Exaudi, the 6th Sunday after Easter and the Baptism of Trevor Flores [John 15:26-16:4]

 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christ has good news for His apostles. The good news is that, although He was going back to the Father, He promised to send them the Helper, the Comforter, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit who proceeds from God the Father. The Holy Spirit would testify of Christ to the nations and He would do that work of testifying through the apostles. They would also bear witness—that is, testify—because they had been with Christ from the beginning of His earthly ministry. They were eyewitnesses to all of it so they would testify to Christ’s ministry and miracles, His teaching and doctrine, His suffering and death to pay for the sins of the world, His resurrection from the dead to justify and sanctify believers, and His ascension far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things (Eph 4:10). This was a great promise. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the eternal and coequal godhead, would be present in their ministry of baptizing and teaching all nations. God the Holy Ghost—“Ghost” is from the German, “Spirit is from the Latin, they’re interchangeable—He would create repentance in the hearts of sinners through their preaching. He would rebirth sinners as children of God in the waters of Holy Baptism, and then continually feed and nourish the baptized with the testimony of Jesus. This would happen through the apostles’ witness during their lives and their written testimony after their deaths. This is good news for the apostles.

Christ also has bad news for His apostles, and they need to know it now, before their work begins on Pentecost, lest, when it happens, they stumble in the faith and fall from it entirely. Jesus says, “They will put you out of the synagogues.” The unbelieving Jews were doing this to people already before Jesus’ death. John states in John 9:22, during the episode of the healing of the man born blind on the Sabbath, that the Jews had agreed already that if anyone confessed that He was Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue. After the formerly blind man confessed Christ, that’s precisely what they did to him. They cast him out of the synagogue, excommunicating him. It gets worse though. “Yes,” Jesus says, “The time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service.” Jesus had sent them out previously to the lost sheep of the house of Israel as sheep among wolves. He told them in Matthew 10[:17-18], “They will deliver you up to councils and scourge you in their synagogues. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles.” But the apostles were not to fear the unbelieving Jews, even though they had the name “church,” beautiful synagogues, and the traditions of the elders. But since they did not know God the Father or His only-begotten Son, they were not the true church. They looked like. They sounded, in many cases, like it. They had Abraham’s blood but they were not His descendants because they did not the Father or the Son as Abraham did. They thought they knew the Father, but because they rejected the Son, the one who reveals the Father and the Father’s love for the world, they would excommunicate and exterminate the apostles.

But part of the good news is that the bad news doesn’t matter. Yes, they will be excommunicated. But it would be excommunication from the false church which rejects God’s grace for Christ’s sake and teaches people to rely on their own merits for part of their salvation. Yes, they will be killed for their testimony of Christ. But not only would their deaths for the sake of Christ galvanize the godly and fortify the faithful, their executioners would be the ones to send them to paradise to be with their Lord Jesus in perfect bliss. Physical torture? Sure, it’d hurt, but Jesus had told them, “He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt 10:38-39). Physical death? Paul tells the Corinthians, “I die daily” (1 Cor 15:31), this is the death to self, the death to sin, the putting to death of the Old Adam, the sinful nature each day. In fact, the apostle can even apply the forty-forth psalm to Himself and all the faithful who bear the cross of suffering for the faith. He writes in Romans 8[:36-37], “As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” This isn’t to say that it won’t hurt. This isn’t to say that the flesh won’t fear. But all of it is expected. Jesus has told them before hand and they conquer in all of it.

This is why today is the perfect Sunday for you, Trevor, to be baptized. I have good news for you. In Holy Baptism God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost washed you of all sin which had inherited from your first father, Adam. In Holy Baptism, God the Father rebirthed you and adopted you as His son, and clothed you with Christ’s perfect righteousness so that when He looks at you He sees you as righteous as Jesus is perfectly righteous. As His son by Holy Baptism, God the Father looks at you and says the same thing He said that day when John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased” (Matt 3:17). In baptism God has given you the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit promised to the apostles, for Peter says on Pentecost, “Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). In Holy Baptism, God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost has bestowed upon you all things that pertain to life and godliness (2 Pt 1:3), so that each day you can live in your baptismal identity as a son of God, shunning the perverse and self-serving pattern of the world and pursue instead faith in God, love toward neighbor, and chastity towards yourself. Each day you can—and should—return to your baptismal promises, so that you daily repent of your sins and believe the gospel that God, for Christ’s sake, freely forgives you, lifts you up, and sets you back on the paths of righteousness. All this is why Luther could write that there is no greater jewel in body or soul than baptism, for it is God’s gift to us by which He makes us His own children and gives us His gospel promises. That is good news indeed, not just for Trevor for all the baptized faithful.

But I have bad news for you as well. Since Baptism places you into God’s kingdom, His church, where He reigns over you by His word and Holy Spirit, that means you have a big target on your back from the other kingdom, the kingdom of the devil. The devil does not want you to live in your baptism. He wants to lead you away from the work God has done in that water combined with God’s word. He will spend his time trying to entice you away from your baptismal identity with temptations to sin. Working with him is the world with its sinful thoughts, its lifestyles of self-gratification, and its warped belief that tolerance of sin is the highest form of love. The false church will work against against you as well, trying to lure you away from the simple gospel presented in the Scriptures by passing off their traditions as if they were God’s commandments, or teaching you trust your own righteousness or your own feelings above what God says in His Word. Then there’s the sinful flesh, the old Adam, that we drown today in the water combined with God’s Word. Your own sinful flesh wants the things of the devil and the world; pleasure and popularity, gain and glory, earthly security and self-indulgence. Just as the devil, the world, the false church, and even the apostles’ sinful flesh warred against them and their testimony, so these great enemies are not arrayed against you because of who God has called you in Holy Baptism: His Son.

But like the apostles, so it is for you, and for all the baptized faithful. The good news is that the bad news really doesn’t matter as long as you remain in your baptism and live in it. God has sprinkled clean water on you and cleansed you. He has given you a new heart in which the Holy Spirit dwells, not for His own sake, but for yours, to keep you in the faith, to keep you coming back here to have your faith nourished and fed as often as you’re able. The Holy Spirit dwells in your new heart to that you continue to put the Old Adam to death each day, as often as He rears his ugly, ungodly head. You push him back under the water and drown Him again by repenting and trusting in Christ’s promises, because you are not a child of the devil, you are not a friend of the world, you are not your sinful flesh. You are God the Father’s child, Christ’s Jesus’ younger brother, and a temple of the Holy Spirit who, like St. Paul, dies daily to the sinful flesh, who takes up your cross and follows in Christ’s footsteps no matter the cost. You do all this because it is who God has made you in baptism. This isn’t to say that it won’t hurt. This isn’t to say that the flesh won’t fear. But all of it is expected. Jesus has told you before hand. Not only do are you forewarned. You know that by faith you are more conquers in all of it. And this is very good news. Amen.

May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.