Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, who has come to make us clean. Amen.

Have mercy, O God, and send us your salvation. We pray with penitent hearts, Lord, that you would hide your holy face from our sins when we mourn over our transgressions and accept your grace in Christ. Create clean hearts in us, O Lord, and willing spirits that rejoice in the gift of your redemption. Amen.

Our synod’s seminary doesn’t have married student housing. Those students who do get married have to find housing in the Milwaukee area. One apartment that was passed down from student to student over a number of years was located above a funeral home. The rent was cheap, because the owner expected the student and his wife to watch over things after hours. But sometimes when friends dropped by to watch a movie or a football game, the question would come up, "Is there anybody downstairs?" The friends weren’t asking about the funeral home staff. If the answer was yes, invariably the friends wanted to take a peek. Those students should have stayed upstairs, but for some, curiosity got the best of them. For most of them, the trip downstairs represented their first up-close encounter with a dead body. Sometimes they were tempted to touch it, but at the same time, they were a little afraid to. If they did touch it, when they got back upstairs, many of them washed their hands.

Why do you suppose they did that? The quick answer would be "germs." Our society is very sensitive to hygiene. But that’s a fairly recent development. When the transcontinental railroad was first completed, people used to say that you could travel from New York to San Francisco in a week—so quickly that you wouldn’t even need to take a bath. We’ve come a long way in 130 years. But tonight we’re reading from the book of Numbers, written by Moses about 3,500 years ago. Here Moses talks about washing after touching a dead body. Moses wasn’t worried about germs. God had commanded the Israelites to observe a complex system of laws and ceremonies that today seem almost arbitrary. But God had done it for a reason. Those laws and ceremonies pointed ahead to the coming Christ. They were prophecies of what the Savior would do. Tonight we’re looking at one of those prophecies: the water of cleansing. We see Jesus making us clean – clean from the stench of death and clean by applying his death to us.

If this law applied to us today, you would have to purify yourself after you went with your Seminary friends and touched a dead body, or if you were in the hospital when someone died, or if you stopped by the cemetery on your grandmother’s birthday to put flowers on her grave.

Moses writes: "Whoever touches the dead body of anyone will be unclean for seven days. He must purify himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day; then he will be clean. But if he does not purify himself on the third and seventh days, he will not be clean" (verses 11,12). If someone died in a Hebrew home, that home was unclean and had to be purified. If an Israelite touched a bone or even a grave, he or she was unclean and had to be cleansed. This law had nothing to do with germs. This law was about God and his reaction to sin.

When God created Adam and Eve, he created them to live forever. If they had obeyed him, they would still be alive today and we would expect to live forever with them. But Adam and Eve didn’t obey God. They turned from him in their hearts, reached out with their hands, and sinned. God then pronounced on them the curse of death that still hangs over our heads. Death is not a natural part of the cycle of life. It’s a horrible contamination of God’s creation. And it comes from sin.

With these ceremonial laws, God wanted to portray the idea that sin separates people from God’s presence. Death proves that all are sinners, so death produced the most intense ceremonial uncleanness. Even Grandma’s grave made a Jewish person unclean. And if you’re unclean, you dare not enter into God’s presence. Moses says, "Whoever touches the dead body of anyone and fails to purify himself defiles the Lord’s tabernacle" (verse 13). God wanted his people to be extremely sensitive to this issue, so that they would understand that they had to get rid of the contamination of death.

And so do we. God has not commanded us today to observe this ritual. Still, we need to understand that our sin raises a stench to God that would turn his stomach (if God had a stomach). We need Jesus to wash away the stench of death from us, regardless of whether we’ve ever touched a dead body or not. No matter how healthy you may feel today, sooner or later your body will be crushed in a car accident or cancer will eat your organs or old age will wear you down until you die. Unless Jesus returns first, we are going to die because we have inherited the birth defect of sin. That birth defect ruins all that we are. It makes it impossible for us to do anything good in God’s eyes. This birth defect makes us so we can only sin and die. And God hates the stench of our death.

God’s law is simple: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength" (Dt 6:5). It isn’t "help the poor." It isn’t "visit the sick." It isn’t "promote racial healing." God’s law says, "Love me with all of your being." If we would love God totally and absolutely, he would never have to tell us to visit the sick or help the poor or treat all people of all races with Christian love and respect. We would just do those things because we would understand that that’s how God wants us to live. Anything less than perfect love for God is sin. We sinners die because our love stinks.

