Our Savior Lutheran Church
178 W. North Ave. Crestview, Florida 32536
Please come and visit us at 5:00 PM Saturday Evening or 10:00AM Sunday Morning
phone: view phone(850) 682 3154
website: http://oselc.blogspot.com
Rev. Vance G. Tech
Worship Times
5:00 PM Saturday Evening
10:00 AM Sunday Morning
The Baptism of Branden Hubbard Into Christ
Monday, January 10, 2011
Isaiah 60:1-6
Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Merciful God, we humbly implore you to cast the bright beams of your light upon your Church that we, being instructed by the doctrine of the blessed Apostles, may walk in the light of your truth and finally attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Lord in your mercy... Hear our prayer.
The Word of God which the Holy Spirit has caused to be written by inspiration for you is recorded in the Matthew 3:13-17.
Beloved Saints in Christ Jesus,
Christ chooses to come to us and work through water. Christ does not choose to pretend to come to us in water. Christ does not symbolize that he comes to us in water. Christ does not choose to give us the empty impression that he comes in water. Christ comes to us in and through water does many magnificent things for our benefit and welfare.
For example Christ works through water in his Baptism to “fulfill all righteousness”. Christ transforms water into the finest wine on earth at the Wedding Feast in Galilee, because “there was no wine”. Christ walks on water in order to comfort them when the waves were high. Christ calms the waves when his disciples “were about to die.” Christ brings a great draught of fish into the nets of the fishermen when they were discouraged.
Christ allowed blood and wine to flow from his pierced to fill both the chalice and the font for our salvation. In all these ways Christ worked through water for our benefit and well being.
On this day the water River Jordan piles up, heaps up so that God’s children may walk safely across. Through the heaping up of the water of the Jordan River, God bound himself to his people with an unbreakable promise that he would continue to be with them, driving away all their enemies from them. He who can heap up river water, can certainly protect his people from their enemies. Again God works in water for our benefit.
It all seems kind of silly though. The idea of water heaping up and fulfilling all righteous but in the background St. Paul is proclaiming in the Epistle that God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.”
Today, through the Baptism of the Lord, all water received God’s blessing, so that any water we use in baptism is transformed into water of pure salvation, water that is able to cut us off from our sin and its guilt, punishment and all its consequences.
Again God causes water to work for our benefit and well being so that any boasting about what is accomplished, must be boasting in God who is the source of our life in Christ whom God made to be our wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
When Christ is present in the water of baptism by virtue of the spoken Word of God, everything that Christ is, his name his titles, his divine and human natures, all that he has ever been, all that he is and ever will be, all he has been though and all has happened to him, all this is his is there with him in that water.
If Christ does not place himself into the water for our benefit, why do we emerge from Baptism, with faith in being clothed with Christ, with faith in having put on Christ? Why then would we speak of being baptized into Christ so that it is no longer us who live but Christ lives in us?
And since Christ indeed places himself into the water of baptism to fulfill all righteous for us, because that is what he does for our benefit in our baptisms this teaches us that God in water has indeed made it possible for the greatest of all miracles to take place the miracle of a great and magnificent transfer and exchange in which Christ does not keep what is his own and tells us to keep what is ours, but gives us what is his and takes from us what is ours. This transfer takes place in water.
When we enter the water of baptism we enter with sin guilt, death and condemnation, but we emerge from that water reborn into Christ, one with Christ cleansed, purified, righteous, holy, forgiven, empowered, gifted, and defended from all our enemies.
Having just come through the celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord, Christmas, we have just sung, “He undertakes a great exchange, puts on our human frame, and in return gives us his realm, his glory, and his name, his glory, and his name. (LSB 389:4)
Now the thing is, by putting on our human frame Christ made it possible for the glorious wondrous exchange to take place, but it is actually in baptism, in preaching and in the Eucharist, that the glorious exchange between Christ and ourselves takes place and continues to take place so that we are always receiving and continuing to receive Christ’s realm, Christ’s glory and Christ’s name”.
Whenever water or words or bread and wine become the sacred space, the holy of holies into which God places himself in Christ to work by virtue of his Word through the Office of the Holy Ministry, there is God’s presence, his power, his holiness, his nature, his forgiveness, his work, his righteousness, his faithfulness, his faith, his attributes, his essence, his name, his inheritance, everything he is and all this Christ does not wish to keep for himself but to hand over to us.
When Christ puts on our human frame he unites God and man through his sinless life and suffering death and resurrection and so we sing, “God and sinner are reconciled”. This is the Gospel proclamation of Christmas.
