Romans 8:12-17. "What is Baptism?"

What is the meaning of baptism? In this episode we learn how baptism is not about just fulfilling a command but is a gift from God that makes one a child of God. Through baptism, individuals receive salvation and are adopted into God's family, as illustrated by biblical passages and teachings of Jesus and Paul. 

Baptism is described as an act of God’s grace, where the Holy Spirit works to bring believers into the kingdom of God. In conclusion, Tim highlights the loving and transformative relationship believers have with God, as their heavenly Father, through baptism.

This Sunday sermon, based on Romans 8 verses 12-17, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on May 26, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)          

Transcript

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Amen and amen.

I listened to a sermon by another local pastor once. It was on baptism. I like this pastor; good man, faithful to his people. In the message which he preached on baptism that day, he talked quite a bit about people whom he had baptized. You could tell that this was a man who loved pastoring people, who just plain loves people!

But I couldn’t believe the message I heard. At the beginning, what he told them was, “I’m not going to spend too much time on what baptism is.” Then he told some stories. And at the end, in his closing notes, he told them, “If you’re not baptized yet, and you don’t feel one hundred percent comfortable being baptized, probably none of us ever will! Get baptized anyways.”

Yes, but more, NO! Yes, get baptized anyways. But no, don’t think that you should be uncomfortable about it. Today I want to make sure that you know what your baptism means; what God does in baptism. In Baptism, the Triune God Makes You a Child of God.

Baptism. It is, very simply, water applied to someone in God’s name. The triune God’s name, as Jesus instructs us at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he told his disciples right before his ascension into heaven. Disciples, make new disciples! How will they go about that? He tells them to do it  by “baptizing new disciples in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

My pastor friend, who preached that message on baptism, views baptism as an act of obedience. We get baptized because we want to obey God. Jesus does not tell that baptism is obedience. Jesus says, there’s baptism, and then there’s being taught to obey what he has commanded. What are Jesus’ commands? We heard this three weeks ago, as we considered Jesus’ Maundy Thursday message to his disciples. His command to them, and to us, is simply, “Love one another.” 

Being baptized is not a following through on Jesus’ commands. To bring someone to baptism is. To baptize a child, to share the Gospel with a friend and bring them to be baptized, that person, who is already a believer, is obeying Jesus’ command to love! The one being baptized is not, in the same way, performing an act of obedience. That person is receiving a gift.

Baptism is a gift. The gift of salvation. Baptism is adoption into God’s family. This is the teaching of the apostle Paul in his letter to the Christians of Galatia, chapter three, which is quoted for you in your service folder. “All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

The Galatians, to whom that letter was written, thought that obedience to commands made them God’s children. The apostle Paul calls that a different gospel. The true Gospel is the message that God, in grace and mercy, gave his Son in our place to pay for our sin. This is what we heard in our Gospel reading: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” That’s the Gospel. Anything else is a different Gospel, from a different god, the one whom the Bible calls “the god of this age,” Satan, who is a liar from the beginning.

So where does baptism fit in? If it is faith in Jesus which saves us, how can baptism be salvific? How can it bring salvation? Isn’t that “a different gospel,” Pastor Tim? The “gospel of baptism,” as opposed to the Gospel of Jesus. I understand that objection. It even makes good sense. But it runs smack into, not only the apostle Paul’s words, but Jesus’ own words.

Look again at the conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus. Think about the things Jesus is saying to Nicodemus. “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

“I wonder what Jesus is talking about, ‘water and the Spirit.’ If only he would do something - carry out some action - after this conversation with Nicodemus, to indicate to us what he’s referring to!” Verse twenty-two, “After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized.” Well, huh.

Jesus does not seem to have a problem with telling us that baptism brings us into God’s kingdom. In fact, Jesus’ words are stronger there than what I usually say about baptism, and I’m a Lutheran! He says, no one enters the kingdom without baptism, without the rebirth brought about by water and the Spirit. 

So how do we square this? How is salvation brought by baptism squared with salvation granted through faith?

First, we must rightly understand faith. I’ve preached on what faith is before, most recently in our Lent message series. Faith is trust. Trust requires a promise. I trust the implicit promise a chair makes when I sit in it. God makes promises. He promises that through the work of Jesus, sins have been forgiven.

We still need to be made aware of that promise. God can promise something, but unless we are made aware of it, we can’t have faith in it. So, primarily, we have the message of the Gospel, the message of forgiveness for Jesus’ sake. But God also brings that same promise - forgiveness for Jesus’ sake - through what we call sacraments. His Word connected to physical elements in particular ritual.

