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.