For those who observe this Sunday as the Baptism of Jesus…
Today, in the whacky world of the Christian Church Calendar, we move on this week from the infancy of Jesus to his baptism. From birth to thirty years old in the blink of an eye! Wow!
And I suspect we make this giant leap because there’s something of life-changing importance in this account of Jesus’ baptism. This is, after all, the first glimpse we get into what the life and ministry of Jesus will mean for the world. This is like the opening day of the baseball season, or the grand opening of another Wal-Mart Supercenter, or like bringing home the one you love to meet your parents. This is Jesus’ coming out party, and something exciting happens!
John baptizes him there in the chilly waters of the River Jordan, and as Jesus comes up out of the water, the heavens seem to open, and a dove descends, and it lands on Jesus’ shoulder – a sign of the Holy Spirit. And then comes a voice from heaven. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a “bris” ceremony. The name derives from the Hebrew word “berith” which means “covenant.” For a male Jewish child, this is the ceremony in which he is circumcised and made part of the covenant of Israel – the berith. And one of the truly wonderful elements of the service is that, after appropriate blessings are offered by the grandparents on both sides, the parents of the child give him his name. And the name is always one of meaning – expressing both ancient Jewish traditions, and contemporary family relationships. The naming of the child is always very special, and the name itself has deep significance.
So it is interesting to me that, when Jesus was circumcised eight days after his birth, Joseph and Mary gave him the name “Jesus” as the angel had instructed them. But thirty years later, when Jesus came to the Jordan to be baptized, God himself got into the act. As with many of our baptismal traditions today, God used that occasion to name his child.
And God named him, “The Beloved.” The word “beloved” means “dearly loved”. And that’s the name God gave Jesus. And here’s what I think is so special about this. When you and I were baptized – some of us as children with waters from a font, some as adults by immersion in a tank, some of us at various ages in the Jordan River itself – when we were baptized, we were baptized into the name of Jesus.
Do you hear that? We were baptized into the name of Jesus!
You see, the spiritual name God has given you…is “Beloved.” In fact, some of you may have at one time or another attended a wedding and heard the congregation welcomed this way:
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God…”
Why did the minister call you that?
Why did he call you “Beloved”?
Because that is what God calls you! That is your name!
Beloved. Dearly Loved.
And here, in the story of the baptism of Jesus, we see God working on a wonderful project. In the middle of a sinful and fallen world in which human beings hate and hurt and harm each other, God is unfolding a whole new way of living. We might call it – the beloved life.
Today, we give it the name Christianity, although to be honest with you, so much hate and hurt and harm have been allowed to infiltrate Christianity that it often does not live up to its name. Individually, members of this community are called Christians although, once again, we who are Christians often fail to reflect the beloved life.
And I suspect that this story of Jesus’ baptism, when God names Jesus and calls him into the beloved life, is placed there at the beginning of the new church year so that we will know where to begin and anchor our lives as followers of Christ.
Roberta Bondi, in a beautiful book called “To Pray and To Love”, writes about the earliest Christians and points out that, on the surface, these men and women appeared to be just ordinary people, like anyone else of the time. And yet, when you get to know them, these Christians were quite unlike other people. And what most distinguished them from others in their culture was their unusual love for each other in their communities, and the unusual love of their communities for the world around them! “My, how these Christians love one another!” wrote one Roman historian of the time. This love, Bondi observes, was neither abstract nor a simple matter of good feeling. No, it was a way of being together, a way of prayer, and a way of living in the world.
You see, the starting point and ending point of the Christian life is love of God and love of neighbor.
For our Christian forbears, only a person who loves is a fully functioning human being. And yet, because of the presence of sin in the world, loving as God intends us to love does not come easily to us. So the very purpose of the early Christian communities was learning how to love, and it was seen as a life-long enterprise. Learning to love with God’s love is what the Christian life is all about.
So in these days following Epiphany, I want to explore this beloved life with you. What does it look like? How is it different? And how can I start living it?
And today, the simple point I hope to make is that the beloved life starts with accepting Christ.
