Hearing Pastor Copus.

My friend, Perry Copus - the Rev. Perry Copus - is a great preacher.  He's great because He preaches the Law and the Gospel.  He preaches Christ for me.  He tells me what Christ has done for me in Baptismal water and His Word.

Today, God has preserved him through a surgery that removed cancerous tumors from his intestines and vital abdominal organs.  His gut was bathed in chemotherapy solution in the hopes that any stray cancer would die.  He lies in a hospital bed.  My prayers ascend for him, his dear wife - Belinda, and their sons.

Here is a snippet from a sermon he preached on 2 Kings 5.1-14:

Now, the baptismal imagery here is so extraordinary that we cannot pass up talking about it, no matter what direction the rest of the sermon will take! In the chapter before this one, we have Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite woman, who was stone dead, probably of a brain aneurism. And Elisha stretched himself over the child, who sneezed seven times, and was awakened from the slumber of death. Seven sneezes are followed here a few verses later with seven washings, which take away the rotting disease that had threatened the Syrian general. Seven is God’s number: for in six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested; Seven times the priest would sprinkle the blood upon the altar, and upon the ark of the covenant, to make atonement for the sins of the people; seven lamps were set up inside the tabernacle, signifying the presence of the seven spirits of God with his people; seven times, on the seventh day of the siege of Jericho, Joshua and his trumpeters marched around the city with their trumpets sounding, and the walls came down. Seven is God’s number, and where we see things happening in sevens, we know that God is the one doing the heavy lifting.

And these two miracles performed by Elisha are linked by their sevens, linked to show us two images of Holy Baptism, that means by which God is working a complete and total washing away of sin and of the bitter effects of sin, a leprosy of the soul and mind which eats away at them continually until we are claimed by death and hell—except that God has intervened, and has made our flesh like the flesh of a little child, clean, clean before him, which had been leprous and sick and dying. In Holy Baptism, God himself has stretched himself over you, and his lying down upon you in death has raised you up to a life that cannot die, for “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” His death is your life, his last breath your seven little sneezes as you awaken to new life in him. For “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death,” Paul writes, “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.” You are baptized into Christ—and so you bear his name, both upon your forehead and upon your heart—and those who bear that Name have passed from death to life.

What this sermon preaches is the Gospel for me, for you and for him.

Perry is baptized. Cancer has no power over him.  Perry is in Christ - the One who was and remains crucified AND has arisen.  His cancer has been swallowed up by something greater than a chemo bath. Perry has already died in baptism and been made alive.  Life is his.  God has stretched Himself over Perry with a holy bath.  Perry rests in Christ's death and resurrection.  O Glorious Day of the Resurrection, come quickly!

This I know and believe.