulfilled in Christ Jesus.  He is subject to the Law of circumcision, so that, in His own flesh and blood, the covenant is completed and established for you and for all.  That is to say, He is the Son of Abraham who receives everything God swore to give to Abraham, and in His Resurrection those gifts become the possession of all who are baptized into Him.

The promise is there, already, in the Name of Jesus, which God gave by the angel Gabriel.  Like the Son of God Himself, this precious holy Name is also a pure gift of divine grace.  It confesses that Yahweh saves His people from their sins; and that the Baby conceived and born of St. Mary is Yawheh in the flesh.  Both God Himself and His promise become flesh and blood, for the Word of God from all eternity, now in time becomes true Man.  Therefore, not only in Holy Baptism, but also in the Holy Communion, the promise of salvation is given to you in the flesh of Christ Jesus.

As the promise and the flesh of God are one and the same, in the Person of Christ Jesus, so are you redeemed and saved in both body and soul, in your flesh and blood, as well as in your soul and spirit.  That has significance for the way in which you love and serve your neighbor with your body, in view of the fact that your body shall be raised from death and the grave to the life everlasting.  What you receive and do with your body matters, because your body shall be raised up and glorified forever in the Body of Christ Jesus.

As He received His Name at His circumcision, so have you received His Name in your Baptism.  Not that you are called “Jesus,” but that He and His salvation have become yours, by His grace.  For, in naming you with His own Name — that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — He truly conveys Himself to you.  In this, His face shines upon you (without scaring you to death!); He blesses you with His Glory (not for destruction, but for Life); and He grants you real Peace through His forgiveness of your sins.  For where sins are forgiven, and God Himself does not condemn you, there is no longer any fear of death, but only grace, mercy, and peace, and life and salvation.

This is, indeed, what the Lord Jesus has accomplished for you.  He is as good as His Name: By His Cross and Resurrection, He has saved His people from their sins, and He brings them into the safety of eternal Life with His God and Father in heaven.  This is what your Baptism has given to you, to start with, and no less so the preaching of the Gospel.  It is through such speaking of His Word that the Lord your God blesses and keeps you in His true Peace, both now and forever.

It is through this speaking of His Word that He keeps on giving more gifts, which culminate and center in this Holy Sacrament of His Body and His Blood.  In this eating and drinking of Christ, you are living already in the eternal Eighth Day of His Resurrection and of the Life everlasting.

Which puts this New Year of His grace, and each and every day and night of your life on earth, into the proper perspective of eternity.  For you are the Lord’s, and your Life and Salvation are safe and secure in Him, today, tomorrow, and forever.

In the holy Name of Jesus. Amen.