Now, there was a time in my life when I thought that “to accept Christ” was simply to believe that Jesus is the virgin-born Son of God who gave his life on the Cross for me by taking my sins upon himself, and that in accepting what he did for me, I am forgiven, made alive to God, and assured of going to heaven when I die.
Now I want you to know that I still believe all those things, nothing has changed in that regard. But today, I believe that accepting Christ means so much more than that understanding I received as a child.
Accepting Christ – more importantly – means especially to accept that you are passionately and completely loved by God! It means to accept that you are DEARLY LOVED!
But we Christians are not very good at accepting this! Often, we are convinced that when God looks at us, or others, what God sees before anything else is our sin. But its not that way at all!
Do you remember when your kids were little, and they’d bring home pictures they’d painted or drawn at school? They might look like scribbles to some, and there’d be paint drips here and there, but those pictures would go right to the refrigerator door and hang there for all to see. I remember a picture I once drew in school with crayons. It was a masterpiece, depicting enemy planes flying overhead, and three little kids on the ground shooting at them. I used little dotted lines to show the bullets going into the sky, except that one of the kids in the drawing had his dotted lines going into the ground. My mother asked why those dotted lines went into the ground instead of into the air. I told her that my friend Dennis and I were the two boys shooting into the sky, and the third was my little bratty brother Steve who was peeing on the ground. You can use dotted lines for all kinds of stuff!
And yet, that picture went on the refrigerator, too! You know how it is when your children create something out of their own hearts, and even though it’s very flawed and imperfect, you find yourself filled up with pride and happiness and pleasure. “My child! What an artist!” we gush.
Roberta Bondi asks, “What if, when God looks at God’s children and what we do, God is struck first, not by the awful things we do, but by God’s love for us? What if God sees very well the terrible, hateful messes we make, but says instead, ‘Yes, I see it all, but how much more important it is that they are so dear to me? The baby paintings they make are beautiful to me, and I love them so very much I can hardly bear the pain of it.’”
How sad it is that the Christian church has developed an almost exclusive language of sin to describe our relationship with God. We remind people of how bad they are, how wrong they are, how unacceptable they are to God. In fact, a great deal of modern evangelism is built around the goal of making people aware of how terribly sinful they are, that God will punish them for it by sending them to hell, and then telling them that, if they are truly sorry and turn back to God, God will forgive them and save them. Yet this kind of evangelism is nowhere found in the New Testament, nowhere found in the early Christian Church. And its terribly unproductive effect is to keep people from feeling safe and loved in God’s presence, and in fact, drives many people away.
But the message of Jesus is different.
It begins with the name God gives us: “Dearly Loved.”
And so to accept Jesus is to accept the gift of God’s incredible love for you and for others.
And when you do, something important can begin to happen in your life. It’s the first baby step in a lifelong process of learning how to live the beloved life.
It starts with an honest self-examination of your life. You can begin to take a fearless moral inventory and discern all those places where sin keeps you from loving God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and where sin keeps you from loving your neighbor as yourself. You see, the only true way to deal effectively with sin in your life is by approaching it not under the judgment of God, but under the love of God! The day you truly believe that God loves you and will not reject you no matter what is the first day you will ever be free enough to be able to be truly honest with God and with yourself. It will be the beginning of a process in which you can come to grips with those things that are wrong in your life and need to be changed.
I’ll always remember the year our daughter Bethany decided to leave behind her career in high school softball in order to run track. She made the decision mainly because the first time she ever tried running the high hurdles, she crashed into just about all the hurdles! But the track coach came up to Beth and said, “You know, Beth, you have the perfect build to become a great hurdler if you’re willing to work at it.” He was clearly looking beyond all the downed hurdles, all the clumsiness, all the bruises on her legs from her failed attempt. What he noticed was her beauty. Her promise. Her opportunity. And with that affirmation of value, Bethany set out to overcome her failures, and to learn how to be a great hurdler.
When you accept Jesus by accepting the gift of God’s unswerving love for you, it makes you want to learn how to live better, and love better, and be a better person!
So this morning, I want to invite you to begin the beloved life.
You are dearly loved!!!
Isn’t that AWESOME?
And today I invite you to accept that love, and begin now to learn how you can better love God, your neighbor, and yourself!
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