Matthew 28:19-20
Mark 16:16
John 3:5
Titus 3:5
1 Peter 3:21
We talk a lot around here about discipleship. And it’s not just us; this is an obsession throughout the North American Lutheran Church.
Discipleship is discussed so much among us that last month at our convocation in Indianapolis one person said that it had become a buzzword. One online dictionary says that a buzzword is “a word or phrase, often an item of jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context.”
God forbid that discipleship ever proves to be nothing more than a passing fad among us!
God forbid that discipleship ever proves to be nothing more than a passing fad among us!
God forbid that it’s regarded or approached as nothing more than another float in the parade of church programs!
Being and making disciples is the business, the only business, of Christ’s Church.
We have that from Jesus Himself. After He died, rose from the dead, and spent forty days revealing Himself to and teaching some 500 of His disciples, Jesus ascended into heaven. But not before He had given His Church--this church, you and me--our commission.
In His commission to the Church, Jesus didn’t say, “Cocoon yourselves from the world on Sundays and ignore Me the rest of the week.”
He didn’t say, “Have big potlucks, fun parties, and entertaining worship services, light on both Law and Gospel.”
Instead, Jesus gave us what we call the great commission. You know it well. But humor me and read Jesus’ words of commission for us aloud with me now:
"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20a)A disciple is a person to whom the Word of God, the Word of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life with God through the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, has come and, powered into our hearts, minds, and wills by God the Holy Spirit, creates within us faith in Jesus, God the Son, that saves us from sin and death and also makes us part of God’s ever-new creation.
The English Standard Version’s rendering of Romans 10:17 gives us a helpful understanding of how a saving faith in Christ, the thing that makes us disciples of Jesus, comes to us: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
See how it works?
First, the Word of God, the good news of new life through Jesus, comes to us.
Then that Word knocks on the doors of our lives, opening us to God, to create faith, making each of us a new creation.
Some of us are so thick of mind and heart, so willful and self-centered, that it takes us a long time of having that Word incessantly knocking at our doors before we begin to hear and start to believe.
Some of us are so thick of mind and heart, so willful and self-centered, that it takes us a long time of having that Word incessantly knocking at our doors before we begin to hear and start to believe.
This is what happened in my case. The Word of Christ first came to me in April 1955, when at about a year-and-a-half, I was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God, Who never gives up on we sinners, kept speaking the Word of Christ to me through the years, even through a decade of overt atheism and unbelief. He kept sending people into my life who, in their own ways, spoke the Word of Christ to me. They were members of His Church, His rescue party, prompted by the Holy Spirit to speak the Word to me so that I would come to trust, or believe in, Christ.
This is what God does: He keeps speaking His Word to us in order to give us faith in Christ and then to grow our faith in Christ so that we can have life with Him. “Here I am!” Jesus tells us as He told the first-century church in Laodicea, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” (Revelation 3:20)
To be a church committed to discipleship means, first of all, to be a people who hear and trust the Word of Christ when it’s spoken to us in the Scriptures, Holy Baptism, and Holy Communion.
It also means to be a people who, out of love of God and neighbor, speak the Word of Christ in various ways to our families, our neighbors, our classmates and co-workers, and others we come to know.
Personally, I find God opening doors for me to share the Gospel, the Word of Christ, all the time. A new one creaked open last week. Last Sunday, we were at Rusty Bucket for lunch. Ann and I go there maybe once every six weeks or so, sometimes with family, sometimes with members of the congregation.
On Sunday, our server and another one helping her brought our meals to us. The second one saw me and exclaimed, “There’s our favorite priest!” She recalled an incident that I was only able to remember later on Sunday afternoon. Holding a tray of food at that time, she had bumped into me as I was going to the restroom to wash my hands. seeing me in my collar, she nearly fell over herself to apologize. I smiled. “That’s OK,” I told her. “My business is forgiveness, not condemnation.” The way they reacted, you would have thought that I was Jimmy Fallon. I guess they don’t expect the Word of Christ to be delivered with a smile. Apparently, they’ve been talking about their “favorite priest” ever since.
Before we left, our dinner companions and I filled out a positive review of our server...sincerely meant. I appended a note to my receipt saying, “Thanks for the great service. God bless you!” I left my business card.
