January 2026

Sermon 01/11/2026 – The Beloved

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Sermon Text

Baptism is a special gift of God. While we engage with God in many ways in life, baptism is a gift only given to us once in our life. For some of us that gift is given when we are infants and for others when we are old enough to choose it for ourselves. Yet, in either case we are given a special gift of grace through the simply element of water. We are shown that God’s grace has washed us clean of sin and that we, having been washed through faith, may start a new life. We are reborn, not only of the sign of water poured out upon us, but by the gift of the Spirit that comes from our faithful confession.

Baptism is a unique ritual, though similar washings can be found in various faiths and cultures. We believe that, through our being washed with water, we are no longer just people blown about by chance, nor do we belong to our earthly family alone. When we are washed in the waters of baptism, we are transformed into something new. We are made into the children of God, and in that new identity we are able to participate in our faith fully, be called “Christians,” in truth, and go forward in life in the fullness of the new birth which our faith and the Holy Spirit affords us.

Baptism as we know it was first practiced by John the Baptist, his baptism was a sign of transformation granted to Jewish faithful as a sign of their repentance. The baptism which John practiced marked the starting point of something new, but John was clear that his baptism was not the final form of the ritual. Someday, someone would come and initiate the final form of the sacrament. This person would baptize, not only with the outward sign of water but with and inward sign, the presence and gift of the Holy Spirit. The baptism which John promised is the baptism which was fulfilled by Christ, and which was enabled by Christ’s own baptism in the Jordan.

Our scripture today is short, but it tells us about all we need to know to understand Christ’s baptism and its relationship to ours. Baptism, as we have established, is an outward sign of the inward change a person receives through faith. It shows the Holy Spirit’s work in a person that facilitates their New Birth and the beginning of their true life through Christ. I think a natural question that follows this definition of baptism is, “Why was Jesus baptized then?” Jesus did not sin, and so had no need to repent or be changed. Likewise, Jesus was God and so always experienced a perfect union with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. How then did Jesus “receive,” the Spirit in any meaningful way through Baptism.

Christ was baptized, not so much for his own benefit, as he was for ours. Jesus did not ask anything of his disciples that he did not face himself. Why else would he be born as a child, when he could have simply appeared on earth one day? Because Christ needed to bless childhood with his experience of it. Why did Christ die on the cross? Not only to atone for our sins, but to cross the threshold of death ahead of us, that we might know the way. Likewise, Christ received baptism so that we might have an example and more than that a forerunner in our own baptismal journey.

Christ’s baptism revealed the nature of the sacrament by several signs.[1] Christ the Son was revealed in flesh when he came down into the water. God the Holy Spirit appeared visibly, “like a dove,” to rest upon Jesus. God the Father spoke aloud, “This is my son, the Beloved.” These three signs made clear that Christ was God, and that all three persons of God were equally involved in this ritual. The perfect example of Christ enabling us to pursue our own perfection, the power of the Spirit which facilitates this change, and the love of the Father which accepts us as children of God.

No matter when we are baptized, we receive the benefits of the sacrament. Some people, out of a well intentioned concern, will worry about baptizing infants. They think it is unfair to baptize a child before they can come to faith themselves. This was the logic behind the anabaptist reformers who would go on to found the Amish, the Mennonites, and our modern Baptist churches. They believed that baptism was only valid if an adult assented to be baptized, and so would rebaptize those baptized as infants. More extreme groups will baptize you as many times as you like, assuming that only one made truly in faith counts.

For its entire history, however, the Church has affirmed infant baptism. It is an exception rather than the rule that it is taught against. When we baptize infants, we are saying that they are welcomed into God’s family from birth. The logic goes, at least partially, that no other grace of God is forbidden to people based on age, so why should this one be locked away? An infant, being baptized, is given the gift of God’s regenerating grace, and when they reach maturity can choose to accept that gift or return it, but the gift is only ever given once. Though a person may leave the faith and return as many times as they like, their initial baptism is all that is necessary.

