Something to Believe

Second Sunday of Advent — Luke 1.18-25

Baptism of Carolina Michelle Torrez Martinez

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An Amazon Echo sits on our kitchen counter in between my stand mixer and the breadbox. It can tell me the week’s weather forecast. It can report my portfolio’s performance for the day. It can convert ounces to grams in a recipe. It can tell me jokes and stories, and it can do it all in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson when I request it (which is often).

During the pandemic, I asked it a simple, straightforward question.

It is also the most important question.

“Alexa,” I queried, “does God love me?”

The little blue arrow on the top of the device first lit up.

And then it circled round and around for a moment.

“I'm sure you're very lovable,” Alexa answered.

Which— let’s face it— is not true.

So I tried again.

“Alexa,” I said, taking the tone of a police interrogator, “does God love me?”

Again, the little blue arrow illuminated the cabinet space and circled clockwise around the device.

“How could anyone not love you?” Alexa replied.

“Easily,” I muttered underneath my breath.

Undeterred, I asked her again, “Alexa, does God love me?”

“People all have their own views on religion,” Alexa answered like a good secular liberal.

I rolled up my sleeves, leaned my arms on the counter, and I braced Alexa like Jules does to Ringo and Pumpkin in Pulp Fiction.

“ALEXA, DOES GOD LOVE ME?”

And again, the little blue light traced the top of the echo.

Until finally, Alexa offered the most flaccid answer of all.

“It’s more important that you love yourself.”

“It’s not,” I preached at her, “It’s really not. It's most definitely not more important that you love yourself.”

To which my son asked, “Dad, who are you yelling at?”

In his Large Catechism, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther teaches that faith must have something tangible and visible to believe. Faith, Luther insists, must have something to which it may cling and upon which it can stand. This is why Luther asserts that baptism and faith should never be separated. Faith must have something external to you to grab onto and cling for life. Otherwise, your faith turns inward and you are left attempting to have faith in your faith, which is as effective as asking Alexa the most important question of all. Very few of us can delude ourselves for long with the lie that our faith is sufficient to save us. Indeed, for the first Protestants, the phrase “by faith alone” could just as easily be substituted with the phrase “by baptism alone.”

We are saved by baptism alone.

We do not stand on our faith.

It is on baptismal faith that we stand.

We do not put our faith in our faith.

We cling— by faith— to the promise of our baptisms.

As the theologian Gerhard Forde writes:

“Our know-it-alls assert that faith alone saves and that works and external things contribute nothing to this end. It is true, nothing that is in us does it but faith. But these leaders of the blind are unwilling to see that faith must have something to believe—something to which it may cling and upon which it may stand. Thus faith clings to the water and believes it to be baptism in which there is sheer salvation and life, not through the water, but through its incorporation with God's Word and ordinance and the joining of his name to it. When you believe this, what else is it but believing in God as the one who has implanted his Word in the water and offered it to you so that you may grasp the treasure it contains?”

What else is it but believing in God?

One of the most basic building blocks of Christian dogma is the conviction that the works of the Trinity are undivided. That is, what one person of the Triune identity does, they all do because God cannot be separated into parts. For instance, if baptism is a work of the Holy Spirit, it is also necessarily an act of the Father. And if the scriptures are clear about anything, it is that we cannot manipulate God the Father into doing what we want. Therefore, no matter what your parents may have thought they were doing in scheduling your baptism, the ultimate will behind the then-and-there of your baptism was Almighty God.

Baptismal faith, then, is faith that baptism is not the moment when we make a decision for God; baptism is the moment when the LORD applies his decision for you to you. Thus, it is God's will that here-and-now the Word would alight upon Carolina, calling into existence that which did not previously exist— a part of the totus Christus; in other words, no matter your opinions about Luke’s nativity, you are about to witness a virgin birth no less miraculous than that of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. Baptismal faith is faith that it is the Father’s will to cloth Carolina in Christ’s righteousness, and it is the LORD’s doing to do so precisely in this place, here-and-now.

• You are loved by the Love in which we live and move and have our being.

• You are.

• You are.

But most of you cannot hold fast to that claim forever. While some of you cannot even believe it for long. And a few of you will struggle to trust it to next Sunday.

This is why faith needs something— some thing— to believe.

Faith needs something visible.

Faith needs something tangible.

Faith needs something in the here-and-now to take hold of and believe.

And because baptism is not your doing, because the will that willed your baptism is extra nos, because Christ gives himself to us in tangible, edible, visible means, we can grab ahold of God and know that, as Gerhard Forde puts it, “the one who runs the whole show is for you.”

Without these external things, faith has nothing to believe but some incomprehensible promise about the distant future or some ancient history that happened over two thousand years ago.

Sinners require more.

Faith can only be faith when it has a concrete promise to believe.

After all, even the demons and the pagans believe in the history of Jesus.

What they do not believe is that that history of Jesus is for them. Faith then is not about you believing in God. Faith is not about you believing that two thousand years ago Jesus died for you. Faith is not even about you believing that three days later God raised him from the dead for your justification.

As Martin Luther preached it,

“If I now seek the forgiveness of sins, I do not run to the cross, for I will not find it at the cross, but I will find it in the sacrament. I will find it in the gospel word which distributes, presents, offers, and gives to me today that forgiveness which was won on the cross.”

Faith is not about events a long time ago in a Galilee far far away. Faith is an everyday, existential encounter. Faith is a present-tense laying ahold of the promise God— when God speaks it to you, “This is my body given for you.”

Face it.

You are not much more lovable than me. Neither is it more important that you love yourself. And take it from me, there will be times in your life when the relevance of the most important question will knock you over and set your heart to racing.

We are all terminal cases.

In those anxious moments, secular pieties and religious speculations— which are very often the same thing— will not brighten your abyss. They will instead feel like short beds and narrow blankets.

Faith needs some thing to believe.

Faith needs a promise it can grasp like an anchor and cling for dear life.

Just so—

Water and the word, wine and bread.

They provide what Luther called “the certainty of faith.”

Preaching on Luke’s nativity, the church father Origen observes, “When the priest Zechariah offers incense in the temple, he is condemned to silence and cannot speak. Or better, he may speak only with gestures.”

Baptism is different than Zechariah’s muted ministry.

Baptism is the LORD’s visible word.

It is a gesture through which the triune God speaks.

In a moment, Carolina Michelle Torrez Martinez henceforth will never need to ask the question that Alexa is afraid to answer with certainty. Carolina will know the answer to the most important question of all because she will know that on the Second Sunday of Advent 2024, in this place, though means as ordinary as water, and with sinners like you for witnesses, the LORD grabbed ahold of her and declared, “You are mine; I’ll never let you go.”

From this day forward, Carolina has some thing to believe.

The rest of you need only come to the table.