Hearing You Are Loved
A sermon on Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 for Baptism of our Lord Sunday.
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash.]
Whenever possible, I spend the noon hour on Thursdays talking with three other Lutheran colleagues about the preaching texts for the coming Sunday, as well as other ministry topics.
As the only member of this little group who did not grow up in the Lutheran church, I frequently find myself sharing about the contrasts in worship and theology between our shared faith tradition and my own Evangelical roots.
This past week, we were talking about the introduction of various baptism-focused rites into our congregations’ worship for Baptism of our Lord Sunday, and one of the other pastors commented that he is really working on getting his folks to embrace the Thanksgiving for Baptism as an alternative opening to worship, beyond just this particular Sunday.
For him, this encouragement is about breaking out of a liturgical rut and exploring the fullness of our options for worship.
I appreciate that instinct, but I shared that, for me, starting worship with Confession & Forgiveness (as we usually do, rather than Thanksgiving for Baptism) is actually what felt like the freeing new practice when I first discovered the Lutheran church.
In the churches of my childhood and adolescence, there was a lot of talk about repentance and forgiveness, but there was no collective practice that embodied it.
Repentance was a personal discipline. Something you did in silent, somber prayer, or maybe in tears at an altar call.
And forgiveness was something you just had to trust that God offered, if you did the repentance thing thoroughly enough.
I might hear God’s forgiveness talked about in a sermon, but I never had it announced to me, personally.
In response to this sharing, one of the other pastors in our group reflected on how different it is to hear God’s forgiveness “in your own head,” versus hearing the words pronounced… having a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ declare to you “the entire forgiveness of all of your sin.”
When it’s in our own heads, if feels like something we have to produce:
We have to believe hard enough, and repent sincerely enough, and then, maybe, forgiveness will feel real and transformative.
It’s an entirely different thing to be able to just receive the assurance:
to watch a pastor’s hands dip into the waters of the font, the physical, touchable sacrament that hold’s God’s promise for us, and to hear the spoken words of absolution that you don’t have to initiate.
It’s a gift I still haven’t gotten over… not even now that it’s my voice God uses most Sundays to announce the message of healing, acceptance, and love.
Because it’s a weekly reminder that it all starts with God.
We don’t have to earn it. We don’t have to conjure the assurance for ourselves. We just receive it.
Luke’s account of the baptism of Jesus makes me wonder if, perhaps, our Lord and Savior might understand that feeling.
Jesus is striking in this story for his silence.
John the baptizer has plenty of words to share about Jesus, proclaiming his superiority and prophesying his coming work of baptizing, winnowing, and gathering his people, but Jesus does not say a word.
Instead, he hears one:
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
It is an unequivocal affirmation.
And Jesus didn’t have to earn it. He didn’t have to conjure the assurance for himself. He just received it… before he had done one moment of public ministry.
My seminary professors were always very quick to remind students that Jesus’s baptism is not the same as our baptism, and we need to be careful about what parallels we draw when we preach the story of this particular Sunday.
But I think this is a parallel that is appropriate.
Because even if Jesus does not share our need for forgiveness, I think it’s possible that he still does share our need for assurance… our need to remember that we are not… cannot be… do not need to be the source of the power that transforms our lives.
In fact, that shared need may be the explanation for why Jesus does get baptized by John, a baptism that certainly was not a necessity in his religious context.
Traditionally, in the first Century, only Gentile converts to Judaism would be baptized as a symbol that they were setting aside their former life and identity to become part of the Jewish faith.
John had adapted this practice into a baptism of repentance to call Jews into the life-shifting reorientation toward God’s will, a visible sign of a changed life.
But Jesus did not need to repent and have his life reoriented toward God … and he was already a Jew… so it’s fair to ask why he was baptized.
And I think the answer is in the recognized need for God’s transforming power.
Before he could move from his passive identity as God-with-us – sharing the human realities of embodied life – into his active ministry of God changing the world for us… he needed to be transformed.
And, rather than making that shift on his own, it had to be something he received.
Which is exactly what happened:
He receives John’s baptism… and God’s Spirit descends on him… and a heavenly voice declares “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
I don’t know about you, but for me there is a powerful solidarity in knowing that Jesus, too, may have needed to hear words for affirmation.
That having access to heavenly power… having been present as the Word that spoke creation into being… having total unity with God the Father…none of that makes him self-contained and invulnerable.
Of course it doesn’t, if I think about it.
That’s one of the things that’s so transformative about a trinitarian God: the recognition that God is essentially relational; NOT isolated; NOT self-contained.
That is the image in which we are made, which is why we cannot be self-contained or invulnerable either.
We cannot meet all our own needs.
We cannot summon up faith and assurance of our belovedness inside our own heads.
We need to hear it.
And in the story of Jesus’s baptism… we do.
The SALT commentary this week explains it simply and clearly:
“Because we are part of the Body of Christ, it’s not just Jesus to whom God says, “You are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased” — these words are also addressed to us!.”[1]
So… understanding just how powerful it is to hear the words, spoken to us, assuring us of where we stand with God, I want to ask you all to join me in something a little different today.
We are all going to be the voice of God for each other today.
The Words are in the gospel reading (with flexibility for gender identity), go ahead and look in your bulletins so that you don’t have to worry about remembering:
You say: “God says:” and then the words of the verse: “You are my Son (or Daughter, or Child), the Beloved; in you I am well pleased.”
Everyone got it?
OK. Now, in a moment, I am going to invite everyone to raise your hand and keep it in the air until someone says those words to you.
Then, when I say go, we are going to bless each other with the assurance of God’s love and pleasure in us as God’s children.
You can bless one person or many (if someone else blesses the person you wanted to bless before you get to them, you can tell them again. We can all stand to hear this more than once)
If you don’t know gender identity of the person you are blessing, just ask so that you can give them the right title. You can also throw in their name, if you want.
And we are going to go until everyone gets to hear what a delight they are to God. Ready? Go!
And one last time, for those who are worshipping from home (or reading this sermon wherever you find youself):
God says: “You are my Child, the Beloved; In you I am well pleased.”
Thanks be to God.
