Just two weeks ago we celebrated the feast day of a British teenager, who in the early 5th was kidnapped from his home by Irish pirates. His name was Patrick. Those pirates took him back to Ireland where he was sold as a slave. When he escaped he travelled to France where he entered the priesthood, following in the steps of his father and grandfather. He studied and about AD 432 was appointed to be a missionary bishop to Ireland. His great desire was to return to the people who had kidnapped him and who had made him a slave so that he could share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with them.
As word of Patrick’s ministry spread people began to seek him out. One of those people was Findcath mac Dego, one of the Irish kings. Patrick shared the Gospel with this pagan king and with his whole entourage of warriors and druids. The king and his men took the message of Jesus Christ to heart that day and were baptised by Patrick. His instruction to the newly baptised men went something like this: “Today you have put on Christ. You have bound him to you like the armour on a Roman soldier’s chest, a lorica, is tied to him. Now you belong to Christ. As you have been washed in the well of washing and poured and sprinkled with water from above, so have you received the Spirit from Heaven. You are surrounded by Christ as the waters swelled around you in the regeneration of new life.” Patrick’s parting advice to the King was this: “My King you now belong to Christ and Christ belongs to you; go and live your Baptism.”
Martin Luther described Findcath when
he left Patrick that day as going out “to swim in his Baptism.” I think
Luther’s words describe our new life in Christ very well. We’re to go
out and swim in our Baptism. The Sacraments are the outward and visible
signs of the grace that God has worked in us through his Son. Next time
you go to a Christian bookstore, look around you at all the books that
aim to tell us how to successfully be a Christian. Some of those books
are good and lots of them are trash, but how many of them start where
Patrick started – with the Sacramental sign of our being grafted into
the Body of Christ? It shouldn’t be any surprise to us that Jesus
forever linked Christian discileship to the sacrament of Holy Baptism
when he gave his Great: “Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded
you.” One of the great errors of the modern Church has been to separate
the very Sacraments that Our Lord ordained from his call to
discipleship and our sanctification. Too often the Sacraments have
become something optional. You get baptised if and when you feel like
it. Holy Communion has been taken from the main gathering of God’s
people on Sunday morning and has been moved to a small, optional, and
poorly attended Wednesday or Sunday evening service. Jesus didn’t give
us a whole lot of direct commands, but he did tell his people to do
these two things: to be baptised and to receive his Supper until his
coming again. These two Sacraments should be the starting point of our
faith, but they aren’t just ceremonial points in time with a beginning
and an end. Our baptism marks a new life – one that continues. Baptism
isn’t a “been there, done that” sort of thing. It’s “been there, still
there.” It’s done that, still doing that. The same goes for Communion.
It’s not just something we do on Sundays. What we do on Sunday is to be
a reminder to us that we live our lives in perpetual Communion with
Christ. He is our spiritual nourishment. As we go down the road of
discipleship, we start with our baptism and continue in Communion with
our Lord as we make the journey.
As modern people we want
to segment or compartmentalise our lives. We go to work and live in the
“work sphere.” We go home and we live in the “family sphere.” We go to
church and live in the “church sphere.” A lot of us have a hard time
putting it all together and realising that they’re all ongoing and part
of one life. We tend to look at things as isolated events.
Easter tends to be that way. We celebrate Easter one Sunday and the next we’re on to something else. But the Church knows better than that. That’s why we celebrate Easter for fifty days. It’s a reminder that Easter is the reality of the Christian life – that every day is an Easter for each of us as we celebrate and live in Christ’s resurrection. The Resurrection is supposed to have a lasting effect on us. In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul writes, “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).
We need to rebuild our lives on the grace of Easter and that means building on a solid foundation of faith. The Sacraments are signs and seals of Gods grace. As they communicate God’s promises to us they confirm and strengthen the faith that God calls us to live daily. Our Epistle lesson tells us that the victory that overcomes the world is that faith. In the Gospel lesson Jesus says to Thomas, “have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Our faith is what gives us the desire to put into action what God has taught us. Faith should never stop with head knowledge or intellectual assent – our faith has to go into action. The problem is that our human nature is inconsistent. We stumble and fall. But God knows we’re prone to getting weak as we journey with him. He knows that and he gives us the grace to persevere. In the Epistle we’re told that Christ comes to us in both water and blood and by the Spirit. All three are there to encourage us. Our baptism is a reminder that we are not of this fallen world – we’re a part of Christ’s Body – and the Holy Communion reminds us that we receive our life from Christ. These are what give us strength to persevere when we’re spiritually tired.