This is how God uses His baptized people. As Greg Finke says in Joining Jesus on His Mission, the book we’re going to start studying and discussing on Tuesday, discipleship is about enjoying the people Jesus brings into our lives and watching for and, knowing that Jesus has already gone ahead of us to Rusty Bucket or wherever we may go, showing those people how Jesus is calling them to Himself.
This life of discipleship begins for most of us at Holy Baptism. Baptism is the usual portal of entry into life with Christ. (If you’re one of those people who have come to believe in Jesus without having been baptized, you’ll want to be baptized.)
To drive home the idea that Holy Baptism is the usual starting point for Christian discipleship, consider a few things.
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul says that Baptism is like circumcision, the rite through which eight-day-old boys were claimed by God as His own in Judaism. God made them His own without the children being able to understand a thing about God or faith.
Jesus says in His conversation with the Jewish teacher Nicodemus that Baptism is a new birth for human beings born into this world as sinners and that we must have this rebirth to be part of His kingdom. “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5)
The apostle Peter says of the flood that God used to destroy the whole human race except for Noah and his family: “...this water [the water of Noah’s flood] symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ…” (1 Peter 3:21) The cataclysmic flood that God used to kill off the whole idolatrous, self-centered, sinful world and give this old creation a new start is only a faint foreshadowing of the absolute and eternal salvation that comes to us through Holy Baptism. Noah’s flood was to our baptisms what the Tonka trucks from my childhood you’ve seen in my office are to real trucks.
In a letter to a pastor named Titus, the apostle Paul says of Baptism: “[God] saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit [in other words, through Holy Baptism]…” (Titus 3:5)
Baptism is a big deal: It saves us. It brings rebirth and is something that the Church has no right to withhold from children, infants. And because it is, as Jesus teaches, a rebirth for us, it isn't necessary that the baptized person understand what God is doing for them through Holy Baptism. Did any of us understand what God was doing when He gave us birth into this earthly life?
Some people say. “You Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Catholics, and others make it so easy. You think that if you get doused with water, you’re saved and you don’t need to believe in Jesus.”
That’s not what we think.
This is what we do think: We can’t rescind the Bible’s teaching that Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit saves us. That’s what God’s Word teaches. It saves us because, as The Small Catechism reminds us, “Baptism is not merely water; it is the water used according to God’s command and connected with God’s Word.”
Holy Baptism brings God’s Word to us, unleashing the Holy Spirit into our lives to constantly speak the Word of Christ to us, to create what the New Testament calls the “gift of faith” within us.
The good news of Jesus is too good to be believed by people mired in the sin, death, and cynicism of a fallen world, a world no different from the way it was before Noah’s flood. In my natural state as a sinner, I can’t believe the Gospel. I will only have the power to believe the good news--the gospel--of new life through faith in Jesus when the Word invades my life as it does in Holy Baptism, the Bible, and Holy Communion. Jesus tells us: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16).
Think of it in this way. Today, we’re praying for the people of the Bahamas. Hurricane Dorian decimated their island, injured them, killed many of their loved ones, destroyed their homes, businesses, and infrastructure. But even now, salvation from these horrors has arrived, things like shelter, medical attention, food and water, power generators, and so on. The start of a new life is there for those who will trust in the givers and their gifts. (May we be among those offering them help.) Just so, Holy Baptism saves us. But God doesn’t force us to trust in Him. He doesn't force us to believe in Jesus. He keeps giving to us, keeps calling us His own, in the hope that we will receive by faith what He offers as a free gift.
Think of it in this way. Today, we’re praying for the people of the Bahamas. Hurricane Dorian decimated their island, injured them, killed many of their loved ones, destroyed their homes, businesses, and infrastructure. But even now, salvation from these horrors has arrived, things like shelter, medical attention, food and water, power generators, and so on. The start of a new life is there for those who will trust in the givers and their gifts. (May we be among those offering them help.) Just so, Holy Baptism saves us. But God doesn’t force us to trust in Him. He doesn't force us to believe in Jesus. He keeps giving to us, keeps calling us His own, in the hope that we will receive by faith what He offers as a free gift.
This is the first of a four-part series on living out our baptisms. That means being and making disciples who have been saved by God’s charity--His grace--through faith in Christ. We baptize because Jesus commands us to do so and Jesus commands us to do so because Holy Baptism brings the saving Word of His Gospel to sinners, calling us to receive the gift of faith, so that we live with God now and forever. But that’s just the beginning of our journey as baptized children of God. More about this journey next Sunday.
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
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