Scripture texts: Isaiah 43:1-7, Luke 3:15-22
“How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?” How many?
Change? We’re Lutherans. We don’t change.
It’s an old joke and one I imagine most every denomination of the Christian religion has a variation on. It is one of those great ironies of history that the Church became this bastion of conservative thought. Now I don’t mean “conservative” in a political sense like we usually hear in this election year, but rather in its literal form: a longing or eagerness to maintain the status quo. To keep things as they are. To do it “the way we’ve always done it.”
That’s not what the Church was meant to be. That’s not what Christianity was supposed to be about. That’s not what God’s about. His plan for our world was hardly “Let’s leave everything exactly the same as it was.” No, God’s been about transformation, about renewal, about regeneration, resurrection. In short, he’s about change.
Take our Isaiah text for instance. One of the great prophecies of God’s grace. God declares to his people their restoration. He will bring them from the lands far away and make them his own once more. He will protect them from all danger. He will give them the wealth and the respect of the nations. Does any of that sound like business as usual? Does it sound like keeping things the same?
No, God is on the move. He’s taking his people from exile. He’s giving them back what they’ve lost. He standing by them in the midst of trials. This is upheaval. This is transformation. This is change writ large. Because with God, you often don’t do things small. It’s “go big or go home.”
Today is the festival of our Lord’s Baptism. There is a long standing point about why Jesus chose to be baptized by John. The Gospels however give us those answers. They tell us what this is really about and what it’s about is God’s changing the world yet again.
In Matthew’s version of the story, John asks Jesus direct why he’s there and Jesus answers with the somewhat cryptic “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” What does Jesus mean by that?
Luke’s version of the story, which we have today, may give us the answer. John the Baptist has spent a good dozen or so verses before our text today telling the people to change their ways (there’s that word again.) To repent. To live life in service to others. To give generously. To treat other with kindness and respect. And then along comes Jesus, claiming he’s there to fulfill all righteousness.
He’s come to do what John has asked of the people: To live his life for the sake of others. For the sake of all. To give himself as example to follow. To do perfectly what we cannot do and by doing so, change the world.
And he does just that. He goes from here into his ministry. He heals the sick, gives the blind the sight, makes the lame to walk. Hardly leaving things the status quo. To goes to the mountainside and into the plains and teaches vast crowds of people, telling them to trust in God, reminding them that God is working to transform the world for the better. He welcomes into his midst those the world has rejected, the sinner, the tax collector, the prostitute. He stands up to the old order, revealing their hypocrisies. Everywhere he goes, he changes things.
Even to the very cross. There goes to defeat death and sin forever. There he goes to break the worst part of our broken world. There he goes to win life out of death. There’s no status quo in the shadow of the cross or the empty tomb of Easter. EVERYTHING has changed.
When we bring our children to this font, we don’t just come to hear the promise of God, that he has claimed us as his own. That’s important, make no mistake. But we also come to make a pledge of our own. We claim we will raise these children in the life of faith. We promise to make of them, as best we can, good and faithful Christians. We make a promise and we dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of that promise.
Jesus baptism, in that regard, is no different. He too comes to make a promise. He comes to promise to us that he will not leave us where we were. He will not leave the world as it was. He has come to transform everything. He has come to put right what has gone wrong. And in the water before John, he declares to the world, “This is why I’m here. To change the world.”
And yet, we who follow him so often act as though nothing has changed. We live in fear and anxiety. We look upon others with the suspicion of danger, not the opportunity of mission and service. For almost two thousand years, we of the Church have failed to understand what Jesus was really about. We turned him into a moral scold, not the catalyst of the world’s transformation, not the bearer of life-out-of-death that he truly is.
And look at the world around us. Our legacy of failure. But our God is a god of infinite second chances. And as we remember the meaning and purpose of our own baptisms, it is helpful to remember that. Luther talks about the remembrance of our baptism as “daily dying and rising again.” Another try. Another chance to get it right. Another opportunity to help Christ change the world.
It’s not too late. The world needs the Church and it needs the Church to be the Church as it was meant to be. An instrument of justice and change and service and transformation. To be God’s instrument for the taking the world from what it was to what it’s meant to be. Amen.
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