Sermon Illustrations for Baptism of Our Lord (2022)
Illustration
Isaiah 43:1-7
Noting that this lesson is a Word of God’s grace, John Calvin wrote:
... and indeed, the cause of salvation, and of all blessings we receive, is the undeserved love of God; it is also the cause of all our excellence; for if he judge of us according to our own qualifications, he will not value us a straw. We must therefore set aside every idea of merit, or of personal worth of which we have none, and must ascribe everything to the grace of God alone. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.VIII/1, p.323)
Picking up on this theme along with God’s intimate knowledge of us to which the lesson attests (v.7), Christian musician Ricardo Sanchez says, “God knows your sin but calls you by name.” Mother Teresa echoed similar themes, as she is quoted as saying:
God is love and he loves you and we are precious to him. He called us by our name. We belong to him. He has created us in his image for greater things. God is love. God is joy, God is light, God is truth.
These are all themes typical of what baptism is all about, which we celebrate today.
Mark E.
* * *
Acts 8:14-17
I found this troubling story in Philip Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Yancey relates a powerful and painful moment from the church of his childhood. Here’s what he wrote.
In the 1960’s the church deacon board mobilized lookout squads, and on Sundays these took turns patrolling the entrances lest any black “troublemakers” try to integrate us. I still have one of the cards the deacons printed up to give to any civil rights demonstrators who might appear:
Believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God’s word, we cannot extend a welcome to you and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly. Scripture does NOT teach “the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” He is the Creator of all, but only the Father of those who have been regenerated. If any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God. (Unanimous Statement of Pastor and Deacons, August 1960)
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly barring all black students. A few “liberal” members left the church in protest when the kindergarten turned down the daughter of a black Bible professor, but most of us approved of the decision. A year later the church board rejected a Carver Bible Institute student for membership (his name was Tony Evans).
In some ways, it’s hard to believe people demonstrated such racism. We know it happened. We also know it wasn’t new. In the first century, Jews had little to no regard for Samaritans. They were despised by most self-respecting Jews. The Samaritans accepting the Word of God and receiving the Holy Spirit was and is a big deal. It foreshadows what Peter will later declare in Acts 10. “God is no respecter of persons.”
Bill T.
* * *
Acts 8:14-17
One of the most delightful discoveries about the human genome is that we’re all different, but we’re also almost exactly the same! We are not different species, despite what the pseudoscientists suggest. One reason we can interbreed, something that appalls the racists, and affects the rest of us is that we are all one people.
The history of the rift between the Judeans and the Samaritans was complicated. Suspicion and hostility were rife on both sides. The Exiles led away to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple were the political and economic elites – many poor people remained behind to care for the vineyards, and they intermingled with the peoples imported to the land by the Babylonians in an attempt to disconnect those people from their homelands also. These people retained their own form of their Jewish identity. When the Exiles returned, expecting after a few generations to just take back their land from those who had occupied them for seventy years, neither side recognized the others as having a part in God’s plan. Attempts by some of the descendants of those who remained behind to help with Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the temple and the walls were rebuffed. Centuries went by and these peoples remained divided by their different versions of the same Holy Book and their separate temples. Therefore, Jesus told the shocking parable of the Samaritan who helped the Judean who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Those who heard this story would never have used the words good and Samaritan in the same sentence.
Okay, it’s back to Genesis 1, where God creates us all, female and male, one people. The apostles send Peter and John to investigate what Philip, the Greek speaking deacon, had been doing among the Samaritans. Surprise, it turns out that as far as the Holy Spirit is concerned, Samaritans are people like us.
It’s no different today. So, when some people are more likely to be killed than others, falsely accused than others, imprisoned than others, something is seriously wrong – in God’s eyes!
Frank R.
* * *
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Martin Luther concisely expressed the importance of baptism. He once wrote, “There is on earth no greater comfort than baptism.” (What Luther Says, p.61) In another setting he said of the rite:
For that purpose, Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, my righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life.
Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) offered reflections on the rite in line with Paul’s thinking (in Romans 6):
In other words, it is the replacement of the subject – of the ‘I.’ The ‘I’ ceases to be independent and to be a subject existing in itself. It is torn from itself and inserted into a new subject. The ‘I’ does not perish, but must let itself diminish completely, in effect, in order to be received within a larger ‘I’ and, together with that larger ‘I,’ to be conceived anew.”
In baptism, the old, selfish “me” gets smaller and is joined to a bigger, more faithful and loving “I” taking my place.
Famed New Testament scholar of the last century Rudolf Bultmann associated baptism with eschatological (future) thinking. He wrote:
[It is] to be open to God’s future which is really imminent for every one of us; to be prepared for the future... (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p.31)
Elsewhere, he describes this reality as a “free openness to the future... [which is] is freedom from anxiety in the face of nothing... Faith as openness to the future is freedom from the past.” (Ibid., pp.77-78) Someone who’s been baptized is a lot more daring, not so chained by all the dumb things she’s done or the boxes into which others have put him.
Mark E.
