"Come to the Water," Matthew 3:13-17, Bryan Wandel

Quick show of hands, how many of you are now or have ever been an

intern? What an eager and underpaid

congregation we have here. I once, many years ago, applied

for an internship with the Department of State.

I was rejected for this internship, but that rejection

LED many years later, 20 years later, to some of the content of

this sermon right now. So let me tell you a story.

So I'm sitting in my dorm room in Rochester, NY and figuring

out what I'm going to do for the summer.

I come across this internship with State Department and it

just seems like the coolest thing in the world, right?

I have no idea what one would actually do in such an

internship or how I would get there or what it pays probably

for the better. And but I'm, I'm I'm full of

passion, right? I'm I'm passionate about our

Lord. I've been growing by leaps and

bounds my faith recently and I'm just I want to see the Kingdom

of God come through everything in my life and I'm just super

fascinated by politics model UN nerd, all that stuff.

So start filling out the application name, college major,

boom, here I come, Foggy Bottom, right?

And then I get to the question that says, what are your goals

with this internship? What are you aiming for?

And I could sort of see at that moment 2 paths on the one side.

I know what they're asking for. Like, I'm naive, but I'm not

stupid. Like, I know what they want to

hear about democracy and human rights and American interests

abroad and all that stuff. And I'm like, you know what,

forget it. I'm just going to tell the

truth. I'm applying for this internship

with the Department of State so that I can see the Kingdom of

God come through US foreign policy and you know, send flush,

do something else this summer, whatever.

Couple months later, I get a call in my dorm room, my dorm

room phone and this woman says hi.

I'm so and so calling from the Department of State.

I was reading over your application.

I was interested and so I wrote down your info so I could take

it home and call you from my home phone, which intern

coordinators out there not supposed to do this kind of

thing, personal identifiable information, all that thing, she

said. I'm actually, I'm a believer

also. I've been pursuing my calling

here at the Department of State. And first of all, I just want to

encourage you in your own faith, your interest in politics, but I

also want to encourage you to think a little bit more deeply

about how your Christian calling and mission fits with your

career mission. And I thought, huh, actually,

I've never thought about that. I've just got all these kind of

passions and feelings drives, and they're all kind of the same

thing. And I don't know what they are.

Maybe you've thought deeply about those things you've

wrestled with, what your mission is in your life, how that fits

with the things that you're doing right now.

I'm sure some of you have wrestled with those questions as

you wrestle with them. I think one of the difficulties

is that the questions become more difficult as you get more

deeply into them. For example, some of us feel

like our mission is to materially make better the

social conditions around us in concrete ways to improve

fairness and justice and wealth so that these things become more

real around us. You know, like measurable

outcomes. That's the phrase, right?

Love that phrase. Measurable outcomes.

And some of us feel like our mission is to find the truth, to

know for certain that we are on the right side and we have the

truth. So I find the right church.

I find the right candidates, I find the right philosophy.

And once I've got those things, I know I've got it right.

Then I have a mission to tell other people and make sure that

they are on the right side of the truth.

And many of us feel this tension all the time because these two

groups of people both feel like they are on a powerful mission

and that the other people are probably never going to get it.

They're just never going to understand the mission.

We feel this in so many ways. Those groups of people sometimes

then will join different book clubs, listen to different

podcasts and sources of news. Many times they'll attend

different churches. Never mind all of the political

stuff associated with that. There's this exterior mission,

this interior mission, and you got to choose one of them.

Which one is your mission? Well, I'm here as the preacher

today to tell you that the biblical teaching is not so.

Not only is there no division between these two things, but

that it is destructive to act in such a way.

It divides us, It pulls us apart in some unnecessary ways.

So what is that mission? There is a mission that the Lord

has for us that ties together the exterior and the interior of

our ourselves. And we can experience that

through the mission to enter into the presence of God here on

earth. One word for that mission is

worship, the mission of worship. And I mean that not just in the

particular sense of singing songs and going to worship

services, but in the broader sense to live your life in such

a way as to enter into the presence of God here on earth.

Let's tease that out for a few minutes.

In the Old Testament, one of the great stories of the Old

Testament is the Exodus, which is found in the book of Exodus.

And in this story, the people of Israel are in bondage.

They are in slavery in Egypt. And so Moses goes to Pharaoh,

and he says to Pharaoh, let my people go.

And Pharaoh says, go where? To do what?

And Moses says to worship. God has called us to hold a

sacred feast of worship, to meet with him in his presence here on

earth. That is Our Calling.

And the story continues. They pass through the Red Sea.

They're liberated from their bondage and they go to this

mountain, this meeting place of God with humans called Mount

Sinai. And the whole rest of the Old

Testament sort of looks back on this moment of like, this is

what we should be doing if we really were who we're supposed

to be. This is what it would be like in

this moment right here. And they feel that way because

that's exactly what God says to the people at that moment.

And Mount Sinai, he says, this is your mission right here.