Why is this? Well, consider how our own families work. When you are born into a family, you are part of that family. You may leave them, you may disown them, you may walk away from a time, but you are part of that family regardless. If you are adopted, then your identity shifts. You are no longer part of one family, but another, and in the same way no matter how you wander personally, the family remains yours. The church is the same. When we are joined to the church in baptism, we are adopted into the family of faith, and so while we may choose for a time to leave that family, we do not need to be adopted again when we return to it.

Baptism is a necessary part of a faithful person’s walk with Christ. It is commanded that we be baptized as a sign of our faith and without baptism we cannot truly join the Church. Baptism is a necessary part of our initiation, and acknowledgement of God’s grace in our life that has brought us to where we are. In the sacrament we are made children of God and thus are made part of the church. It is not optional to be baptized, for any person who truly wishes to walk in obedience to Christ must be baptized in order to truly be obedient.

Does that mean that a person who comes to faith but dies before they are baptized is damned? No! Nor does it mean unbaptized children are left abandoned. Faith in one case and innocence in the other is sufficient cause not to worry for a person’s soul. However, when we are not in extreme circumstances, when we have ample time and ability, we are bound to do what is required of us. Christ asks that we are baptized, and so we must be baptized.

Baptism is the thing that marks us as God’s children, and in the same way that it shows us as children of God, it puts on us the responsibility of God’s children. We like Jesus are now God’s “beloved,” and that term has special meaning. In Genesis, when Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, God uses the same term to refer to him. “Take your son, your only son, your beloved…”[2] in baptism we are not just born into a new life, but we take up our cross as well. As children of God, we are no longer living for ourselves, but for something greater. We have a family to care for, the church. We have a God to live for, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Most of all, we have a duty to live sacrificially, as Christ once did for us. Baptism is a new start, and today I invite us all to remember our own baptism as we prepare to reenter the world. We who have been made children of God, have a duty to the world, and the waters we touch today are our reminder of that truth. – Amen.

[1] I build off of Aquinas’s perspective here, as stated in Summa III. Q.39

[2] Genesis 22:2

Sermon 01/04/2026 – Losing Christ

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 2:41-52

Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents were unaware of this. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.

When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously looking for you.” He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them, and his mother treasured all these things in her heart.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.

Sermon Text

All the parent’s in the room, if you ever feel like you weren’t always the best at parenting your children, I present to you a scripture of vindication. You have not, at least you probably have not, lost your child for several days in the nation’s capital. (I apologize to anyone who left a child in the mummy exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute.) Here, we see Mary and Joseph, who raised a child who was perfect in every way, and they still managed to make a mistake like this. Take that as a sign that you can be a little less strict on your performance with your children.

Beyond this assurance offered to all parents, there is more to take out of this scripture. Today, I want us to look at this story beyond its literal reading. This is a story that takes place every day, in every part of the world, and probably happens to every person at least once in their life. This is the story of two people, as close as they possibly can be to Jesus, lose him in the crowd, and do not even notice it until they are a good ways away from the place where they lost him.

We usually talk about people losing Christ, or losing faith entirely, in terms of people who leave the Church. We know that someone has lost Christ when they cut off all ties from Christianity. The obvious moments where people publicly recant their faith or deny Christ are the stories we tell with a quiet fear. The people who once had all the faith in the world, seemingly overnight, just seem to lose it completely. I, however, think that there are many people in the pews who have lost sight of Jesus and the way that we do that is by doing exactly what his parents did in our scripture.

The story we’re told is simple. Jesus and his parents are part of a caravan going to celebrate Passover in the city. The twelve year old Jesus is constantly running, as twelve year olds do, from family to family, playing. They make the long journey, break bread and eat lamb, recalling the salvation that God worked centuries before for their ancestors. They made their way out of town, Jesus nowhere to be seen. They assumed, however, that he was just off with a friend somewhere else in the caravan.

It was not until they were a day’s journey away, probably when everyone was settling in for the night, that they realized what had happened.

