First of all let me say thanks to those of you who helped out in my absence. I
especially appreciate Ellen and Tina tending to ministry while I was gone. I
spent the final days of the year in Florida visiting Michelle’s family. From
what I hear, the weather here may not have been all that different from what we
had in Florida.
A New Year brings changes. We have a new Congress, a new Governor, a new
senator, a new majority in our state houses. And those who have just entered
those positions understand their tenure as a new beginning for the state and the
country. I’m not saying I buy it; I’m just saying that we’re all hearing that
narrative in the media.
This is the beginning of a New Year here at First Baptist. Although New Years is
not a religious holiday, many churches arrange their church’s plans and budget
around the New Year. Many of us make resolutions in the New Year to change the
way we live.
So I think it’s appropriate for us as a church each year to look at the previous
year, give God thanks for what happened, or at least for most of it, and start
asking ourselves again how we understand our path forward as a congregation.
New starts are nothing new in the Bible. The Israelites observed a New Year
festival every year called Rosh Hashanah. It’s celebrated, depending on the
year, in late September or early October. They blew the ritual trumpet or Shofar,
they offered sacrifices, and they observed ten days of repentance leading up to
the Day of Atonement.
But the biggest new start in the Old Testament is actually the flood, in which
all the evil of the world was supposed to have been drowned. The idea was for
the world to return to the state it had been before Adam’s sin in the garden.
But as you know, things didn’t stay that way. Israel went through one
devastation after another. It got so bad that people started talking again about
God doing something to return the world back to its pristine state. Some places
in the Old Testament talk about earthquakes that are so devastating that every
evil person and thing perishes.
One book which was around during the time when Matthew was writing his gospel
was a set of visions experienced by the Old Testament prophet Ezra. This book
wasn’t in our Old Testament, but it was and is still considered to be scripture
by some churches.
It talks about God sending the Messiah to earth at the end of time. But instead
of dying and coming back to life, the Messiah dies, along with everyone else in
the world, and no one comes back to life. And after seven days the world
reverted back to the way it was at creation. That’s how God got rid of all the
evil in the world.
The reason I mention all this is to show just how little hope people had in the
world. They really thought the world was so bad that the only way God could fix
things is by coming here and destroying all the bad people.
So when Jesus’ disciples started talking and writing about the meaning of his
life, they had to address that same concern, the sense that the world needed a
fresh start, and that God was about to hit the reset button.
They agreed that God was going to hit the reset button on the world. But God was
also going to try and redeem those who were willing to be redeemed. The process
wouldn’t all happen at once. Jesus would come as God’s own Son and teach people
how to live, and those who followed him would survive the whole cosmic cleansing
process.
The thing is, Matthew doesn’t come right out and say that. He uses symbolism to
say what he means. This story is about Jesus going out to see John the Baptist.
John was widely considered a prophet by the people, someone not beholden to the
political and religious establishment.
He stood out in the desert, reminiscent of Old Testament prophets, and he told
people that God was going to hit the reset button, if you will. He told people
they needed to turn away from the bad things they had been doing and get ready.
John was good. Lot’s of people left their homes and went out into the desert to
see John. Many of them were very convinced by his preaching, and they symbolized
their choice to live differently by being baptized in a river.
The funny thing was, Jesus came out to be baptized too. Now if that’s confusing
for you, don’t worry. John was confused too. It’s not like Jesus needed to
repent of his sins. He didn’t have any. So John was really thinking to himself,
“Why are you here?”
John tried to prevent Jesus from being baptized. He said, “Buddy, I should be
baptized by you. You shouldn’t be asking me to baptize you.” If I were John I’m
sure I’d be saying the same thing.
But Jesus wasn’t coming to show people that he was turning from his evil ways.
He had a sense that he was God’s son, and that God had planned for certain
things to happen in certain ways so that he could save the world from sin. He
was intent on doing exactly what God wanted him top do, even if it meant being
baptized.
So John baptized him, and as he came up out of the water, Matthew talks about
three things that happened. Now in order to understand what these things mean,
you have to realize that Matthew is making very clear references to the Old
Testament.
Matthew isn’t just talking about Jesus being baptized. He wants to tell us that
Jesus is God’s son, just as the people of Israel always considered themselves
collectively to by God’s son. Jesus is Israel personified. His life is the life
of the people of Israel.
He goes down to Egypt like they did. He escapes an attempt by a ruler to kill
babies like Moses did. He spends time in the wilderness being tempted like they
were. He teaches people the follow the law on the top of a mountain like Moses
did.
And Matthew compares his baptism to Israel passing through the Red Sea on the
way to the Promised Land. Only this time, the Promised Land Jesus leads them
toward is God’s reign over the earth.
Jesus’ baptism is like the beginning of that process of God getting rid of the
bad stuff and making everything new again. As I said, Matthew talks about three
things that happened at Jesus’ baptism which give it meaning.
First, the heavens were opened. Now if you know anything about your Old
Testament, you know that these words usually are followed by God revealing the
future to a prophet, who then tells the people what he saw.
The Israelites believed that the sky was not just space, but a dome the
concealed what was going on in heaven. So when God wants to let people know
what’s going on in heaven, God has to open the heavens. Specifically, Matthew
alludes to Ezekiel 1, where God begins revealing God’s plans for the future to
the prophet Ezekiel.
