So Jesus was baptized.  He wasn’t in need of it: John the Baptist was quite plain about that, confessing that, truly, John was the one in need of baptism at the hands of Jesus.  Jesus instructs John to go ahead and baptize him, anyway, to fulfill all righteousness.  What is righteousness?  It’s the opposite of sin.  Righteousness is life God’s way.  God is righteous.  He expects righteousness not just in our conduct but in us, in our hearts and souls, our desires, hopes, plans, and choices: in our nature, the very root of our being.  The problem is, we’ve all got a case of root rot; it’s called sin.  We all have a sin problem.  It’s not a little problem, any more than a little drinking problem is little.

One definition has it that righteousness is the moral standard acceptable to God.  To fulfill all righteousness is to live up perfectly, completely, to the standard God expects.  At each moment and in every way, Jesus continually lives up to the fullness of God’s standard.  Jesus is fulfilling all righteousness.

But what does baptism have to do with that?  Isn’t baptism for sinners, those who have an admitted, a confessed sin problem?  And what’s the solution to that?  Being doused with some water?  Why water?  We feel water.  We need water.  We understand about washing and being washed.  My mother would share the story of how, when her water broke at my birth, the obstetrician told her he had never seen so much.  I was washed into this world.  We are born through the waters.

The first chapter of Genesis tells us of the dark, formless void, the Spirit of God, hovering, we’re told, over the waters, dark, deep, and vast.  God speaks, and there is response: light, and life—that which hears and responds to the Word of God, into which He breathes His breath of life.  It’s not meant to be rigorous, quantifiable, repeatable science.  It’s like poetry—putting words to feelings, the sense of something important, running attentive fingers along the contours of mystery.  Water means life, new life, new creation, restoration.  God led His people to salvation through the waters.  The psalms sing it many a time.

Baptism wasn’t only about the forgiveness of sins, the washing.  Deeper, profoundly, baptism is birth into a new life, out of the old, dark chaos and into God’s Word-ordered light.  Water is the physical sign, the physical experience: it is the Spirit who draws us into, through, and out of the water.  We enter new life through the Spirit.  Jesus opens the way, fulfilling all righteousness.

Jesus comes to call people to follow, follow him, follow God’s way, and to show us how, and that, with him, it can be done, with him, we can.  He is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.  Our faith isn’t just the theological propositions we receive and adopt.  Faith doesn’t mean believing the right things.  Test that: I believe the right things; therefore, I have faith.  No, therefore we pride ourselves on believing the right things.  Faith means knowing the truth.  The truth is not a thing but a person, Christ Jesus.  Test that: I know Jesus; therefore, I have faith.  Faith comes with knowing Jesus; we know Jesus through the Spirit.  Our faith is in God, that God is who He says He is, will do what He promises to do.  Jesus shows us and confirms for us the power of putting our faith, all our faith, in God.  Forgiveness, rebirth, salvation, water, baptism, following, righteousness—when Jesus receives baptism, he is drawing all these together, fusing them for us.  We are physical and spiritual: we respond to what our senses experience; we respond to what our souls were made to know, and need.

Baptism is the initiation of Christ’s ministry among us: by undergoing a baptism he did not need but knows we all need, he consecrates the waters, making them holy for us, the starting line to holiness.  Holiness does not mean superiority; for us, holiness means being devoted to God, going God’s way.  Baptism points to one place: the cross.  What can lead us beyond the cross, out of the grave?  Faith.  And the perfection and embodiment of faith is Christ Jesus, God with Us.

I’ve always been bowled over by what Paul writes in the sixth chapter of Romans: “do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death?” (6:3).  Doesn’t sound so happy, does it?  We are reborn to die, washed then to perish bathed in our own blood?  If we do not follow Christ to the Cross, how shall we die to the world?  If we aren’t dead to the world, we pursue it, heed what the world says, hunger for what the world offers, shaping our lives after the world’s direction and, doing so, step by step, we walk away from God.  Not that people see it that way: Oh, I’m living for Jesus!  In my own way.

Of what use is baptism to us, then?  Baptism is a beginning, an initiation into ministry.  For infants, it is a sign that the parents desire and resolve to have their child journey with Jesus.  For those who have reached the age of decision, baptism is their public profession and affirmation that they want to walk with Jesus, the confirmation that they have heard Christ’s call, and are saying yes.

To be baptized into Christ is to be joined with him in his death.  Remember, though—his death means life for us, for all who have faith.  Jesus leads the way and perfects our faith.  For a Christian, to die is to die to sin—when we die, we no longer sin, no longer know the inclination, no longer have the ability.  When we take our last breath in this life, sin is done and we are done with sin.  Hallelujah!  Amen!