Then God shows that he not only intends to reconcile the children of Abraham to himself, but all the sons and daughters of the earth. This is the Gospel proclamation of Epiphany.
But the Gospel proclamation every Sunday throughout the Church Year is that God in Christ through word and water and bread and wine gladly has exchanged himself with all sinners, with the whole world and makes this same exchange effective when an individual believes the Words spoken from Heaven, receives the Holy Spirit, is baptized into Christ, hears Christ speaking and receives him in the Eucharist.
When Christ is in water with us, his suffering and death is in that same water, the blood and water that flowed from his side is in that water, his wounds, his resurrection and his glory is in that water, his relationships with the Father and the Holy Spirit are in that water, his divine nature and human nature are in that water, his names and titles are all in that water, all his powers and everything else that can be said about him is in that water and this is what comes to us in the transfer. At the same time our sins, our guilt, the curse that hangs over us, our death, our condemnation, God’s wrath, all this goes to him.
“Come on” Christ says in Baptism, “you’re coming with me.” “From now on I’m in you and you are in me.” Consequently, in baptism, God the Father says of us precisely what he says of Christ, “that he is well pleased with us.”
When we enter the water in which Christ has placed himself we emerge from the water full of and covered in Christ, as heirs with Christ, with the name of the Father
When the flesh of Christ touched the water of the Jordan River when was baptized, he sanctified and instituted all water on earth to become a baptism, a holy sacred means for the exchange between God and sinner to take place. Wherever his Word is spoken over the water and applied according to his command, there, whenever there is faith, the glorious exchange takes place and it is no longer we who live but Christ lives in us and we live in him. We emerge from the water of baptism with the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit emblazoned in glory on our foreheads. This life of Christ is preserved and sustained in us by the continual hearing of the preaching of the Word of God and in the eating and drinking of the holy Eucharist.
Christ said, “Baptism now saves you.” "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.
"He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. Amen
Depart in peace…
The Epiphany Of Our Lord
Isaiah 60:1-6
Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Merciful God, we humbly implore you to cast the bright beams of your light upon your Church that we, being instructed by the doctrine of the blessed Apostles, may walk in the light of your truth and finally attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Lord in your mercy... Hear our prayer.
The Word of God which the Holy Spirit has caused to be written by inspiration for you is recorded in the 60th chapter of Isaiah.
Beloved Saints in Christ Jesus,
There is a Chinese proverb that says that “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
The sacred Scriptures teach us that the whole world has been a place of deep and abiding darkness, of evil and corruption ever since Adam and Eve, who with a little help, from Serpentes / Ophidia convinced themselves that they would like to be “as God”.
But the actual problem, as we consider it carefully, was not so much the desire and will to be “as God” as it was the desire and will to “be, not as God”. Adam and Eve were already “as much like God as they could possibly be” before Eve ever thought of reaching out and taking hold of the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve already were “as God” for they could see and talk to him face to face and walk with him in the cool of the day. They bore God’s image. Adam and Eve already were “as God”.
But when Eve and Adam encountered the old Serpentes / Ophidia, they were deceived into believing that they were not “as God” but would be if they would but only do for themselves, in the midst of all the heavenly and earthly blessings they possessed, that one thing that their Creator asked them not to do.
Consequently, this thing which happened to the greedy dog in Aesop's fable when the dog carrying a stolen bone, saw its own reflection in the water, opened its mouth to possess the very thing that it already possessed, then dropped and lost what it was already carrying, also happened with Adam and Eve in the beautiful Garden of Paradise. John Lydgate the Benedictine Monk and Medieval Poet said of this fable, “the one who covets all, loses all.”
According to the Scriptures, this is how the human race has come to having “lost it all”. Someone may ask, “How have we ever come to exist under this shroud of death that covers all people (Isaiah 25). He answer is, We have all come to dwell, to sit in the midst of deep darkness by once denying and by continuing to deny the very light that we once possessed in its beautiful fullness when we were as God.
There is no one here this evening who really needs any further evidence to convince them that darkness, evil and death hang over this world like a black shroud. Song writer Tom Waits sings a song in which he says, “Misery is the river of the world, everybody row.” And he also says, “If there's one thing you can say about mankind there's nothing kind about man. You can drive out nature with a pitch fork but it always comes roaring back again.” – Tom Waits
The nation to which the Prophet Isaiah spoke the Old Testament Reading, (Isaiah 60) had returned from captivity in Babylon to a homeland which lay in complete ruin. It was like being in absolute darkness without the slightest light ray of hope the width size of a piece of sewing thread.
And to them the Lord sent Isaiah to say “For behold thick darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising.”