They rush back to Jerusalem, probably taking another full day to get back. When they arrive they walk all around the city looking for Jesus. They ask all their relatives, they go through alleyways and city streets. They go everywhere they can before they finally decide to go to the Temple. Maybe they thought he might be there, maybe they were desperate enough that only prayer in front of God could give them hope. As they enter the Temple complex, along one of the porticos of the temple, they see their tween son seated among a group of Sadducees and Pharisees, listening to them and adding his own thoughts. When they grab ahold of him, asking how he could leave them, he told them that he never left, he was where he should have been – in his father’s house – it was they who left him behind.

We need to understand this is true in our own life as well. God never leaves us, but we frequently walk away from God. In the darkest moments of our life, though we may struggle to see or feel that God is with us, we are never left alone. Christ is never the one to leave a person behind, we are always the one who step away from Christ. That can feel harsh, it can feel like I am trying to blame people’s lack of faith on themselves, but I am just trying to establish a baseline of truth. God does not abandon us, but we can leave God behind.

I find it hard to blame people who fall away from the faith in the midst of tragedy. When we walk through “the valley of the shadow of death,” we are walking through chaos itself. When we are in the darkest moments of our life, it feels like we are walking through a place God must have never touched. Grief because of loss – of loved ones, of circumstances, of security – all of these things can obscure the presence of God in our life. Unless we are already rooted deeply in our faith, it is easy to get lost in the midst of all that. I think some people stay fully on the right path in the midst of grief.

The more common way of losing track of God, the one I am concerned with today, is what happens when we step away from God outside of tragedy or loss. In the midst of our faith journey, sometimes we can assume that Christ is standing next to us, and we continue walking until we look around and find that he’s been gone for a while. We have a moment when we realize that we have been going our own way for so long that we cannot see Christ in anything around us. We begin to despair, because we begin to see how empty a life we have made for ourselves.

For me, this realization happened in seminary. I had a lot going on in my life and I was in a low place anyway. I was studying to be a minister though, and I was constantly doing “church-stuff.” Yet, in between Greek and Methodist History I was faced with a terrible realization. Despite going through all the motions, I could not see Jesus anymore. I could not feel an ounce of faith within me. I had been drained of all that, left listless and lost, and I could barely hold on during those few horrible weeks where everything seemed lost.

I, like so many people, had lost Jesus. Had moved in my own direction and just assumed that because I was meeting the most basic expectations of faith, that I was perfectly fine. Yet, if I had been honest with myself the signs would have been there. I had no joy in life. I did not pray. I did not seek out chances to worship beyond what was expected of me. I believed in Christ intellectually, I lived out a Christian life in the most basic sense of the word, but here at the threshold of a live devoted to God, I realized my faith had gone completely awry.

Therapy was a big part of fixing my dysfunction in this part of my life, but I also realized that I had to find Jesus again, to backtrack until I found where I had gone wrong. Thank God that Christ is a loving and present God. I found Jesus right where I knew he would be. He was seated in the middle of the Seminary Chapel. I devoted myself to serving in the chapel, it became like a local church to me, and in that place

I found Jesus again, and we started walking forward together again. I was able to find my salvation again, but I had to admit I had lost track of Jesus to do so.

Reflect on your own faith now. Ask yourself the question, “Do I have faith in Christ?” Not just a belief, not just a feeling, do you really see Jesus as present in your life? Does that faith ask you to live sacrificially for others, or does it just approve of what you already want to be doing? Most importantly, is the object of your faith the Lord, Christ who lives in Heaven at the right hand of God the Father, and will someday return to set things right? Is your God alive, not just in words you say once a month, but in your earnest belief and practice of life?

Today, as we come to the Table of Grace, as we take bread and cup, I would encourage you to kneel at the altar and answer that question. If the answer is “Yes!” Then may you receive the bread and cup to strengthen you as you continue to walk in faith. If the answer is “No.” Then let this be the chance to dedicate yourself to the God who offers you eternal life and abundant life besides. If the answer is “I don’t know.” Then let this meal be your chance to come close to God and see for yourself where you stand.

Christ is lost, not because he ran away, but because we have run away. May we seek him earnestly, find him again, and walk beside him toward perfection itself. – Amen.