The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Three hundred years before the birth of Christ, God spoke through the prophet Malachi: “Behold, I am going to send my messenger, and he will clear the way before me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, he is coming,” says the Lord of hosts. It’s a prophecy about John the Baptist, and specifically about what he has been created in this world to be and to do. So when John showed up at the River Jordan, he had but just one job: to preach to people who were worse off than stones. He is to preach the law and the gospel, calling human beings to repentance, to the true Christian faith.
The word “repent” is a word that is heard mostly in conjunction with the law. When you hear about a preacher preaching repentance, the first thing that comes to mind is how we fail miserably to uphold the Ten Commandments in every thought, word, and deed. Yet it is also a call that gives what it demands. It calls for repentance and it gives repentance. And the Greek word “repent” means to turn around, to do the opposite thing or go in the opposite direction. The Lutheran Confessions rightly understand what the word “repent,” metanoia, means in the Bible: it means to feel sorrow, contrition, shame over one’s sins, and to trust fully in the person and the work of Jesus Christ for the remission of those sins, apart from any works or deeds or thoughts that you have or could have. But as I said, the call gives what it demands. True sorrow over sin and faith in Christ for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation is nothing less than a miracle, nothing less than a work of God. Repentance is an act of faith, and faith in the heart is worked by God the Holy Spirit in the preaching of the gospel and the sacrament of Holy Baptism.
John himself makes it clear that the work of conversion, faith, and confession, as well as absolution, all belongs to God. The old nature doesn’t have it in itself to repent. It simply can’t do it. It’s opposed to all God’s will and all God’s ways. The old nature does not have the ability to repent. It doesn’t have the ability to believe. It doesn’t have the ability to receive that which God gives. Thus John the Baptist said in the Gospel lesson this morning, “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” When a person who depends on his or her own good works for salvation is converted, that is called repentance, and it is by God’s word, and it’s God’s responsibility that one has in fact been converted.
The people being baptized in the Gospel lesson today were not converted due to the force of John the Baptist’s personality. He wasn’t, after all, a particularly appealing man to be around. He was not a man of his time. He looked like something out of primitive man, a wild man from the wilderness. He’s unlike the religious leaders of the day. He’s not clean, well-groomed, well-dressed, no bright and colorful clothing. He wasn’t clean. He wasn’t groomed. He lived in a world of uncomfortableness, not comfort. He came from the wilderness. He was no diplomat. He didn’t smooth-talk people into the kingdom. He didn’t entertain them with great shows and songs and skits. He preached the law and the gospel. He preached, the Bible says, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. A very simple and clear message from God himself through word and sacrament. God was creating saints out of sinners. He was calling people who were born in sin and could not free themselves to a life of sinlessness and of freedom. He was calling people who were worse off than stones, the stones that dotted the landscape along the path where those folks were standing in line waiting for their turn.
The solid declaration, the Formula of Concord, Article 2, the doctrine of free will, teaches the following regarding your natural ability to believe. And stones. Our Confessions say: before a man is illuminated, converted, reborn, renewed, and drawn by the Holy Spirit, he can do nothing in spiritual things of himself, but by his own powers, including and especially repentance. When it comes to man beginning, affecting, or cooperating in his own conversion or regeneration, he is as effective as a stone, a block, a lump of clay. Although he can direct members of his body, he can hear the gospel, meditate on it to a certain degree, and even talk about it like the scribes and Pharisees and hypocrites do, yet he considers it folly, and he cannot believe. In this respect he is worse than a stone, because he is resistant and hostile to the will of God, unless the Holy Spirit is active in him and kindles and creates true faith and other God-pleasing virtues and obedience in him. So the Confessions don’t really have much to say in favor of free will of human beings. We are worse off than stones. At least stones are neutral. They neither turn to the right nor turn to the left. I took a big stone to anchor an angel that got blown over in a windstorm the other day. I got the biggest, heaviest one out of the landscape I could get. I set it down at the base of the angel. It ain’t going nowhere. It doesn’t go to the right. It doesn’t go to the left. It just sits there. But sinful human nature always goes away from the Lord God.
It gets worse than that. The Confessions go on to say: in spiritual and divine things, however, which concern the salvation of his soul, man is like a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, yes, like a log or a stone, like a lifeless statue which uses neither mouth nor eyes nor senses nor heart, inasmuch as a man does not see or recognize the dreadful, cruel wrath of God over sin and death, but continues in his carnal security. So on Palm Sunday the Pharisees were driven mad by the songs and praise and the parade of the great multitude that gathered to see Jesus enter Jerusalem. They demanded that Jesus rebuke his followers, the multitude. And Jesus’s response: “I tell you, if these become silent, the stones will cry out.” People and stones both lined that road on Palm Sunday, and people and stones lined the path waiting to be baptized by John. But God made his choice. He chose to raise up his children, children of Abraham, not from stones, but from beings that are worse off than stones. He could raise up children for himself from human flesh by virtue of the preaching of the law and the gospel of Jesus Christ. He chose the latter, not the former. He chose human beings of flesh and blood, not stones upon the earth. So on Palm Sunday they sang out, “Hosanna! Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And on the day John the Baptist came preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, God created children who were formerly worse off than stones. But not all were brought to faith. John said the religious leaders did not come to faith. They rather presented themselves for what they really were: hypocrites, hostile to the will and way of God. Thus John said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance, and do not say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I say to you, God is able to raise these stones up to be children of Abraham.”