But God gets rid of our death. He washes it away. We take a bath in Jesus. In Jesus, who inherited no sin. In Jesus, who did love God perfectly. In Jesus, who always put God first, who loved all people the way we never will. In Jesus, who laid down his life to pay for our sins. His life, his death, his resurrection took away our death. They purified us before God. How did each of us take that bath in Jesus? We took it in Baptism. God poured more than just water on us. He poured his gospel on us. He poured the life and death and resurrection of Christ on us. That made us clean. Christ wiped the stench of death away. That’s what we hear Moses talking about this evening. What do we see in this Old Testament ceremony? We see Jesus, who makes us clean from the stench of death.

Having said all that, we still have to admit that God devised a pretty strange ritual to teach this truth to the Israelites. Jewish tradition says that King Solomon could explain almost all the laws of Moses, but this one had him stumped. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the key to understanding this rite is realizing that it is a picture of Jesus.

Numbers 19 calls for a red heifer. A heifer is a young female cow. The heifer was to be physically perfect—unblemished—and red. A truly red heifer is a rare commodity.

Once there was an acceptable animal, it had to be slaughtered outside the camp in the presence of a priest. Jewish tradition says that once they settled in the land of Israel, the Jews did this on the Mount of Olives—near the place where Jesus was arrested. The priest dipped his finger in the heifer’s blood and sprinkled it seven times in the direction of the tabernacle. Then the heifer was burned to ash. Hyssop and cedar and scarlet wool were also thrown into the fire, but the majority of what was in the fire was the heifer. Depending on the breed, a heifer can weigh from 400 to 700 pounds. How many hours do you suppose it took for a heifer to be burned to ash? How much ash do you think you would get from an animal that large? It would be a lot of ash.

What was all that ash for? If a person was unclean due to contact with a dead body, on the third and seventh days the ash was mixed with fresh water and then sprinkled over the person. It wasn’t a bath or even a shower. The person just got a little wet. With this process, God was pointing to Christ. The heifer was to be physically flawless because Jesus is sinless. The animal is extremely rare because there will never be another man like Jesus. But most important of all, the red heifer was to give her life to cleanse God’s people from the uncleanness of death because Jesus paid for our sins with his life.

God’s law demands that everyone who doesn’t love him perfectly should die and then go to hell. But God’s love also demands that he do everything possible to keep us out of hell. So God the Son entered our sinful and tortured world. He carried our sorrows and afflictions. On the cross Jesus passed through all the horrors of this life and through hell. Then he died. And then he rose to give us eternal life. When he comes back, we will live in a world without death, without pain or sorrow or sadness, without any threat that we will go to hell.

When the ashes of the heifer were mixed in water and sprinkled on people who stank of sin, the heifer’s death washed away the people’s uncleanness. This is a prophecy of the gospel. Jesus’ death washes us and takes our uncleanness away when God sprinkles it on us. God sprinkles Jesus’ death on us through the gospel in Word and sacraments. You can’t help but think of Baptism when you think of this sprinkling with water to wash the stench of sin away and make us smell like roses.

When you were baptized, God washed you individually. That washing is yours forever. This is a prophecy of Jesus taking us to the cross with him. In Baptism we are nailed to the cross. In Baptism we die when Jesus dies. In Baptism we pass through the grave and come out alive and holy on the other side. The end result is that our hearts are sprinkled—they don’t stink of death and sin anymore. Baptism applies Jesus’ cleansing and saving work to each of us personally. That makes us holy in God’s sight. What do we see in this Old Testament ceremony and New Testament baptism? We see Jesus, who makes us clean by applying his death to us.

My three daughters are all young, but after a full day of playing outside in the summer on their trampoline or riding their bikes, they come in filthy. Their little bodies look like they were rolling in dirt, their clothes are stained with grass marks, and the smell of sweat is clearly evident. Into the bathtub they go. I tell them, "Don’t forget to scrub!" Thirty minutes later, the girls come down the stairs sparkling in their cute pajamas, wet combed hair, clean and sweet-smelling bodies! "My! How nice you look!" I say. "Are these the same dirty children I saw a few minutes ago?"

God can do something similar, but in more miraculous proportions in our life. God washes our slate clean, and we are presented with a new heart and spirit. The pristine light and love of the Lord makes us a new creation! And, just as we may need to bathe our physical bodies daily to ensure we remain clean and sweet smelling, so too should we bathe our mind with Christ.

Those seminary students probably should have stayed upstairs. But their curiosity gives us a handle on the rich picture that God gives us tonight. Centuries before Jesus made his last trip to Jerusalem, centuries before he offered his body to make us clean, God taught his people that sin makes all stink of death. And he promised to provide a Savior who would die and wash the stench and sin away. Amen.

"Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me." (Psalm 51:10)