Introduction: I am a great believer in the maxim that to do a job well, you need the right tools. If you’re going to tune up your car, you need the proper spark plugs, wires, and wrenches. If you’re going to go skiing you need the appropriate boots and skis and clothing. If you’re going to write a book, you need a good computer, style manual, and editor. If you want to paint your house, you need the right ladders, brushes, and drop cloths. If you are sent to Afghanistan with the Special Forces, as Nancy Owens’ son John was last week, I can’t imagine what you would need, but I do know that you’d better have it! Without the right tools, a job can become sloppy, difficult, possibly dangerous, and it may not get done at all.

 

So what do you need to be a people on a mission? More specifically, what are the right tools to be a people, the church, who are called by God to participate in his mission, which is to restore his creation? If you turn to the back cover of your bulletin, you will see our Statement of Mission. It calls us to be a people who invite others to come and get to know Jesus, who gather together to worship him, who grow to live like him, and who discover ways to serve him. These are not insignificant statements. They are tall orders. What are the right tools for the job?

 

What we need above all is encouragement and strength. That is why we have prefaced the statement with the words: “Relying on the grace of God (encouragement) and the power of the Holy Spirit (strength). . .” Now, know that these two tools are not pulled out of thin air. They are in fact the very tools with which Jesus was equipped for his mission at the time of his baptism. There he received the affirmation of the Father’s love (encouragement), and the fresh energy of the Holy Spirit (strength). So let’s think this morning about these tools and consider how it is that they equipped Jesus, and will equip us, for mission.

 

I. God as One of Us     

            A. A good place to begin is to ask ourselves why Jesus felt the need to be baptized. If John’s baptism was, as the early verses of Luke 3 make clear, a “baptism of repentance,” which means that it was an outward sign of cleansing that reflected an inward repentance of sin, why would Jesus, who we are told was sinless, need to undergo this ritual? Some have suggested that maybe he had sin in his life that we don’t know about, but this suggestion has no biblical warrant.  Others have offered that maybe he did it to please his mother! While this is said humorously, Mary certainly had an influence in her son’s self-understanding. Though the biblical record is virtually silent as to his youth, I think we can infer that as Jesus grew into manhood, he began to realize more and more his own uniqueness. Certainly, as the opening chapters of Luke make clear, Mary knew of that uniqueness, as well as her son’s unmistakable link to Elizabeth’s son, John. Mary must have shared these things with Jesus in various ways as he grew. Though he was still the village carpenter of Nazareth during those years, he must have had an increasing sense that a day would come when he would be called to embark on a much larger task.

 

            B. That day, that moment came, when his relative John emerged in the area of the Jordan River, preaching and baptizing people in an unprecedented movement towards God. We might say that a revival of sorts had broken out, and that Jesus realized that the emergence of John was the Father’s call to action. He underwent John’s baptism, not because he was in need of repentance for sin but because he knew that a very real part of his mission was to identify with the human race and its need for cleansing as the means to come into a relationship with the holy and living God. “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too” (v. 21). It’s as if he was saying, “I have come to be as one of you.”

 

C. And that is the beginning of God’s mission to the world: in Jesus, he came to be one of us. In this regard, it’s worth thinking back for a moment to last week when Jesus met the Samaritan woman at her well. What enabled Jesus to meet her where she was and minister God’s love to her, was the fact that during his journey, he had become tired and needed to sit down and have someone bring him a drink (Jn. 4:6-7). Though sinless, he is like us in every other human way, ways that enable him to relate to us and us to him.

 

II. The Mission Revealed

            A. But simply relating to us is only the beginning. What else was his mission going to consist of? To find out, Jesus, after his baptism, spent time praying. Often we can be tempted to think that praying is a waste of time, that it’s action that counts. We can spend weeks planning programs or paying consultants thousands of dollars to do it for us, and consider time spent in prayer to be a non-essential luxury. We reason that while it may give us a sense of inner peace, prayer can do little to bring into reality the kingdom of God. Know that Jesus never thought that way. From the beginning he realized and modeled the critical importance of prayer, the importance of waiting on God for direction and power. He didn’t run off to do what he thought best after identifying with God’s people; he waited on the Father in prayer.