In Romans 6, St. Paul tells us that all who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death. As Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we, too, should walk in newness of life. Last Sunday our focus was on the Resurrection. But it’s important that we remember that the resurrection isn’t something that just relates to Jesus – it related to us to. St. Paul wrote to Timothy: “If we have died with him, we shall also live with him” (2 Timothy 2:11). So we need to ask, “What does it mean that we partake of Christ’s resurrection too?” Look at our Epistle lesson, 1 John 5:4-5:
For
whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory
that overcomes the world, our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world
but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
The power for the risen life comes from union with our risen Saviour.
We know that we’re citizens of God’s Kingdom, but until we either die
or Jesus comes again, we all have to spend our earthly lives living in
a sinful and fallen world. If you remember back a few weeks, the
lessons of the first three Sundays in Lent put our focus on how we’re
assaulted by the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. We
might be God’s children, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still face very
real temptations and struggles with what we’ve been called away from.
The only way that we can overcome the ways of our old lives is by a
life and an energy from a higher source. The Christian must be “born
from above.” It’s not enough to have head knowledge, as I said earlier.
It’s not enough to accept Christ as a teacher who came to show us a
higher and better way for living. If that’s all we do, then all we have
is a higher standard than others, but no real power to rise to it. The
difference comes when we believe that our Teacher and Master is the Son
of God who was resurrected and has triumphed over sin and death. We can
find the grace and power to live according to his commandments when we
understand Jesus is the Son of God. Through faith we receive the grace
of God. Our old selves are buried with him in the grave and we born
again through his Easter Resurrection. Because he has already conquered
sin and death, he gives us the power to do so to. As citizens of his
Kingdom, living under his victorious reign we live the new life that he
gives – we overcome the world.
The bringer of life is Christ. Look at verse 6:
This
is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water
only but with the water and the blood. Christ came by water and by
blood.
First, he came to cleanse us from our
sins by the washing of water. The baptism that he commanded is the
outward sign of the remission of our sins and his relieving us of our
guilt and punishment. In him every sin we have ever committed is washed
away. Because of Christ’s cleansing us, we can stand before a holy and
just God and not be condemned. Jesus received our condemnation. He is
our life. Because of that, every remission of sins after our baptism is
only the renewal of the grace that has been given to us. St. Paul also
wrote to Titus about baptism being the washing of regeneration the
means by which we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, which then
works in us to renew our hearts and minds and make us fit servants of
God(Titus 3:5. Baptism incorporates us into the living Body of Christ.
It grafts us into the living Vine and makes old dead wood that could
produce nothing to be alive with the Spirit so that it can bear new
fruit. We are taken into a new covenant with God, being baptised into
the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Because Christ
died for us – he took our punishment on himself – we have a new
standing before God. When the soldier pierced Jesus side as he was
hanging on the cross “there came out blood and water,” to signify the
cleansing power of his blood. Secondly, St. John emphatically adds:
“Not with water only but with water and the blood.” The blood is the
life. Remember all the way back to Genesis: God warned Noah “You shall
not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood” (Genesis 9:4). God
taught his people over and over that blood is life. The old sacrificial
system taught that blood – life – had to be shed to cover sins. When a
sacrifice was made in the Tabernacle of the Temple, the point wasn’t to
symbolise an offering of death. The shedding of blood on the altar was
a symbolic offering of life to atone for sin. The whole point of the
Old Testament sacrificial system was to teach God’s people that
innocent blood must be shed to cover sins. Those imperfect sacrifices
of dumb animals pointed to the perfect sacrifice that Christ made for
us in his own death. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and
have it abundantly” (John 10:10). He gives us that abundant life
through is blood. Jesus also said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless
you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no
life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,
and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed,
and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live
because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This
is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate
and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever” (John 6:53-58). We
are grafted into his Body and we receive our nourishment from him. The
Holy Communion is the outward sign and seal of that grace. Through his
blood we abide in the living Christ and he abides in us.
Finally, look at verses 7-12:
And
the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is the truth. There are
three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three
agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is
greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has borne witness to
his Son. He who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in
himself. He who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he
has not believed in the testimony that God has borne to his Son. And
this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is
in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son of God
has not life.
