My Child, the Beloved; a sermon for Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Matthew 3:13-17 (NRSV)

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ ¹⁵But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. ¹⁶And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Let the words of my mouth

    and the meditations of my heart

    be pleasing to you,

    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Here, my friends, is another story about Jesus that’s chock full of weirdness that we’ve normalized over the passing millennia. Set aside the geographic unfamiliarity we encounter hearing locations like Galilee and the Jordan. It gets odder as we dive in.

We already know the Jesus guy and the John guy. They’ve been introduced, but maybe not as fully by Matthew as by Luke. We know who they are. Via Luke we know they’re cousins. They’re very close in age. So we’ve got all that.

But look at the other stuff in the story.

Imagine being in the crowd (because John apparently drew crowds) and having everyday conversations, or trying to make small talk to folks from some other town who’ve traveled to find John out here in the wilderness. People are going down toward John one at a time. No way does anybody hear the interaction between the cousins. There’s too much else going on. But suddenly:

• the heavens were opened (what does that even mean?)
• a ghostly dove thing falls from the sky and lands on the dude who just came out of the water
• a voice booms from heaven

And if that’s all normalized for you and doesn’t feel weird enough, or if you have grown to expect that what the gospels offer are the extraordinary and the miraculous, let me offer this one:

• Jesus is concerned with what’s proper.

We don’t find out until later on in the gospel how bizarre that is. We don’t learn about Jesus turning things on their heads as a matter of practice until farther in.

I am convinced that we don’t spend enough effort understanding how weird these stories are, and how weird are some of the things we claim and practice.

I believe in the resurrection of the dead.

How foolish are we if we think that our bodies will last until Jesus comes? How foolish are we to think we don’t revert back into the global carbon cycle? The dust of our ancestors is the nourishment of the tomatoes we eat.

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world

One with each other… fat chance.

Make them be, for us, the body and blood of Christ

This is the claim that had the Roman world convinced that the followers of the way were cannibals eating the flesh of their leader. Also, the Latin for “this is the body,” hoc est corpus is the locus of “hocus pocus.”

Maybe if it’s weird, you’re on the right track, baby; you’re reborn this way.

Hey.

It’s no wonder Nicodemus had such a hard time with Jesus’s “born again” language. He’s totally right: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bizarre. It’s absurd.

And still we trust in it.

Wait. Strike that. Revise it.

We trust in the One whose power works through it.

And we don’t have to understand everything that One is doing through the sacrament, either. Nicodemus didn’t get it. John didn’t get it. I think we’d be lucky to grasp one of the Spirit’s miracles in baptism in any given moment. Bath and resurrection and forgiveness and initiation and adoption and remembrance…

Sometimes the best thing to do is just to open up and let God.

You are not in control here. The more you try to be in control, the more the power of God’s Spirit is going to slip through your grip. You lack the imagination and the power and the perspective to have control here.

Let go.

John thought he knew what he was doing. He held on to an idea of righteousness that got him absolutely furious at the Temple hierarchy. And I think there’s room for that righteous anger. And I think we have a prophetic duty to speak and act and maybe shout truth to human power and its structures.

But John seems to forget the nature of the Servant that Isaiah speaks centuries earlier:

He won’t cry out or shout aloud

    or make his voice heard in public.

He won’t break a bruised reed;

    he won’t extinguish a faint wick,

    but he will surely bring justice.

When Jesus came along to show John and his followers that this was appropriate for the Human One, too; that Jesus, the son of a woman, needed this sacrament, too; John’s mind went boom.

It’s okay that we don’t get it. But there’s one part of the sacrament, one part of the story that echoes to each one of us today.

a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

That’s not just a proclamation about Jesus, y’all. That is the proclamation of the Creator of the Cosmos to every single one of us. As each of us comes up out of the water of our baptism, whether our clothes are sopping wet or there’s just a faint trickle tickling its way down toward our forehead, that same booming voice from heaven is grinning from nebula to supernova and whispering to each of us:

You are my child, the beloved.

If you can’t hold on to anything else, hold on to that. It’s essential. It’s central. It’s everything.

You are my child, the beloved.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer for Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Great Spirit who hovered over primal waters,

you are beginning and ending,

all in all:

Return your creation to unity with you,

not with devastating flood,

but with the patience of the stream

that smooths rocks and cleanses wounds.

Nourish us today

with all that grows from your living water:

food for the body

and grace for the soul.

Cleanse us of all that defiles

until the swimming hole we share

runs sparkling clear,

so all your children

may play together in joy and safety.

For we trust you,

whose power we hear in the thunder

and whose mercy falls like rain

until in your temple all cry, “Glory!”

and your praise echoes through eternity.

Amen.

