Richard Davenport
January 7, 2024 – The Baptism of Our Lord
Genesis 1:1-5
On one of the albums I have a home there’s a song called, “Before It All Changes.” I’m not really sure what the significance of the title is. At any rate, the song is almost entirely instrumental. It reminds me a bit of one of those songs you get way at the end of the credits to some sci-fi movie or something like that. Its rhythm clips along and, when I close my eyes to just let it play it makes me think of one of those satellites like Voyager that we launched decades ago and is now hurtling out of the solar system. As it flies it sees all of the sights, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter and all of its moons, Saturn and its rings, the wild rotation of Uranus, the brilliant indigo of Neptune, even poor little Pluto out there.
But what comes next? The song gets quiet and a bit eerie. The only thing out there is darkness. Sure there are other stars, but you’ll never reach them. Even if you happened to be pointed in right direction, you’d fall apart in the eons it would take to ever get there. No, now you have nothing left to look forward to by the empty blackness.
It’s at this slow point you hear a man’s voice echo the simple words, the only words heard in the song, “And God said, ‘Let there be light…” and suddenly everything starts moving again. Suddenly you’re turning around. Suddenly instead of the empty nothingness in front of you, you see the sun, you see the light. It’s distant, but it grows closer by the moment. You’re speeding past the outer planets, speeding back to the light, back to the warmth, back to a place where you’ll never have to worry about being alone.
It’s a fanciful little tale. As I said, I have no idea why the song is titled that, nor what the artist was thinking when he wrote it. So I can only speculate. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than I want it to and it may not mean anything to you at all.
A fanciful little tale. That’s certainly what Genesis 1 and 2 sound like. There you are in the empty blackness. God has fashioned this ball of water that he’s going to use as a base for other things, but even that is black. It’s so black, in fact, that you wouldn’t even be able to tell it was there unless you ran into it. The three persons of the Trinity are having a heated discussion among themselves. “What are we going to make? What is it going to look like? How is it going to work?” The come to a consensus and they all turn to look into the black nothing, and, almost as if they are collectively holding their breath, everything becomes still and silent. And then, into this infinite darkness, God speaks, “Let there be light…” The first sound uttered in the darkness gives birth to the first light ever seen. When we think of light, we think of lightbulbs, flashlights, the sun in the sky, all of these things that give off light so that we can see. But not this light. This is the purest, most unadulterated light ever to exist, for it simply blooms in the darkness with nothing to project it. Light that emanates from God Himself.
Again, a fanciful little tale, something to spark the imagination perhaps. It’s something that undoubtedly can and has occupied the time of countless philosophers and theologians down through the ages. “What does it mean? Does it matter to us? Did it really happen? Does anything change if it didn’t?”
Plenty of people have professed faith in Christ as the savior while at the same time rejecting the Genesis account of creation. This is especially true in the modern era. You have scientists who have been actively working since the Enlightenment to find ways to explain how the universe came to be and how humans came to exist. The fact that they have to intentionally disregard the basic rules of science to do so doesn’t bother them, because it is more important to them to show the world can exist without a creator.
Sadly, they aren’t the only ones. With the assumption that all science is done by scientists who are actually seeking the truth, rather than just the confirmation of their own biases, many others have fallen into the same trap. Whole swaths of Christendom have bought into this idea, including the Catholic Church and even beloved theologians like C. S. Lewis. For all of his amazing work in helping people understand the deeper things of the faith, he still thought there was a time when generations passed for humanity and yet they lived, and somehow died, without sin.
But, again, so what? If I believe in Jesus, have I really lost anything if I don’t quite buy all of this 7 day creation stuff? The church seems to have survived just fine and it all seems a little farfetched anyway. I can hold onto my vision of Jesus and know that he loves me and maybe not sweat the rest of it so much. As long as I have the essentials, I won’t worry about it.
It’s true, God can save us in spite of our own ignorance. None of us perfectly understand his will. God’s promises always hold true and when we trust him, we receive the benefits of those promises, even when we are unintentionally, or sometime intentionally wrong.
At first glance it may seem odd to talk about Genesis 1 at the same time as we talk about Jesus’ Baptism. The discerning reader will note that in both of these readings we find the Trinity at work. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all visibly gathered together. Seeing as how this is an extreme rarity in the Bible, that should say a bit about the importance of these two passages.
Of course God never does things randomly. The appearance of the Trinity here at Christ’s baptism is intentional and is meant to be seen in light of the events of creation. In the beginning, God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – create a world without sin, a world where peace, joy, light and life are the way of all things. The sin of Adam and Eve brought all of this crashing down. Discord, anger, darkness, and death now plague every living thing.