Now all this talk about stones and the power of God’s word and the work of the Holy Spirit in the process of conversion should put us in mind as well of the epistle reading today, Philippians chapter 1. There Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi: “I thank my God in remembrance of all of you, always offering prayer with joy in every prayer for all of you, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” Paul is addressing Christians, people who have already had the miracle of conversion performed upon them. But guess what? It’s not a one-off. After conversion in the waters of Holy Baptism and the preaching and teaching of the law and gospel, God continues to work on you. Some of us don’t particularly like it. We’re like hard stone that God takes a chisel to, to sculpt it. Here Paul is making it clear that God not only creates children and saints out of sinners, he continues to work on them throughout their life in this world. Paul teaches us here that the work continues and that Christians are not self-made men and women. A lot of people think, in fact I once had to use a piece of Sunday school material in my vicarage year that said something to this effect. It was from Gospel Light, a Baptist publication. Don’t ask me what a Lutheran church is doing using Baptist material. I put an end to that even as a vicar. But there it was: that the more mature we become in Christ, the less we have need for the cross of Christ, and the more and more we do good works for him. Well, that’s not really how it works at all. Paul uses similar language in Ephesians to describe what God does for us as Christians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing, it is a gift from God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, for certain purposes which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” God creates through us the gift of faith and then he continues to work on us, refining that gift of faith, so that it manifests itself in true love toward one another and toward our neighbors.
The message is not unique to the New Testament. Isaiah 64:8: “O Lord, you are our father. We are the clay, and you are our potter, and we are all the work of your hand.” Now I want you to think on that for a moment, that the Lord God starts with something that is spiritually deader than a stone, the human soul, which by nature opposes God’s will. Then he brings us to life, creates a living work of art that Paul calls “workmanship.” But an even better translation might be that we are in fact a work of art by God. That’s what the Greek sort of carries with it. God’s not just the creator of the world. He is the artist who brought the world into being, the artist par excellence, who loves to create works of art. It is in his very nature to create and fashion something beautiful. In Genesis chapter 1 the Lord pronounced his works of art as good or even beautiful. In fact, the Septuagint, that’s the Greek translation that was in use when Jesus was on his earthly ministry, the Greek translation of the Old Testament Hebrew, took the word “good” in Genesis 1 and translated it as “beautiful.” So day one was beautiful, all the way through day seven was beautiful, with the crowning achievement on day six: human beings created in his likeness and in his image. They were beautiful works of art.
Christian faith, faith that is in the heart, is itself a work of God that he began in us on the day in which the word became real and the Holy Spirit began to dwell in us, in the new nature that was created by the water and the word. It is not a good work in the sense of something we do or we can generate. It’s a good work in the sense that God did it and is doing it in us, through us, and for us. See, children from the moment that they are begotten into this world are meant to be molded and sculptured by their parents to be the Christians they were baptized to be. They are to grow up learning what it means to be a child of the heavenly Father, a brother or sister to Jesus Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. Christians also are supposed to have that innocent trust, that whatever their parents are doing for them is good for them. It’s the same with our heavenly Father. Faith is the good work that God spoke into you in the waters of your baptism. The ultimate goal of faith is our salvation, but another goal of faith is to do good works that the artist has prepared for us before the foundation of the world. St. Paul says in verses 9 and 10: “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” The work of faith is to love, is to increase our knowledge and wisdom concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, and to come to know that which in the world is excellent and pure and blameless. This too is a part of God’s work in us. But in each of us there remains a resistance and opposition to the great artist and to that which is in fact excellent and pure and blameless. And the sinful world itself also is opposed to all that is pure and blameless and excellent. In God’s sight, God said creation was beautiful, good, very good. But the fall into sin destroyed it and scarred and defaced the creation, everything in it, to its deepest core.
That opposition is why the artist came into the world and first allowed himself to be disfigured, defaced, broken into pieces by sinners who can only create death and destruction. He took our sins, our ugliness, upon himself and put them to death with himself on the cross. The Creator did not let the pain, suffering, and death of his creatures have the final word. He rose in a beautiful sunrise on Easter morning, victorious in the strife for those he came to save. Then the artist took the clay, and he began with first a water bath, a baptism. The old Adam needed to be put under, and he needs to be drowned daily, with all of our sins and all of our evil lusts, so that the new Adam, or the new Eve, can emerge, who is righteous and holy before God. The artist knows the damage sin causes. He experienced it himself. But the artist’s work of art, his masterpiece, the new heavens and the new earth, and the new you, will be completed that final day when he comes with all of his holy angels. He will have finished what he had started from the very beginning. Like the Philippian Christians, we today can look forward to the day of Christ Jesus, not only with hope, but with supreme confidence that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the last day. Though you have gone from worse than a stone, a sinner, to a saint, holy, created and fashioned in the image of God, growing day by day in knowledge and wisdom of all that is excellent, pure, and blameless. For your sins are forgiven, and the word dwells in you. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.