Your Light Has Come: a sermon for Epiphany Sunday

Matthew 2:1-12 (CEB)

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. 2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”

3 When King Herod heard this, he was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. 4 He gathered all the chief priests and the legal experts and asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 They said, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for this is what the prophet wrote:

6 You, Bethlehem, land of Judah,

        by no means are you least among the rulers of Judah,

            because from you will come one who governs,

            who will shepherd my people Israel.”

7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search carefully for the child. When you’ve found him, report to me so that I too may go and honor him.” 9 When they heard the king, they went; and look, the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. 11 They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 Because they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route.

Let the words of my mouth

    and the meditations of my heart

    be pleasing to you,

    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Y’all, I am generally a morning person. I am pretty nonfunctional by the end of the day, but in the morning I can generally get up and moving and — fueled by a good double shot of espresso — be a fully functioning human being. Generally. I have my mornings when that’s a bit more difficult.

So when Isaiah says,

Arise! Shine!

I’m generally pretty good to go.

Some of y’all are morning people, too. I’d invite you to read Isaiah’s song from that kind of perspective. We could approach it metaphorically, but let’s live into the scene instead. I feel like it’s informative.

Especially in this season, when we’re just beginning to pull away from the longest night, and the sun is still pinking the clouds at half past seven, early risers like me find ourselves in the darkness for a while.

Though darkness covers the earth

    and gloom the nations,

    the Lord will shine upon you;

    God’s glory will appear over you.

When it’s early and dark, I do what I can to make sure I’m being quiet so the rest of the house can sleep. I turn off the alarm quickly, tread softly to the bathroom — I’ve made a point, the night before, to mark where things are I might kick and make a ruckus. I shut the door and turn on a gentle light. When I go down the hallway, it’s in silence. Every noise in the night, when you’re sleeping in the quiet, sounds ten times louder than it does during the day. I don’t want to startle anyone. I want to let them sleep.

When I dress to run, I barely crack the bathroom door enough to make out which way my socks fit. All I need is the light around me. I don’t need to illuminate the room.

Darkness covers the house.

Nations will come to your light

    and kings to your dawning radiance.

It doesn’t really take much light to make out what we need to. We have, I think, grown accustomed to being flooded with electric light all the time. Most of us, I’m sure, grew up with the convenience of having a light switch in every doorway that worked around the clock. It’s a convenience that we depend on so much that we view it as a right.

That troubles me.

At Buffalo Mountain Camp and at Camp Wesley Woods, one of our regularly programmed activities was a night hike. Campers left their flashlights in their bunks, and we led them on a single-file hike silently up a trail. We helped them discover how much more of the world they could experience when they opened up their range of vision beyond what a flashlight can illuminate. It is astounding how much you can see by the light of stars and moon. It is also inspiring to realize how much more you can experience when your other senses are sharpened.

It is also necessary to rid ourselves of our more redundant and distracting lights in order to find the light we’re looking for.

The magi were students of the stars and what wisdom their movements could impart upon observant people. It was an early science, one that we find laughable today. I wonder how much of our science will be laughable in fifty or five hundred years. We do our best with the tools and the collected knowledge we have available to us, just as the magi did two millennia ago. And it would seem that, regardless of the primitiveness of our science, the Holy Spirit is able to use our science to gift us with revelation.

By the way, isn’t it amazing that God is willing to self-reveal to us in our foolishness? God doesn’t make fun of our foolishness or dismiss it for the bungling effort that it is. God uses it. In fact, I’m going to be so bold as to say that the presence of God that we observe in our foolish attempts at comprehending the world around us validates and affirms our those attempts that we do make.

God isn’t asking us to get our science and art and study absolutely perfect. God doesn’t even seem to care that what we’re finding isn’t necessarily wholly true or factual or sound. It would appear that what God is concerned with is that we’re making an effort.

Which, by the way, is not the same as either not making an effort or obfuscating a genuine effort at finding truth. God is not going to bless or affirm our attempts to promote falsehood and deceit. That is chaff that God is going to burn with the rest of the garbage.

But our genuine, well-intentioned efforts God will affirm.

So if revelation is what we’re after; if truth is what we’re after; if seeing God is what we’re after, then maybe what we need to be doing is spending more time and effort eliminating all the distractions around us and opening ourselves to the possibility that God is already present. Maybe it’s time to take a night hike, leave the flashlight and the phone and the pager behind, out of sight and out of sound, and open our eyes and ears and heart and mind to the wider world of God’s presence everywhere in our natural and social environment.

Arise! Shine! Your light has come;

    the Lord’s glory has shone upon you.

A lot of our images of the magi show them heavy with rich fabrics and bejeweled headgear, grasping at the silly old idea that they were kings of some sort. We would do well to make our scientists kings, I think. But I want to invite you to focus not on the magi themselves, but rather on the light they were pursuing.

Find a way to let go of all the distraction and rediscover that light. It is all around you and it is within you. It is leading you to the only one truly worth finding.

Your light has come.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.