St. John’s train of thought is
plain. The life given by the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood is the
ongoing and perpetual witness to the Son of God. The Holy Spirit
creates new life in us, which is seen outwardly in our baptism, and
then the Spirit feeds and strengths that life through our communion
with Christ as we receive his body and blood, our heavenly food. The
very fact that we live – and when we’re all gathered together, that the
Church lives – is the evidence of the claim that Jesus has made to be
our Lord. This isn’t the testimony or witness of men; it’s the witness
of God the Holy Spirit living in men. It might come through men and
women, but that’s because each believer lives again in Christ and can
witness him. Life comes from life, and the risen Christian proves a
risen Christ to be the source of our Christianity. In fact, the growth
of the Church – of the Body of Christ – is the ongoing growing and
strengthening witness to Christ in the world. St. John Chrysostom
wrote: The Chruch consisteth of these two together, and those who are
initiated know this, being regenerated by water and nourished by the
Blood and Flesh. Hence the Sacraments take their beginning” (Homily
85). The Church fulfils her mission and grows as she abides in Christ
and he abides in her. To be the Church means that we stress this new
life above all else.
In our Gospel lesson this morning we see Jesus giving his divine
commission to the disciples. They were laying low and hiding out from
the authorities when Jesus appeared in the room before them. And yet
Jesus gave these men calm assurance. He came into the room and simply
said, “Peace be with you.” They saw his pierced hands and his feet and
that was all they needed. St. John says that they were glad to see
their risen Lord. But notice that Jesus didn’t just come to give a
little bit of reassurance to a group of men who feared that the
authorities might come for them next – to crucify them the same way
their Lord had been. No, Jesus reassured them and gave them a
commission:
Jesus
said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even
so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and
said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Think
about it. Those disciples were scared. When Jesus was before the
Sanhedrin Peter had been identified as one of his followers. They were
afraid to show their faces in Jerusalem. Jesus came to give them
reassurance, but that’s not all – he and call them to go out and boldly
proclaim that the Kingdom of God had come, just as he had spent the
last three years proclaiming that same Kingdom. They just wanted to
hide and Jesus said, “No! God out and boldly proclaim the message I
gave you!”
You see, too often we as Christian are happy to receive Christ’s
comfort. We’re happy that we’ve been saved from our sins. We’re happy
to leave sin behind and live our lives, by the help of the Spirit, in
ways that are pleasing to God. But does that involve actually going out
into the world to use those Spirit-given gifts to proclaim the Kingdom
of God? The Father didn’t send the Spirit just to make us feel warm and
fuzzy. He sent the Spirit to empower his people for service and
ministry. Pentecost wasn’t about feeling warm and fuzzy or about having
nice feelings about God. It was about boldly proclaiming a message of
salvation through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. The early Christians
understood what it meant to be Easter people – to be people united with
Christ in his Resurrection. But Jesus breathes on each of us too. To
swim in your baptism, as Luther used to put it, means to live the
Spirit-filled life. God fills each of us with his Spirit just as he did
those disciples he breathed on as he commissioned them. Jesus empowered
his disciples and said to them, “I send you.” And he does the same to
each of us. Take those words in our Gospel lesson as if they were
spoken to you.
This is where we start. We find our risen life in our risen Saviour. We
have been joined with him and we find our spiritual food in him. When
Christ died and rose from the dead he crushed the head of the Serpent.
St. John described in his vision, how the angel chained that old
Serpent, the Devil, and threw him into the pit. On the cross, Christ
bought not only his victory, but our own, and now he sits in heaven at
the right hand of the Father where he reigns over his Kingdom. His
disciples huddled fearfully in that room with the doors and windows
shut, fearing the world outside and what might happen to them if they
showed their faces in Jerusalem. They didn’t realize that they had
nothing to fear. Our Lord and Master is ruler over all and has won the
victory for us. Too often we’re just like the disciples. Jesus says to
each of us, “I send you,” but we’re afraid. We just need to remember
that he reigns and that we have nothing to fear when we go out in his
name. That was what drove those early Christians, even when they
suffered martyrdom. They understood what it meant to be an Easter
people. They understood what it meant to be citizens of God’s Kingdom.
They knew what it meant for their Lord to have already won the victory.
I’m reminded of the chorus of a popular hymn – it’s not a typical
Anglican hymn – but I think the words really sum up the life we find in
our risen Saviour:
O victory in Jesus,
My saviour forever,
He sought me and he bought me
With his redeeming blood;
He loved me ere I knew him,
And all my love is due him,
He plunged me to victory,
Beneath the cleansing flood.
Title: The Easter Life
Series: Sermons on the Church Year
Text: 1 St. John 5:4-12 & St. John 20:19-23
Date: Easter 1- March 30, 2008