The prophet Isaiah experiences, in this vision in our first reading, something very like a sacrament. He gazes upon God Almighty in his throne room, the holy holy holy God, high and exalted. Looking upon God leads Isaiah to despair. God is holy; he is not. We come to the same realization when we read the life of Jesus Christ. Who has been so good, so pure, so wise, so noble as this man? No one! He is holy, holiness itself walking and talking among sinful people. The apostle Peter, too, once realized this, when he witnessed Jesus performing a miracle on his fishing boat. He fell to his knees and cried out, echoing Isaiah, “Leave me, Lord! I’m a sinful man.”

God had an answer for Isaiah. A messenger is sent, bringing a thing and a Word from God. He touches Isaiah’s lips with a coal from the altar and tells the prophet, “This has touched you. Your guilt is taken away.” Do we question those words? Why should we question God’s promise through baptism, which we heard Peter tell the Pentecost crowds last week is a promise “for you and for your children and for all who are far off”?

Baptism saves because God, who saves, chooses to use baptism to save. The salvific power of baptism is not found in special “holy water.” When there’s a baptism at this church, we fill this font with tap water. The power does not come from the water. It does come from the minister. It does not come from the person being baptized. Baptism is God’s action, his power at work. Lutheran theologian Marcus Gray says it this way: “Baptism is God's promise coupled with the water, where he promises to give us all the benefits we get from the crucifixion. If you will, it's like irrigation, delivering grace and salvation.”

The triune God is active in baptism. Obviously we baptize in the triune name, again according to Jesus’ command. But the triune God is the active agent in baptism. Again, in our Gospel reading, Jesus connects the Holy Spirit to baptism. This connection is made in various other Scriptures as well. But baptism occurs at Jesus’ command. He tells his disciples to go and baptize new disciples in all nations. He showed them exactly what he meant for them to do when they baptized people at the Jordan River after his conversation with Nicodemus. And through the work of the Holy Spirit, at the command of Jesus, God the Father receives you as his child in baptism. In Baptism, the Triune God Makes You a Child of God.

What does it mean to be a child of God? It means that your daddy is the biggest, strongest daddy on the block. Think of Isaiah’s vision, seeing God as high and exalted, wearing a robe that filled the temple by itself. Think of a father, sitting in a chair at home, with a little child looking up at him from the floor. His big hands on the armrests. His kicked-off shoes look like boats. 

This isn’t someone to fear, though. He’s big, he’s strong; he loves you. Paul says it so well: “The Spirit you received” - God’s Holy Spirit, who comes to you in baptism - “the Spirit does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

Those two words are Aramaic and Greek (although our Bibles translate the second one into English). Why two words? In the early Christian church, the believers often wrestled with how Gentiles, non-Jews, became part of God’s family. The Galatian church, to bring them up again, fell into an error, telling Gentiles that they needed to obey the ceremonial laws of Israel. Paul says, No! Again, in the portion referenced in your folders, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile; you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed,” you are part of Israel, that means! “And you are heirs according to the promise.”

Here, in Romans, Paul repeats that thought. Whether you are Gentile or Jew, whether you speak Greek or Hebrew or Spanish or Tagalog, you get to call out to the one seated on that throne, “Abba! Pater! Papa! Dad!” 

To be a child of God means that you have a home. Somewhere where you can count on a bed, a place to rest and lay your head. That rest may be spiritual, the rest we enjoy as we gather to hear God’s Word. That rest may be physical. As a child of God, you have siblings. Brothers and sisters. If you lack a roof over your head, God’s other children are here for you. If you go hungry, let a brother or sister never say to you, “Hope things get better.” Things will get better, because we will feed one another! We are family. 

To be a child of God means that you are loved, and that you love. This is why Jesus tells his disciples to baptize and then teach obedience. That’s how life works. That’s how we grow up. We are born. We learn from our parents right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate. The work of a parent is to train up children in what is right, good, lovely. To show them how to reject what is wrong, evil, hateful. 

When we are reborn of water and the Spirit into the family of God, as God’s children, we also start learning right and wrong. Human parents don’t teach this perfectly. I don’t. As we tell our kids about right and wrong, we also show them examples of both. They see us engage in love; they also see us sin.

We see no such thing in our Father in Heaven. He is holy holy holy. We know what he is like because we have Jesus’ life recorded for us in the Bible. The apostle Philip asked Jesus, the night that he was betrayed, “‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’ Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’” 

Jesus shows us what our Father is like. Jesus calls us into life like his own, calls us into being co-heirs and co-sufferers with him. To suffer is simply to live as Jesus did. To love when love is not always reciprocated. To share when thanks is not always forthcoming. To do such things because we know that our good and gracious Father cares for us. Will provide us with all we need, and so much more than we deserve or could even imagine. Therefore we need not fear. “Father welcomes all his children to his family through his Son. Father giving his salvation; life forever has been won.” Holy, holy, holy is our God! Amen and amen.