Noting that this lesson is a Word of God’s grace, John Calvin wrote:
... and indeed, the cause of salvation, and of all blessings we receive, is the undeserved love of God; it is also the cause of all our excellence; for if he judge of us according to our own qualifications, he will not value us a straw. We must therefore set aside every idea of merit, or of personal worth of which we have none, and must ascribe everything to the grace of God alone. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.VIII/1, p.323)
Picking up on this theme along with God’s intimate knowledge of us to which the lesson attests (v.7), Christian musician Ricardo Sanchez says, “God knows your sin but calls you by name.” Mother Teresa echoed similar themes, as she is quoted as saying:
God is love and he loves you and we are precious to him. He called us by our name. We belong to him. He has created us in his image for greater things. God is love. God is joy, God is light, God is truth.
These are all themes typical of what baptism is all about, which we celebrate today.
Mark E.
* * *
Acts 8:14-17
I found this troubling story in Philip Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Yancey relates a powerful and painful moment from the church of his childhood. Here’s what he wrote.
In the 1960’s the church deacon board mobilized lookout squads, and on Sundays these took turns patrolling the entrances lest any black “troublemakers” try to integrate us. I still have one of the cards the deacons printed up to give to any civil rights demonstrators who might appear:
Believing the motives of your group to be ulterior and foreign to the teaching of God’s word, we cannot extend a welcome to you and respectfully request you to leave the premises quietly. Scripture does NOT teach “the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.” He is the Creator of all, but only the Father of those who have been regenerated. If any one of you is here with a sincere desire to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, we shall be glad to deal individually with you from the Word of God. (Unanimous Statement of Pastor and Deacons, August 1960)
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly barring all black students. A few “liberal” members left the church in protest when the kindergarten turned down the daughter of a black Bible professor, but most of us approved of the decision. A year later the church board rejected a Carver Bible Institute student for membership (his name was Tony Evans).
In some ways, it’s hard to believe people demonstrated such racism. We know it happened. We also know it wasn’t new. In the first century, Jews had little to no regard for Samaritans. They were despised by most self-respecting Jews. The Samaritans accepting the Word of God and receiving the Holy Spirit was and is a big deal. It foreshadows what Peter will later declare in Acts 10. “God is no respecter of persons.”
Bill T.
* * *
Acts 8:14-17
One of the most delightful discoveries about the human genome is that we’re all different, but we’re also almost exactly the same! We are not different species, despite what the pseudoscientists suggest. One reason we can interbreed, something that appalls the racists, and affects the rest of us is that we are all one people.
The history of the rift between the Judeans and the Samaritans was complicated. Suspicion and hostility were rife on both sides. The Exiles led away to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple were the political and economic elites – many poor people remained behind to care for the vineyards, and they intermingled with the peoples imported to the land by the Babylonians in an attempt to disconnect those people from their homelands also. These people retained their own form of their Jewish identity. When the Exiles returned, expecting after a few generations to just take back their land from those who had occupied them for seventy years, neither side recognized the others as having a part in God’s plan. Attempts by some of the descendants of those who remained behind to help with Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the temple and the walls were rebuffed. Centuries went by and these peoples remained divided by their different versions of the same Holy Book and their separate temples. Therefore, Jesus told the shocking parable of the Samaritan who helped the Judean who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Those who heard this story would never have used the words good and Samaritan in the same sentence.
Okay, it’s back to Genesis 1, where God creates us all, female and male, one people. The apostles send Peter and John to investigate what Philip, the Greek speaking deacon, had been doing among the Samaritans. Surprise, it turns out that as far as the Holy Spirit is concerned, Samaritans are people like us.
It’s no different today. So, when some people are more likely to be killed than others, falsely accused than others, imprisoned than others, something is seriously wrong – in God’s eyes!
Frank R.
* * *
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Martin Luther concisely expressed the importance of baptism. He once wrote, “There is on earth no greater comfort than baptism.” (What Luther Says, p.61) In another setting he said of the rite:
For that purpose, Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, my righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life.
Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) offered reflections on the rite in line with Paul’s thinking (in Romans 6):
In other words, it is the replacement of the subject – of the ‘I.’ The ‘I’ ceases to be independent and to be a subject existing in itself. It is torn from itself and inserted into a new subject. The ‘I’ does not perish, but must let itself diminish completely, in effect, in order to be received within a larger ‘I’ and, together with that larger ‘I,’ to be conceived anew.”
In baptism, the old, selfish “me” gets smaller and is joined to a bigger, more faithful and loving “I” taking my place.
Famed New Testament scholar of the last century Rudolf Bultmann associated baptism with eschatological (future) thinking. He wrote:
[It is] to be open to God’s future which is really imminent for every one of us; to be prepared for the future... (Jesus Christ and Mythology, p.31)
Elsewhere, he describes this reality as a “free openness to the future... [which is] is freedom from anxiety in the face of nothing... Faith as openness to the future is freedom from the past.” (Ibid., pp.77-78) Someone who’s been baptized is a lot more daring, not so chained by all the dumb things she’s done or the boxes into which others have put him.
Mark E.