Yes, in almost every nation and in the heart of almost every person who has ever lived there has been a mighty hope for things to be better.
This is part of what drives our “cursing of the darkness”. From Martin Luther King’s “dream” to John Lennon’s “imaginings” there is always an unrelenting hope that we will somehow find a way to light the candle of our salvation and forever lift the dread darkness that covers the face of the whole earth and then “the world will live as one”.
And yet the desire to “be, not as God” somehow continues in us and this desire to “be, not as God” is manifested in our ongoing rebellion against God and in the unkindness and cruelty we heap upon one another each other, just as it was in the beginning.
In his Law, God under what must be excruciating pain of disappointment, has for thousands of years now, verbally nudged, tutored his human creatures toward being as God again, to be one with God in love, to love others, to sacrifice, to give, to share, to forgive, to show mercy, to be kind and patient, and to bear all things. Still there is that strong will and desire to “be, not as God” which will let us have none of it, maybe the mere pretense of it when it will work out to our advantage.
Those who may feel as though the time in which we live has a special claim to the title “darkness” or that the darkness in our time is growing so exponentially that we can now be certain that the end of the world has come us really need to read more history books.
Remember, the Epiphany of Christ in all its visible glory will arrive when people are least expecting it, not when they most expect it. The Epiphany of Christ in glory will come at a time when those who do not believe in Christ are boasting that there is so much peace and safety in the world. Then sudden destruction will come upon them and they shall not escape. Peace and safety is not really a prevailing theme throughout our world today.
Of course, the media keeps us well supplied, to an over abundance of things to curse. We seem to have now a never ending supply of dark things we can curse. And we are certainly able to curse the darkness every day now almost without effort.
But now, while we may not need further proof or evidence that the world is indeed filled with darkness, with evil with death, because we have an overwhelming flow, a daily flow, an hourly flow of solid evidence to support this dismal fact, we do however stand in need of constant proof and evidence that we and even more narrowly, you and I (and here is where it may begin to sting a little) are always more a part of perpetuating the problem of darkness in this world than we are a part of solving or resolving it.
The tutoring and nudging of God’s Law does not need to prove to us that there is deep darkness evil, sin, death, in the world out there, but to prove to us that there is darkness, evil, sin, death in here, right in our hearts and in our sinful natures.
This is certainly a part of the reason that even within the Church which stands Elect and Glorious in Christ her Lord and Savior, never ever, in this life, can come to an end of hearing the Law of God. We must always, even as children of light, be hearing the Law of God which never ceases to accuse us and expose us so that are always seeing that the solution has never been, is not and will never be found within us.
This does not mean that there is no solution; it merely means that the solution is not in us, that is, not until it comes to us from outside of us. The Light comes to us, the glory of the Lord rises upon us, and so the light of the Lord is seen in us.
Beloved, we cannot begin to bring about the healing of the nations that we so earnestly desire. We cannot lift the darkness. We cannot light the candle that will drive away the darkness. However in the moment when the light of Christ, the light of God, through whom God the Father has always manifested himself in this world, who has already penetrated the deep darkness of this world, penetrates and pierces the darkness in us and drives darkness out and replaces it with divine light, then will the words of Isaiah be fulfilled in us, “The Lord will arise upon you and his glory will be seen upon you.”
“Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome.” Christ our Savior once appeared in this world manifesting the eternal light of the Father within his holy Church and began to draw the nations to that Light. Now in Baptism, in Preaching and in the Eucharist Christ is present with us and that same glory now shines into us who have come into union with Christ and partake of his divine nature.
Christ has not merely stood back and cursed the darkness, but entered the darkness of our world to become the curse for us. He became the curse of all those who would not “be, as God”, in order to remove its darkness from us and to restore us to being “as God”. We partake of the divine nature, we are being conformed to the image of Christ, who is the image of God. Christ is the Candle, the Light of the World. He is manifested in his Church, and the nations are seeing his light and coming to Him.
The ancient Jews said that "in the world to come Israel shall have no need of the sun by day, nor the moon by night, for God's light shines in this city, and in the Lamb that light is concentrated, and from him everywhere diffused. Beloved we do not need to wait, this same thing is already happening in the world. Amen
“This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and doesn't come to the light, lest his works would be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done in God.” John 3:19-21 (WEB)
I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in the darkness. If anyone listens to my sayings, and doesn't believe, I don't judge him. For I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He who rejects me, and doesn't receive my sayings, has one who judges him. The word that I spoke, the same will judge him in the last day. John 12:46-48 (WEB)
A most blessed Epiphany to you in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. Amen