This opening of the heavens means that Jesus will have a clear vision of what
God is doing in the world. As the son of God, he’s really the only one qualified
to know those things. So if he knows that much, people better listen to what he
has to say.
Secondly, and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier, God’s spirit
comes down from heaven like a dove and lands on him. Now the Israelites were
used to talking about God’s spirit descending upon a particular person, like a
king, and enabling that person to lead people on God’s behalf.
But the bigger symbolism is that Jesus comes up out of the water, and then you
have a dove landing. Now people have proposed all kinds of explanations of what
that meant, but the only place I know of in the Old Testament where you have
both someone coming out of the water and a dove landing is after the flood.
Remember that Noah sent out a dove after 40 days of flooding to see if the water
had receded enough for him and his family to leave the ark. At first the dove
came back an olive branch, and then it didn’t come back. That’s how Noah knew it
was safe to come out.
The point here is that Jesus’ ministry is like a new, clean beginning not just
for him, but for the world, just as the flood was supposed to be a fresh start
for the world. He would begin the process of preparing the world for cleansing,
one which would be even more radical than the flood.
The last thing that happens is that a voice comes from heaven and tells everyone
that Jesus is God’s son, and that God is pleased with him. Again, all the words
used are from the Old Testament. They mostly are spoken of either the king of or
Israel as God’s son. But in Jesus’ baptism, he, like Israel itself, now becomes
God’s son.
Because he is God’s son, because he has access to knowledge from heaven, because
he has chosen to do the things God wants, his life is a new start for the whole
world.
It’s like the sunny morning after a three day blizzard. It’s like getting the
news that your cancer has been cured. It’s like being promoted at work to the
position you’ve always wanted. It’s like watching your child graduate and
looking forward to a completely new phase of his or her life.
The problem many of us face is that we’ve lived long enough to have gone through
many fresh starts. And sometimes those fresh starts are quickly followed by the
same old same old. After enough of those, you start to wonder, as the people of
Israel did, if anything will ever really change.
Sometimes we think that starting a new relationship will be a fresh start. We
won’t make the same mistakes we made in previous relationships. We won’t have to
put up with the things we didn’t like in the people from our previous
relationship.
But then when we get into that new relationship, we start to realize that the
new person isn’t perfect either. And we’re still the same person we were before,
and sometimes we end up in the same place.
Sometimes we think that a new job will make everything better. We won’t have
that boss who drove us crazy at the last job. We’ll be more appreciated at the
new job for what we do, and we’ll be paid better too.
But before long we realize that the new job has its setbacks too. We find that
while we bring the same strengths we did to the last job, we bring the same
weaknesses too. And we find that there are still some employees who rub us the
wrong way.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve spent a lot of time in my life thinking
that if I just found the right new beginning, and if I just tried hard enough,
that I would somehow be happy in a way that I hadn’t before.
But this passage reminds us that in the larger scope of things, Jesus represents
the new start, that fresh beginning, that clean slate we all wish we had. He
makes all things new in a way that a new job or a new relationship or a new home
or a new car or a new “you fill in the blank” never can.
None of those things can make us right before God. None of those things can give
us peace that lasts. We’re always going to have trouble with our relationships.
Those of us in the working world are always going to worry about our jobs. We’re
constantly going to watch our possessions wear out, and we’re constantly going
to be replacing them.
But being Jesus’ follower transcends all of that. He never gets old, he never
gets stale, he doesn’t need to be replaced, we never have to fix him, we never
need a new start without him.
Every time we pray, every time we think about what God wants for our lives,
every time we try to figure out how to do a better job of trying to be his
disciple, every time we turn to him in a time of sadness or suffering, every
time we look for strength to overcome an addiction or a weakness or a health
problem, he’s always new. There’s no cleaner slate in the world.
Baptism is a symbol of liberation in Christ. It is the promise of freedom to all
who believe. Nowhere is that more evident than in slavery time in the American
South. White Christians frequently qualified the Gospel by insisting that
baptism changed only the slave's eternal status, not their earthly condition.
But try as they might, they could not keep the liberating power of the Gospel
from finding its way into the hearts and hopes of the Africans.
So in 1807, a Kentucky slave woman named Winnie was disciplined by the Forks of
Elkhorn Baptist Church, where she was a member, for saying that "she once
thought it her duty to serve her mistress and her master, but since her baptism
she had never believed that any Christian could keep slaves."
Talk about a new start! If you’re looking for a new beginning, know that in
Jesus the slate has already been wiped eternally clean.
If life seems dirty and messy and sometimes irredeemable, if it seems as though
there’s nothing pure left in the world, nothing that hasn’t been tainted by the
evil of this world, remember that we serve one who brought a new beginning, the
new beginning to end all new beginnings.
But that new beginning isn’t simply about God needing a fresh start after
watching people continue to repeat the same mistakes people have always made.
Jesus is a new beginning for us. For 2000 years Christians have dated the
world’s history around that new beginning.
God wants to give you a fresh start. God wants to cleanse and flood the hurts
and the pain so that we can finally rise up out of that mess, forgive ourselves
for all the things we dislike about ourselves, make peace with those we’ve hurt,
and hear once again those same words Jesus heard: this is my child, the beloved.
In all of you, God is very pleased.