Exodus 19/6. He says you will be to me a

Kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

It is your mission to enter into the presence of God here on

earth through earthly realities, just like this mountain right

here, and then to minister that presence to the families of the

earth. That is the mission that God has

for us. It's the same mission that Jesus

came to fulfill and instantiate and cast to the four corners of

the earth. Jesus mission.

As we we heard just a few moments ago, Jesus mission

started with his baptism. His ministry begins at that

point and you can tell what Jesus mission is based on what

that baptism is. What is baptism?

Baptism is a washing. That's a consecration to enter

into the presence of God in worship.

So in the story of the Israelites, they come out to

enter into the presence of God. They come out of Egypt, and what

do they do at the base of the mountain as they're preparing

themselves in Exodus 19, they wash themselves to consecrate

themselves, to enter into the presence of God.

The Old Testament pattern is for worshippers to wash themselves,

to consecrate themselves, to enter into the presence of God

here on earth. That washing is a great theme in

the Scriptures. There's a beautiful phrase in

Psalm 26 that talks about this. Psalm 26 says I wash my hands in

innocence and go around your altar.

You see the consecration, entering into God's presence and

worship, proclaiming Thanksgiving aloud and telling

all your wonder, wondrous deeds. You're both sides there, right?

Entering into the presence of God and then ministering that

presence to others. Oh Lord, I love the habitation

of your house and the place where your glory dwells.

The ministry of Jesus was consecrated through his baptism

to go into the world, to consecrate followers, to go into

the whole world so that they might walk into the presence of

God and be his priest and a holy nation.

One of the most beautiful ways of putting this is in a book

from the 1960s. It's called For the Life of the

World by Alexander Schmemann and the author.

He was giving a series of talks at a a student missions

conference. And so the question before then

was, what's what's the goal of mission?

Like? What are we trying to do in

mission? And so Schmemman says, well, the

goal is what Jesus said his goal is, which is the life of the

world to bring. It's for the life of the world.

So the question is, what is the life of the world?

So he says biblically, the life of the world is to use the

material creation, the material world around us to use it,

eating, working, procreation, raising children, all the good

things of this world to use those things and to offer them

back to God in worship so that those earthly realities might

become a communion with God. Here's how he puts up the

natural dependence of man upon the world was intended to be

transformed constantly into communion with God, in whom is

all life. Man was to be the priest of a

Eucharist, offering the world to God.

And in this offering he was to receive the gift of life.

Now, as I look out at you, I know that there are so many

missions in your lives, so many missions in individual lives

that I see right here. Some of you have a mission in

the State Department's working out justice or fairness or

various foreign policy interests.

Some of you have a mission to provide for your families.

Some of you have a mission to be an integral part of the network

of relationships in your neighborhood.

All of these are small M missions that receive, that must

receive their character and their power and their direction

from a a big M mission. And the big M mission that

guides all of those things that informs them is to enter into

the presence of God here on earth to be a Kingdom of priests

and a holy nation. Now I know just as well as I

think most of you do, how easy it is for those small end

missions to completely overwhelm our lives.

They take all of our time and our attention and our problem

solve, problem solving abilities, our intellect.

They certainly take all of our patience, and there are so many

good things to be done through those things, informed hopefully

by God's mission. But that is the problem, isn't

it? It's so easy for those things to

become detached from the big M mission of our lives to uncover

God's presence and His glory through this world.

If that's you today and you're feeling some of that, that, that

that pull away in the small M missions of your life, today is

the day to reconsecrate yourself to the big M mission of God.

Today is the day for that because God has put you here in

Washington, DC, in this place in the world, so that this place

might be for you a Mount Sinai, a meeting place of God with

humans to enter into His presence through your job and

your relationships and your neighborhood and all of the

missions in your life. That in all of these things you

might uncover His glory. You might uncover it corporately

through living out your life in this congregation as a family of

God. That you might uncover His glory

intellectually by digesting the deep truths of the Bible for

your particular situation and your calling.

That you might uncover the glory of God spiritually as you

develop an active and vibrant prayer life to sustain the

missions that God has put you on.

That you might uncover the glory of God practically by serving

those around you, those in need, mentally and physically and

monetarily in your life. All some of those things seem

more religious than others, but all of them are various parts of

the Big M mission of God, which God has called us on.

It informs all of these other things in our lives.

How do we consecrate ourselves for that?

We need to do that at discrete moments in our life, but we also

need to do that every day. Here's a prayer to pray in the

morning. Before you've looked at your

phone, before you've looked at the news, certainly before

you've checked your work e-mail. You pray a prayer that says,

Lord, this day is a day from you that ioffer back to you in

worship. And then you walk through the

various things of your day. 9 AMI have a meeting with this

person. 11:00 Staff meeting. 12:00 Lunch with so and so,

dinner with my family, call with my father at 8:00 in the

evening. And you walk through these

things and you consecrate each one to the Lord.

Lord, how can I uncover and know your presence through these

earthly realities and be a priest for you in these

situations? Well, if you will pray that

prayer, then what you're doing is consecrating your life to be

a temple of the Lord, which is amazing.

It's incredible. It's a beautiful vision.

