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Ascension Day
Sermon
Baptism of
Samuel Robert Preus
“Christ’s
Power Revealed in Weakness”
May 28, 2006
And
he said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to
every creature. He who
believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe
will be condemned.” Mark
16:15-16
Right after Jesus sent out his first ministers, he ascended into heaven
to sit at the right hand of God. The
Bible joins these two events. God
wants us to see His power, glory, and majesty in Christ’s holy
ministry here on earth among us. Just
as God the Son, whom the worlds could not contain, chose to be born of a
young virgin girl and to be laid in a manger, so this same divine Savior
chooses to reveal himself today in very humble means – through the
speaking of sinful, mortal, fallible men.
Jesus is no longer humbled.
The right hand of God refers to the full exercise of God’s
almighty power. It isn’t
a geographical location like Crookston or Fertile.
You can’t find heaven or God’s right hand on a map. God
is a spirit. He doesn’t
have a right hand. But you
can know that Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords and that
he shall reign forever and ever. This
you can know because this is the clear teaching of God in the Holy
Scriptures. He fills all
things and rules over all. He
is the Lord God.
And this same Jesus rules over
us by serving us with his gospel and sacraments.
He serves us and he comes to us and he makes his home with us,
choosing us to be his own. He
invites himself into our hearts. He
comforts us. He gives us forgiveness of all our sins.
He keeps us in the true Christian faith.
He grants us a blessed death.
He sends his angels to carry our souls to heaven where we will be
with him forever. And Jesus
does all of this through the ministry that he has established right here
in his church. Preach the
gospel, Jesus said. Preach
it, not just here or there, but everywhere.
Preach it, not just to this or that group of people, but to every
man, woman, and child in the world.
Preach the gospel. Baptize.
Those who believe the gospel that you preach and who are baptized
will be saved. They will be
rescued from their own sin, from death, from divine punishment, from all
evil, and will have eternal joys in heaven.
They will rejoice in God forever as they find the purest pleasure
in worshipping the One who rescued them from sin.
Those who reject this gospel in unbelief will be damned.
They will go to hell. There
will be no end to their suffering.
Whoever does not believe will be damned.
Even if he is baptized, his baptism will not benefit him unless
he believes the gospel.
The gospel is what we believe. Let’s pay close attention to what Jesus says.
First he says, “Preach the gospel,” and then he says, “He
who believes and is baptized will be saved.”
To believe is to trust in, it is to have faith in.
To believe is not to do something.
The gospel is not something we do.
It is something that we believe.
These are the only two alternatives.
One either believes the gospel or one does not believe it.
The one who believes the gospel will be saved.
The one who does not believe the gospel will be damned.
There is no middle ground. There
are no other alternatives than heaven or hell.
There is no limbo. There
is no purgatory. There is
no Nirvana. There is no
becoming one with Nature, as today’s trendy pantheists like to
pretend. There is only
eternal joy in heaven or eternal torment in hell.
Heaven is received by faith alone.
Hell is received by unbelief alone.
“He who believes and is
baptized will be saved.” Jesus
does not say that he who obeys God’s law will be saved.
The reason is that the Bible teaches that everyone stands
condemned by God’s law. St.
Paul puts it this way in Romans 3:19-20:
Now we
know that whatever the law says it says to those who are under the law,
that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty
before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified
in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.
Many people believe and teach
that if you do your best to obey the law that will be good enough for
God. Nowhere does the Bible
teach this. The Bible teaches that the law shows us our sin and it will
always show us our sin. Those
who believe that their obedience to the law will save them are not
Christians. They reject the
gospel. The gospel is not a
new law given by Jesus. The
gospel is the message, the good news (for that is what “gospel”
means) that Jesus has done the obeying for us.
He has obeyed the law as our substitute to give us the credit for
his obedience. He has
suffered on the cross the punishment for our sins so that we won’t
have to suffer it. God forgives us all our sins for Christ’s sake.
This is the gospel. This
gospel is not something that can be obeyed.
A gift cannot be obeyed. It
can only be received or rejected. One
embraces and loves and cherishes a gift.
One doesn’t obey it. To
turn the gospel into a law that must be obeyed is to despise the
vicarious suffering of Jesus. It
is to trample his blood under the feet, as if his holy obedience all the
way to the death on the cross was insufficient.
Did Jesus fail? Was
his obedience lacking? Was
his love impure? Did he not
die for us all? Or did God
refuse to forgive us even though Jesus took our sins away?
No, Jesus did not fail. His
obedience was perfectly sufficient.
His love fulfilled God’s whole law for us all.
God has forgiven us all our sins because Jesus has borne them in
his body on the cross. This
is how we can know that the gospel is not a command to be obeyed.
It is a promise to be believed.
“He who believes and is
baptized will be saved.” Therefore,
baptism is also a gift. If
baptism were our work, then Jesus wouldn’t have said, “He who
believes and is baptized will be saved.”
Baptism couldn’t save us if it were our doing.
That would mean we are saved by what we do.