But to be in Christ, baptized in Christ, isn’t to remain forever submerged.  To be dead to sin is a blessing, and to be alive for God forever is the perfection of blessedness.  Yes, “we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (6:4-5).  Baptism is the earnest of a promise, a down payment, or first installment.  Baptism is entry into a covenant, in which God pledges Himself to save us, as we have faith in Him and live to glorify Him rather than indulge ourselves, giving ourselves up to the fallenness of this world’s ways, allowing ourselves to stray further and further from the only way to true, abundant, blessed life.  God leaves us with no excuses, no pious cover for dirty deeds or lack of interest.  Life is available: on God’s terms, God’s way, fulfilling righteousness.

Paul shares a mystery with us, a mystery that Christ was also possibly—probably—showing forth at his baptism: through Christ, we die to be reborn.  “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (6:5).  Certainly we shall be: that’s faith.  Faith is not based on nothing.  Faith is based upon a relationship, knowing Jesus.  Scripture offers to help us know Jesus; only the Spirit can cause that knowledge.  Jesus says that, apart from him, we can do nothing, nothing for our salvation; apart from the Spirit, we cannot have Christ.

For Paul, baptism was also meant to mark a definitive break with sin.  When we remember our baptism, which is baptism into Christ, Paul invites, encourages, exhorts us to “consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (6:11).  This is part of what it means to be in the likeness of Christ’s resurrection.  Considering ourselves that way is one thing, and a good thing.  Continually directing that consideration into action, decision, choice . . . that’s not so easy.  We need help.  Faith is for help.  The Spirit will help.  Oh, I’m willing to suppose that there may be or may have been some glorious saint who all at once and forever after was done with sin in this life.  As for the rest of us, there remains the struggle.  We know, we agree with Paul when he writes: “Therefore sin is not to reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,” (6:12).  We say Amen!  Amen we say, when Paul then urges us, “do not go on presenting the parts of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those who are alive from the dead, and your body’s parts as instruments of righteousness for God” (6:13).  Let us meditate upon this, in our age of exalted genital slavery.  Let us meditate upon this, when we feel ourselves turning to those sweet sugar bombs for comfort rather than to the Living God.

Baptism was a sign of Christ’s formal consecration for the ministry for which God had sent him; it is a sign and reminder for us of our consecration in Christ for the ministry to which God calls us: a ministry of righteousness, of obedience that comes—and can only come—with practiced, applied faith.  It is also a ministry of salvation, mercy, forgiveness, and grace, a ministry of patience and endurance, seasoned with wisdom and the resilient hope born of wisdom.  Ours is a ministry of true help, Christ’s help.  We all need help.  In this life, even our best obedience is but a sad patchwork.  We still dash off, offering our parts to sin.  It’s not as if God didn’t know this would be the case.  We don’t have anything to offer to God.  There’s nothing we have that God wants or needs.  Righteousness is God’s gracious gift to us in Christ, yet another reminder of God’s abiding love for us not so very lovable human beings.

Christ is our righteousness, as we will receive him, cherish him, walk with him, listen to him.  We rely on Christ’s righteousness, on Christ alone, who came to fulfil all righteousness.  No deeds, thoughts, or intentions of ours can add anything to Christ’s righteousness.  Our imperfections remain, our besetting sins, our failures.  Satan would use these to crush us, beat us down, convince us it’s no use.  God uses our imperfections to remind us, when and as necessary, that we are still on our journey through the wilderness, with Him.  We don’t walk alone.  We have help.  We have one another, to whom we minister in Christ’s name.  We have those whom God places along the way along either side of our road.  We minister to them, inviting, urging, pleading with them to come belong with us, to come and see.  And all along, the Spirit ministers to us, supplying every gift, supplying all our need.

We have help.  Today, we come to that time when, each year, we install our new class of elders.  We know these sisters and this brother, and they know us.  We’ve seen in them gifts for faithful leadership—faithful helping—in this time in our life together.  It’s God who directed us to them, and God has moved them to say Yes.

To be an elder in the church is not primarily an administrative responsibility.  It is always, first of all, a spiritual responsibility, a responsibility for nurturing, encouraging, upbuilding and even, if it should become necessary, counseling and correcting.  Elders are Christ’s ministry of help.  Elders have a special charge to help all of us to live our baptism: to realize our washing, to rejoice together in our new life, to apply ourselves, together, to our Christ consecration.