But God has not abandoned his creation to the corruption of sin. He will remake his creation and free it from the destructive influences of sin. He will make the world new again. Where will this happen? It begins in the person of Christ. How do we get to be a part of this? Through baptism.
The problem that afflicts creation afflicts baptism as well. Many read it and refuse to see what God is trying to share with his people. They twist it into all sorts of other things, denigrating the gracious gift God offers through the water made pure through his promise. We expect that kind of thing from those who don’t even fall under the umbrella of Christendom, but even Christians buy into this cheapening of God’s great work.
Who is writing the story? It’s been in the works for decades, putting the power to decide truth in the hands of each individual. The late 20th Century philosopher, Jacques Derrida, argued that once an author writes something and gives it to the public, it is no longer his. Each reader is free to interpret the work any way he or she wants. Whatever the author actually intended is completely irrelevant. If the book is your hands, it’s yours and you can believe some of it, all of it, or none of it. You can explain it however you want. The power is yours and yours alone.
Giving the power to you, making you the arbiter of truth. Taking the historical account of the world, the people, and the work of God within it, we turn it into a certain amount of fiction, fiction that can be rewritten, reinterpreted, molded and modified to make it into what I want.
Maybe you don’t rise to the outright atheistic principles of some of these scientists who try to write God out of history. But what about the rest of it? Do you really need recreating? Are you really that corrupt that God would have to go to these extreme lengths to fix whatever problems you might have? Does God really have the authority to dictate the rules for this world? Does he have the authority to judge you? Does he have the right to take the limelight off of you and all of the great things you’re doing in this world?
God’s Word demands we take the condemnation he casts upon us, the sinful desire to make ourselves the star of the show, the arbiter of truth, the writers of history. We’d like nothing more than to soften God’s condemnation of our sin, to sweep it away as a fanciful story or to reinterpret it as some nice story about doing good or loving people or something like that. No one wants to be accused of sinning, and all of the consequences that go with that sin. No one wants to be guilty of the destruction of God’s perfect world. If I can undo the story of creation, then maybe I can undo more of the story too. Maybe I can make it so that I’m not the terrible person I’m accused of being.
The story woven through Scripture isn’t a fictional tale of morality or humanity’s right or power to determine its own destiny or any of those kinds of things. The historical record presented in the Bible is a story of God’s condemnation of sin, all sin, our sin, and how that sin inevitably leads to death, both temporal and eternal. It is also the story of God’s love for his people in spite of their sin. It’s the story of his desire to redeem them from themselves, to free them from their slavery to their own sinful and selfish impulses, to cleanse them and make them holy so that they can live in a perfect world.
Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of John, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” We all stand condemned by our own actions. Jesus has no desire to judge the guilty, but it must happen. For only those who are perfect can live in a perfect world. All others are cast out by their own actions and their desire to live life their own way.
We hear Genesis 1. We hear the account of Christ’s baptism, and we see God’s plan for taking care of his people, how he undoes the damage we’ve caused ourselves and the world around us. How are we to be saved? By being joined to Christ’s death and resurrection, dying to sin and being made alive again. By being washed and made holy and pure, no longer corrupted and unclean. By finding the new creation that begins in Christ and being brought into it through baptism. The Triune God begins his new creation there in the river in the person of Christ, anchoring his re-creative work to him. Through the font, you are joined to him and all that he does. He washes you clean. He makes you pure. He brings you into his new creation through the work only he can do.
Hear and accept the condemnation of your sin, so that you may then also receive his greater gift. Know that you are a sinner, so that he can then make you clean. Let him tell the story, so that he can make you a part of that story, the story of God’s love for the unlovable. the story of his sinful, broken creation recreated.
The work God does here at the font isn’t some minor thing he put together for the fun of it. It is the Creator taking a hand in his creation again, creating something that hasn’t been seen since God first made the universe, a life without sin and death. Jesus, the Light of the World, comes back into his creation and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gather together and announce, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Christ, the Light, had come to save his people, come to save you.
There at the font, that light is yours. Not a light that gives way to darkness and death, but the light that shines from the tomb on Easter morning, a light and a life death and darkness cannot overcome.
We rejoice today that our Creator has come to this dark world and brought light and life again and that he offers it to us, being recreated, the way he always intended, perfect and sinless. Today we rejoice that God looked at us in our sinful state and once again said, “Let there be light…”