But we are not saved by what we do.
We are saved by believing in what Jesus gives us in the gospel.
Baptism doesn’t save us as a legal requirement that we fulfill.
Baptism saves us as God’s gracious gift that gives us
salvation, as St. Peter writes,
Baptism doth also now
save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the
answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ: Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God;
angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him. 1 Peter
3:21-22
In baptism you see a man wearing
a robe standing by a font pouring ordinary water over someone’s head
and speaking words. Since
we are wont to judge God by what we see rather than by what God
promises, many have argued that baptism is the work of men.
But they are wrong. Listen
to what Luther said in a sermon that he preached on our text on
Ascension Day, 1523:
But you
see no work of man in this transaction; for baptism is not my work but
God’s. He that baptized me stands in God’s stead and does not the
work of a man, but rather it is God’s hand and work. God is the real
worker. Therefore, I may and should say: God, my Lord, baptized me
himself, by the hand of a man. Of this I may boast, and on this I am to
rely, and say: God, who will not and cannot lie, has given me this sign
to assure me that he is gracious to me and willing to save me and has
through his Son given me all that he has.
Look through the Holy Scriptures
at the many references to Christ’s session at the right hand of God
the Father. You will notice that it is always joined to the preaching of
the gospel and the administration of the sacraments here on earth.
Jesus is exalted up on high, higher than the highest heavens,
with all the majesty, glory, and power of almighty God.
And yet, where do we find this exalted Christ who rules over all
things by his almighty power? We
find him in the washing of holy baptism.
We find him in the words of absolution, spoken by sinners to
sinners, through which absolution Jesus himself gives to sinners the
forgiveness that he won on Calvary’s cross.
We find him in the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper;
because by his own authority and promise these lowly elements that you
can buy in a store become his life giving body and blood by which our
sins are forgiven and our souls are saved.
Where is God’s right hand?
Is it billions of light years away, out there in a corner of the
universe where no man can go? No!
The right hand of God is right here.
Here within these four walls, Jesus Christ who came not to be
served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many continues to
serve his people. With
power! With gracious, life
giving power that saves us from hell and takes us to heaven.
The God who created all things
by the word he spoke does a far greater work here among us.
Greater than controlling the weather and the affairs of nations
and the flight of birds or the migration of whales or the direction of
the constellations of the stars in the sky; greater than any of these
magnificent works of Almighty God is the work that he does in our hearts
when we come to his house to find him.
Through the holy gospel and sacraments God creates, sustains,
strengthens, and purifies our faith.
“Whoever believes,” Jesus said.
And when we doubt, he send us his Holy Spirit to spark to life
the dying embers to keep us in the faith of our baptism.
Jesus claimed all power in
heaven and on earth just before sending out his ministers to preach the
gospel and administer the sacraments.
If you want to see Christ’s power, you must look under the
cover of weakness. On the cross Jesus appeared helpless, but there it was that
he took away our sin. We
see little Samuel Robert Preus. He
weighs less than seven pounds. He
can’t talk. He can’t
walk up to a stage and pray a prayer inviting the Lord Jesus into his
heart. He can’t confess.
He can’t really do much of anything.
He’s just a little baby. But
don’t let the weakness of this infant fool you.
God’s almighty power is at work here among us today.
A little baby who can do nothing but receive care from others
receives the power of God unto salvation in this sacred washing.
The water you see is joined by God’s almighty promise to his
saving gospel. Jesus became
a baby to redeem babies. Today
little Samuel puts on Christ. He
is united with the death and resurrection of Christ.
He is adopted into God’s family to live a live of daily
repentance and forgiveness, a live hidden under Christ’s suffering and
weakness, even as Jesus pleads for him before the throne of divine grace
in heaven.
“He who does not believe will
be condemned.” Heed the
warning. Living in sin without repentance and neglecting the gospel
and sacraments will destroy faith.
Listen to the warning, but even the warning contains a promise.
“He who does not believe will be condemned.”
Who will be condemned? Not
the one who sins much for a long time; not the one who fell again into
sin after confessing the faith; not the one who has hated, coveted,
committed adultery, lied, killed, slandered, and mocked God.
No, only he who does not believe will be damned.
Unbelief is the only sin that does indeed damn us forever,
because Jesus Christ has taken away all of our sin – all of it – all
of the sin of all of the sinners in the entire world.
He has taken it all away. This
is the gospel. This is what
holy baptism gives us. So
we return in humble repentance to our baptism every single day of our
lives. In these sacred
waters we find the Jesus who died for us, who rose from the dead, and
who ascended into heaven. He
sits at the right hand of the Father. He lives to intercede for us.
He displays to our Father in heaven the obedience he rendered for
us. He is our Mediator.
He pleads for us. Our Father hears his plea and graciously forgives us our sins
and delivers us from every evil. By
his divine intercession Jesus guarantees that we remain God’s children
and heirs of everlasting life. He
that believes and is baptized shall be saved.
Grant this, Lord, unto us all.
Amen.
Rev. Rolf D. Preus
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