READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Deuteronomy 18:15-19
Philippians 4:4-7
St. John 1:19-28
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Who speaks to us on this last Sunday before His Nativity,
saying,
“I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do
not know”
One of the reasons we do not know, is because we are
always changing and Jesus is not. This is part of God’s Word to show that
Baptism doesn’t change, because our Savior and His Promise doesn’t change. This
teaches that we should not resist. We are usually told to not resist change,
but in God’s true religion it is the opposite. Never tire of doing the same
thing for the same God Who delights in it.
For no matter how hard you struggle, in the end, you must
lose.
“It is appointed for man once to die” and dying is losing (Heb
9:27). We feel it at every sickbed. We feel it at every funeral. Even King
David feels it deeply and complains to God, in Psalm 6,
“Turn, O Lord,
deliver my life; save me for the sake of your steadfast love. For in death
there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who will give you praise?” (v.4-5).
If you remember last week, we came to believe that John the
Baptist must also lose and he does. He is alone in the wilderness. Sure he has
a few disciples, but nothing serious. He dresses funny, eats funny, and won’t
comply with any of the other sects in Judaism trying to overthrow the Romans.
He especially rejects the authority of the Pharisees and current priests.
Our saying goes, “you can’t win for losing”. You can hear
John the Baptist's frustration at this revelation, in today’s Gospel. Its not
that he’s begging for his life, its that he’s begging for the truth. Don’t
persecute me, I’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t throw me in jail, I’ve broken no
laws. Don’t behead me, I don’t deserve it.
In fact, just the opposite. John the Baptist did all the
right things, spoke the truth, and showed mercy. John did all the right things,
said all the right things, and believed all the right things. Yet, in the end
he must lose.
Hear John’s last words recorded in Scripture to get the
idea:
“A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to
him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the
Christ,’ but, ‘I have been sent before Him.’ He who has the bride is the
bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him,
rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine
is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is
above all; he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth. He who comes
from heaven is above all. And what He has seen and heard, that He testifies;
and no one receives His testimony. He who has received His testimony has
certified that God is true. For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God,
for God does not give the Spirit by measure. The Father loves the Son, and has
given all things into His hand. He who believes in the Son has everlasting
life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of
God abides on him.” (John 3:27-36)
He must increase and I must decrease. The friend of the
Bridegroom is only given His voice, His words, to joy in and he must admit,
confess, and submit to the fact that the Father loves the Son only.
In our lives, we live this struggle daily. Every day it
seems as if God has left us to our own devices. So much so that entire
religious sects have been created from this false belief. God has set us on our
way, yet in our sin we doubt it ever happened, so we’re on our own.
In our sinfulness we get bored of repetition. Because of
this, we associate failure with boredom. Because nothing changes and nothing
different happens, we assume in our hearts that we must be doing something
wrong. Its wrong because we are not accomplishing anything, we are not moving
forward, we are not doing what we were created to do!
So says satan. For from the beginning, he is a liar and a
murderer. Eve, he said, aren’t you tired of the same old fruit, day in and day
out? Don’t you want something different, something exciting, something
meaningful?
Thus, the Temptation of Jesus was the same, the devil is not
original after all. But instead of fruit, it was the fruit of Jesus’s labors,
the fruit of His Faith. Why do you starve yourself waiting for someone to come
feed you? Just make your own bread and forsake those whom You created. Do you
not know Your own worth? Throw Yourself off the Temple, gather the angels, and
show to everyone what You’re truly capable of.
Your talent and power are wasted on the humans. Serve under
me and I will make you the greatest born among women. No one will stand in Your
way and You will make the greatest kingdom on earth however You want.
I hope you hear in these temptations the devil’s own words
in your ears concerning your church, and your family, and all the other
repetitious things that God has put in your life.
Imagine your heart rebelling one day. Meh, today I don’t
feel like working, it says. Blood, blood, blood. Pump, pump. pump. I want
adventure. I want something different. Something fresher! Imagine anything in
all of Creation going on strike and doing something different.
Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case is, God has given
us the will to imagine something different, something apart from God. That is
the temptation to sin, because whatever we imagine still retains God’s goodness
in it.
For example, a belief in evolution without God, as opposed
to God’s Creation of all things, presupposes things would work together to
create life, without God. It assumes life will just form on its own, because
that’s our experience. But life is God’s realm.
And if life is God’s realm, then He knows how best to order
it. John confesses this, as we already heard. It is enough that the Bridegroom
has given us His voice. It is enough that the Bridegroom comes from above and
has the Father’s love. It is enough that the Bridegroom has come down from His
chamber and nothing is hid from the heat of His Love.
For on top of giving us a heart that pumps day in and day
out without complaining, and all other things in creation that are for our
benefit, He also gives Himself. That is also still His Word, yet His Word is
unlike our words. St. John did not mean that it is enough for Him to speak
every now and then or to give visions. On top of that, John meant that the Word
would be given, Himself.
And the Word was made flesh, as John chapter 1 says. The
Word was made flesh and St. John the Baptist’s joy is fulfilled. Joy that a
Prophet like us has arisen. Joy that the words of the Almighty are in His
mouth. Joy, that a man has been born.
For, there’s more to Deuteronomy 18. The chapter ends right
after our pericope reading, with instructions on how to spot a false prophet. A
false prophet will have God’s own wrath on him if he does not speak the exact
words from the Lord’s own mouth.
From verse 22, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the
Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the
Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be
afraid of him.”
“if the word does not come to pass” means “if the Word is
not born”. In other words, if he does not point to Jesus, he is a false
prophet. Moses did not get to point to Jesus in the flesh. Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Malachi did not get to point to the Word of God and say, “Behold the man”. Thus
they lost in the end.
Even Jesus, pointing Himself out as God and man, given and
shed for the forgiveness of sins on the cross, lost in the end. As the True
Prophet, however, Jesus's loss was gain. Tempting Jesus only resulted in
draining all the power out of temptation. Murdering Jesus only resulted in
draining out all the power of death.
The prophets did not stop pointing to Jesus. The Apostles
did not stop pointing to Jesus. And your faith today is built on the foundation
of the apostles and the prophets, Says Ephesians (2:20). And the apostles were
proclaiming the death of Jesus until He comes, in Communion.
“Do not grow tired of doing good” (Gal 6:9), that is,
do not grow tired of doing THE Good: receiving from God the Good He wants to
give you. Now imagine if God were to change His mind and His ways? This is why
St. John the Baptist likened Jesus coming to a Bridegroom. The Bridegroom
pledges His Truth and His faithfulness to the Bride. He does not change.
We must lose. We must lose out to God. We must give up on
trying to refresh or excite our spirit and proclaim it to be “from God”. God
has promised and only He can accomplish our victory that we so long and pray
for. He has done it. He will do it and He continues to feed it to us, even
today.
So we lose and Jesus wins. We lose our grand and flashy
entrance of God into the world and He wins His birth in a manger. We lose our
false ideas of increasing mercy and grace and God wins at the cross. We lose
our sinfulness of thinking we can do better than God and God wins by continuing
to give us His Spirit by His spoken Word, cleanse us in Baptism, and feed us in
Communion.
We decrease and Jesus increases in His Word and Sacrament.
And isn’t that what we wanted all along?
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