 

            B. “And as he was praying,” two things happened to him. One, the Holy Spirit descended upon him “like a dove,” and two, he heard a word of delight from the Father. To one who knew the scriptures like Jesus did, the combination of the heavenly voice and the descent of the Spirit would have taken Jesus back to the commissioning by God of a figure found in Isaiah called the Servant. Four passages in Isaiah deal with the ministry of this Servant, beginning with the one we read just a few minutes ago (42:1-4). The Servant is one in whom the Father delights and on whom he has placed his Spirit. Reading on we see that this Servant has as his mission the bringing of justice, the bringing of restoration to the entire earth. But that’s not all. As you read on in what are known as the servant songs, the fourth, found in Isaiah 53, speaks of how this Servant will actually bring justice. In words we often read on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, it is revealed that the Servant will bring about restoration by being pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities as he is led to the slaughter like a lamb (53:5-7). His mission, in other words, is to identify with us, and then to die for us. And all this, the first servant song reveals, without faltering or being discouraged!

 

So how is one who can become tired and thirsty from traveling not to falter or be discouraged in the face of a journey to his death? One might imagine that Jesus would have been tempted to rise up, grab a towel, wipe off the baptismal waters, and run back home to mother! I would’ve, but he didn’t. He didn’t, I submit to you, because of the two things that happened to him as he was praying. Not only did they reveal his mission, but they also revealed his tools, the equipment that he would need to sustain him in his mission.

 

III. The Necessary Tools

            A. First, in the voice from heaven, in the expression of delight, Jesus received the affirmation that the Father’s love was with him: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” As far as his mission was concerned, Jesus hadn’t done anything yet, but he learned that the Father loved him anyway. This is grace. Jesus was told from the get go that he wouldn’t have to earn the Father’s love but that it was his, as a gift. Whatever he would do, it would be as a response to love, not as a requirement for love.

 

Doesn’t that make all the difference in the world? How much more secure, how much more confident, how much more free to live and serve when you know you are loved vs. having to perform and hope you do it well enough? If you walk in the door of your home each night, not having to think about what you’ll need to do to earn your spouse’s or parent’s love, but knowing that you already have it, you will be willing to do anything for that person. The Son, Jesus, knew he was loved, unconditionally. He undertook his mission relying on the Father’s grace. Such reliance, such confident resting in God’s unconditional love is to be the basis for our mission as well.

 

            B. Second, in the descent of the Spirit, Jesus received the fresh energy of the power of God. As Peter explained it in Acts, Jesus was able to go around and do good things and healing all who were under the power of the devil because he was ministering in the energy of a more powerful power, the power of the Holy Spirit. “God,” Peter concludes, “was with him”’ (Ac. 10:38). That is why the disciples were explicitly told not to move out in mission on their own, but to wait until they had been clothed with power from on high (Ac. 1:8). When God is with us, nothing can overcome us. Not even, as Jesus discovered, death.

 

Conclusion: One of the phrases from our readings this morning that has caught my attention this past week is that the Servant, Jesus, will not falter or be discouraged as he carries out his mission. As we think about our own role in God’s mission, how easy that would be! Certainly, we can falter and get discouraged when our neighbors or loved ones just don’t get this faith of ours. But even more, given events of this past week in Haiti, we can falter or get discouraged as we wonder where on earth God is in all of this disaster.

 

I suppose we could conclude, with Pat Roberston, that God brought this disaster on the Haitians because of their “deal with the devil,” as he put it, as they obtained their freedom from the French in the 19^th c. But frankly, while that might be a convenient answer, it’s extremely bad theology and bad faith. In fact, when it’s offered by one who supposedly represents the Christian faith, that too makes me tempted to falter and get discouraged!

 

But, as Jim Wallis puts it, the answer to bad faith is not no faith; it’s better faith. Better faith says that God is not vengeful or retributive, or the author of evil. Better faith recognizes that because of the cross, God suffers with those who are suffering. Better faith knows that because of the empty tomb, not even an earthquake can separate us from the love of God. Better faith understands that God is in the business of bringing about restoration from the rubble, a restoration in which ultimately pain and suffering and crying and death will be no more. Better faith knows that in the meantime, relying on the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, we are called to reach out in whatever way we can to those in need. God is with us. May the encouragement of his love and the strength of his Spirit sustain us as we participate in his mission to the world.