Sermon — January 8, 2023 — The Baptism of Jesus
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)
I sometimes wonder how different the world would be if we really, truly believed those words.
I don’t mean that I wonder what it would be like if everyone in the world were a believing Christian, if all eight billion of us believed the theological proposition Jesus were the beloved Son of God. I mean that I sometimes wonder how different our world would be if every one of us truly believed in a closely related but very different theological idea, not about Jesus’ baptism but about ours. In baptism, it’s often said, we have been made members of the Body in Christ, and this is not just a squishy metaphor. By virtue of our baptisms, we participate in the baptism of Christ. When you were baptized, the Church has always taught, you went down into the waters of the river Jordan with Christ, and you emerged, and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove and alighted on each you, and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased,” and you were invited into the eternal relationship of Love that we call the Trinity.
And so what I mean to say is that I sometimes wonder what the world could be if every human being truly knew, truly felt, that they were loved, not for anything they had or anything they’d done, but simply for who they were: the beloved child of God.
Maybe it’s idealistic, but I wonder, sometimes, how many wars could have been prevented if we truly knew that our nation’s standing in the world or our people’s greatness is not what makes us worthy of love. I wonder how many people would not have been enslaved, how many people would not have died in factory fires, how many millions of tons of carbon dioxide would not have been pumped into the air if we truly knew that the worth of a share in our company was not determined our value of our lives. I wonder how much agony we would be spared if we really understood that no college admissions process, or athletic tryout, no promotion or performance review, angry memo from our boss or angry comment on our Facebook page, had anything to do with whether we were good enough to love.
And maybe I’m just an optimist, but I kind of think the answer is: a lot. I really do think that the “good news” of God’s love for us is not just an abstract theological claim, it is the answer to the problem lying at the root of so many problems: we are not convinced, as individuals or as communities, that we are loved unconditionally.
“At the very heart of our experience of being human,” the psychologist John Welwood once wrote, “each of us has an intuitive sense of the value of unconditional love.” There are few things we crave more deeply than the sense that we are truly known and truly loved for who we are, not in the abstract but in practice; and there are few things that are harder to really feel. Nearly all of us have learned, consciously or subconsciously, that love is something to be earned; that to be loved, we must be worthy of love, that to be loved we must be good enough to be loved. And so we work very hard, in healthy and unhealthy ways, to make ourselves worthy of love. And yet there’s almost always a gap between the way that we want to be loved and the way that we feel we are loved, and that gap causes shame and anger and pain, and that pain has nowhere to go, and so we turn it inward, or we turn it outward. And for many of us, there’s always the lingering suspicion that if we are not loved, it must be our fault.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not the way God thinks about the world. It couldn’t be! “It’s my fault that I’m not loved” is not the way of the God whom Peter knew, of the God who became human in Jesus Christ, who “went about doing good and healing all,” as Peter says, but whom we “put to death by hanging him on a tree.” (Acts 10:38-39) God knows it’s not our fault if we’re mistreated or misunderstood, because God knows what it is to be mistreated and misunderstood.
At the worst moment of your life, when the world has let you down or when you have let the whole world down, God looks at you with the eyes of love, and in the words of Isaiah, “thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you.” And God looks at you, as God looks at Christ, and says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” (Isaiah 42:6, 1)
God looks at you on the worst day of your life, God sees you as you truly are, an imperfect and fragile human being who has nevertheless been baptized into the baptism of Christ, and marks with the sign of the Holy Spirit itself, and says, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased.”
It’s sometimes said that this kind of unconditional love will spoil us, as if, once we truly understood that God would love us no matter what, we’d simply stop trying to be good. But I suspect you know as well as I do that that isn’t really true. When you’re told that you are loved, exactly as you are, it doesn’t cause you to start behaving badly. If anything, it frees you to start behaving better. So many of our rough edges are there for our own defense, or for our own self-justification; so many of our most difficult tendencies are attempts to cope with our own fear and shame. And to be loved is to be freed to grow, unencumbered by all those burdens.
So what would it mean for you if your baptism were today? What would it mean for you to go down into that water and have all the muck and mud of a lifetime washed away? What would you be free to do, who would you be free to be, if you could stand up before God exactly as you are, and hear the words of God, addressed to you again: “This is my Beloved Child, in whom I am well pleased”?