1. Grace to you and peace from God our Heavenly Father, from our Lord Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit, who blew over the waters of creation and who now blows over the waters of your baptismal font. Amen. Cross words. We’re in the midst of a sermon series looking at the Six Chief Parts of Luther’s Small Catechism. And the big point in this series is that all of these chief teachings of the Christian faith are really about the cross of Jesus Christ. Today, we are focusing on the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. In our text from John 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. He's a Pharisee, a member of the ruling council, a man with a reputation to protect — so he comes under cover of darkness, hoping no one notices a teacher of Israel sneaking off to sit at the feet of a Galilean rabbi. He opens politely: "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him" (John 3:2). It's a compliment. It's also an attempt to stay in control of the conversation.
2. Jesus doesn't let Nicodemus stay in control. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). And then: "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5). Nicodemus wanted a theological chat. Jesus gives him a diagnosis and a cure. That's our pattern too for today, because Baptism, the Fourth Chief Part of the Catechism, is what we're after today. And the best way I know to preach it is to call it what it is: a cross wind.
3. A cross-breeze is a pleasant thing — it slips in one window and out another and cools a whole house. But a crosswind, the kind a pilot or a sailor respects, is a different matter. It doesn't just cool you; it pushes you, sets your course, demands a correction. That's Baptism. Not a one-time refreshment, but a wind that has set your whole life on a heading. By Baptism into the Cross of Christ, the Holy Spirit's wind blows to guide our whole lives.
4. Here's something worth knowing: the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek word pneuma both mean spirit, breath, and wind — the same word for all three. So, when Jesus tells Nicodemus, "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8), he's not reaching for a clever metaphor. He's pointing Nicodemus straight back to Genesis, where the Lord God forms a man from dust and "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Gen 2:7), and straight to Ezekiel's valley, where dry, dead bones hear the word of the Lord: "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live" (Ezek 37:9). Spirit. Breath. Wind. One Lord, doing the same kind of work he has always done — taking what is dead and dry and breathing into it a life that did not belong to it before.
5. That's the Law's diagnosis. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh" (John 3:6). King David knew it too: "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Ps 51:5). You were not baptized because you were basically fine and just needed a little spiritual touch-up. You were baptized because, apart from the Spirit, you are dry bones in a valley, dead in your sin — and no amount of Pharisaic credentials, moral effort, or church attendance changes that diagnosis. Nicodemus's resume couldn't save him. Neither can yours.
6. But the same God who diagnoses also delivers. He did not leave Ezekiel's bones in the valley, and he hasn’t left you there either. "He saved us... not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5). The wind that hovered over the waters at creation (Gen 1:2) is the same Spirit who was given to you at your baptism — in your case with water poured over your head, with your pastor's hands, with the triune name spoken over you. You did not command that wind. It came to you, uninvited and unearned, exactly the way Jesus said it would: blowing where it wishes.
7. Here's where the wind gets its name. This isn't generic spiritual uplift. Jesus tells Nicodemus plainly where this all leads: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14–15). The wind of the Spirit blows out of the cross, because that is where the Spirit was poured out for you — Christ "breathed his last" (Mark 15:37) so that breath could be given back to you.
8. St. Paul makes the connection explicit: "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (Rom 6:4). Your Baptism wasn’t a pleasant ceremony detached from the cross. It was your funeral and your birth, both at once, in the same water. Luther says it as plainly as anyone ever has in the Small Catechism: "[Baptism] signifies that the old Adam in us should be drowned by daily contrition and repentance, and that he die together with all sins and evil desires; and on the other hand, that a new man should daily come forth and arise, who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever." Notice that word daily. Luther will not let Baptism be a museum piece you visit once. It’s a cross you carry into, under, and through, every day you live.
9. This is also why Baptism can’t be reduced to a feeling, a decision, or a memory you have to keep digging up and reassuring yourself about. The old liturgy of the church, in the prayer Luther wrote for baptism, asks God to grant that the baptized "be drowned in the merciful flood of His holiness, and so be saved from the corrupted flood of sin, separated from the number of the unbelieving, and preserved dry and secure in the holy ark of the Christian Church." Drowned, and yet kept dry and secure — that's the strange logic of the cross. Christ's death actually puts your sin to death, not your feelings about your sin. The cross wind doesn't ask how strong your faith feels today. It asks whether you were baptized, because that's an objective, finished, outside-of-you fact, anchored in Christ's own death and resurrection, not in the weather of your emotions.
10. If the Spirit only showed up once, at the font, and then left you to navigate the rest of life on your own instincts, that would be cold comfort. But Paul says, "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God" (Rom 8:14), and "if we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit" (Gal 5:25). The wind that blew you into the kingdom keeps blowing. It’s not behind you; it’s underneath you, like the wind under a sailboat's keel, setting your heading every single day, whether you happen to notice it or not.
11. This is why Luther, when the devil came calling with his usual accusations — you've failed again, you're not really God's, look at what you did — didn't argue theology with the devil. He simply said two words: "I am baptized." Not "I feel saved." Not "I've earned this." Just the plain fact: I am baptized. That answer ends the argument, because Baptism doesn't rest on your performance; it rests on Christ. Peter says it this way: "Baptism... now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ" (1 Pet 3:21). The good conscience isn't manufactured by you trying harder. It's given by Christ, who is risen, and who has attached his resurrection to your washing.
12. So when the accuser shows up at 2 a.m. with his list of grievances against you, you have an answer, and it isn't found by searching your feelings for evidence of holiness. It's found by remembering the water. "I am baptized" — the old Adam in me has already been drowned; I don't have to drown him again today, only keep him under. The new man has already been raised; I don't have to manufacture him, only walk in step with the wind that gave him life. And on the day when Christ comes again in glory and gathers his own, he will not be looking for an impressive spiritual résumé. He will recognize his own mark, placed on you in water and word, and he will call you his own.
13. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, in the dark, trying to keep his options open. But the Spirit blows where he wishes, not where we manage him, and he had already set his sights on a Pharisee with a guilty conscience and on you, with whatever conscience you brought here today. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16). That love came to you in water, fastened itself to the cross, and now blows through every ordinary day you've got left —carrying you toward a kingdom you did not build and cannot lose.
14. You are baptized. Let the wind do what it does. Now the peace of God, that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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