And you will also though, be consecrating your life to be a

zone of active conflict. The patterns of Jesus life and

ministry and the patterns of the ancient Israelites show us that

those who would consecrate themselves for God's purposes to

uncover his glory on the earth will face spiritual opposition.

And those spiritual forces will be opposed to you, and you will

be opposed to them. And their opposition to you is

called temptation, and your opposition to them is called

exorcism or casting out. We see this in the ministry of

Jesus, and this also is a part of our mission.

Jesus consecrates himself and his baptism for this ministry of

consecration, and then he goes out and immediately the first

thing that happens is that he is attacked by the devil in

temptation and he goes out and he attacks the strongholds of

the devil in a ministry of exorcism and casting out and

releasing people from spiritual bondage.

Now this can look many different ways.

Actually, sometimes we think of the like placing your hand on a

forehead and casting out a demon.

And that happens in the Scriptures, and it happens today

also. For example, in the Gospel of

John, that kind of confrontation looks more like a confrontation

between the truth and lies. Or in some other parts of the

New Testament, in the letters of Paul, the spiritual forces of

evil are part of a confrontation that's like behind all of our

moral life as we live that out in the world many different ways

in which there are spiritual forces of evil arraigned against

us internally in temptation and externally in casting out.

I point this out because it's easy for us to see these

discreet Bible stories as different things.

We get to 1 here and one there when in fact they are connected.

There is a pattern there. The story of Jesus baptism and

temptation and the casting out are one story.

The same thing. The same pattern is in the

Israelites. They, they come out of Egypt,

they're released from bondage, they enter into the presence of

God. They have this great calling

upon their lives be a Kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

And immediately they encounter spiritual opposition in

temptation. This is in the book of Numbers

in the Bible. And they go out and take that

spiritual opposition in a, in a ministry of casting out.

And this is what the Israelites are doing in their mission in

the promised land, casting out spiritual forces of evil.

If you read closely through Numbers, Deuteronomy, and

Joshua, that's how things are pictured.

Now, as I talked about this, it's easy for us to picture

spiritual opposition as if it's like a football game where

you've got one side lined up here and the other side on the

other part of the line of scrimmage, and they're facing

each other. You've got a red team and a

white team. Boom, go.

Someone's going to score more points than the other one.

Someone's going to stop the other team from scoring.

This analogy has limited value. And the issue is that what we

learn from the consecration of Jesus is that spiritual conflict

is ultimately a conflict of consecration.

That which is submitted to the will of God is consecrated to

his purposes and uncovering his glory, and that which is not

submitted to the will of God is potentially arrayed against that

mission. Some people hear that and they

think, what does that mean? Does that mean people who don't

believe the same things as I were like opponents in the

spiritual conflict? Well, actually the apostle Paul

is clear about this. In Ephesians 6, he says that we

wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers

and the authorities and the powers of this present darkness.

And those spiritual powers do still make attack today through

temptation. Temptation and in the world

around us. And it is present all around us,

opposing the mission of consecration.

It's there in self righteousness, self

justification, schism. It's there in impatience with

the long purposes of God, with nonchalance toward what is holy

in all of these things. If those things are not

addressed and confronted and dealt with and exposed and

forsaken and prayed against, we will experience vanity and our

desire to commune with God through His creation or.

All of this that we're doing will end up becoming like some

kind of great big religious show instead of what it ought to be,

which is experiencing the power of God here on this earth.

How do we go about that mission? How is that a part of our

mission also in the day today, then?

Well, I think we can enter into it fairly simply.

Again, at the beginning of each day, here's a simple prayer that

you can pray. It goes like this.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Lord, lead me and those in my small group, those who I walk

out my faith with, and those in my church.

Lead us not into temptation. Lead us not beyond what we can

handle. Lord, steer it clear from us so

that we might not be distracted from the big M mission, the

purposes of God in our life, so the small M missions may not

pull us away in a million different directions and pull us

away from the presence of God. Just as you, O Lord, defeated

and triumphed over the forces of evil on the cross, in the same

way would you defeat and triumph over these same forces here in

the world today. My friends, for all of you, all

of you have so many different missions in your life, so many

important things to enter into, so many things to which you feel

called. Some of them you really feel

certain you're on the right side of history.

Some of them you're not sure at all.

The important thing is for all of us to root those missions in

the big M mission and purpose of God, which is to be a Kingdom of

priests and a holy nation. To consecrate all of these

things to the Lord so that we might uncover his glory through

this earth, through our jobs and our families and our

neighborhoods, through our rejections from internships or

jobs or relationships. And offer these things back to

the Lord in the beauty of worship so that they might be a

kind of communion with God. I'm going to ask the parents

right now. You may go to get your children

while I say a prayer here as we ask for the Lord's presence in

this baptism. Lord Jesus, we pray right now

for all of all of us here, for all of my brothers and sisters

in this place. I pray, Lord, that you will

teach us the ways of mission, teach us to follow after Jesus,

to enter into the presence of God here on this earth, who pray

that this baptism right now might be the beginning of a new

ministry for the one who is baptized and for all of us as we

reconsecrate ourselves for the purposes of God, the name of the

Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit, Amen.