Loved

Sunday, January 12, 2020
First Sunday after Epiphany Year A
The Baptism of Christ

Focus Theme:
Loved

Focus Prayer:
Creator God, our soul’s delight, your voice thunders over the waters, liberating the future from the past. In the Spirit’s power and the waters of rebirth, Jesus was declared your blessed and beloved Son; may we recall our baptism, and be disciples of the Anointed One. Amen.

Focus Scripture:
Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And 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. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

All readings for this week:
Isaiah 42:1-9 with Psalm 29
Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17

Focus Questions:

1. When have you experienced the hand of God leading you?

2. What does “righteousness” mean to you?

3. When you think about your own baptism, can you imagine yourself as beloved?

4. Have you ever thought of baptism as conferring servanthood, of all things? Would we throw a party for such a gift?

5. How does lifting up servanthood clash with our modern system of values around position, class, and prestige?

Reflection:
by Kate Matthews

If we begin our reflection on Matthew’s story of the baptism of Jesus by listening to this Sunday’s Old Testament text from Isaiah, we hear a poetic suggestion of what is to come in Jesus Christ. The prophet reminds us that God is faithful to God’s promises, and that how we live and order our world matters to God.

It matters so much to God that God will send One who will “fix” the mess we’ve made, transforming it into a time of beauty and grace, healing and justice. Perhaps an even better word would be “heal”: this One will truly be a Healer who will bring wholeness to every broken place, to all of our woundedness. The very Spirit of God is within this transforming Servant, the Chosen One whom God upholds and in whom God’s soul delights.

Righteousness as justice and care

The same themes consistently appear in both Isaiah and Matthew: righteousness experienced as compassionate justice and care for those who are poor and/or marginalized, humility and faithfulness that always point to God as the One who is at work in this transformation, and the hope–the promise–of new things that will dazzle us and rattle the foundations of our safe little worlds.

When read, and heard, together, the texts from Isaiah and Matthew dramatically illustrate God’s own deep faithfulness and care.

“Magnificence and humility”

Three chapters into Matthew’s Gospel, we finally get to hear Jesus speak, with something Troy Miller describes as “a paradoxical blend of magnificence and humility.” We get to eavesdrop on the conversation of these two men, Jesus and John, and John at least is used to addressing the crowd, accustomed to speaking “large.”

The words he exchanges with Jesus sound quiet, maybe worried, perhaps awed. In any case, they’re certainly not untroubled. So this baptismal scene, rather than pretty or nice, is full of power and questions, and perhaps even struggle. Magnificence and humility, yes, but full of “trouble and beauty,” as well.

Jesus “announces himself”

Coming onto the scene and asking for baptism, Jesus is announcing himself as that One promised by God through the prophet long ago. And John the Baptist’s response clearly indicates his self-awareness not as the promised One but as the one who prepares the way for that much-anticipated One.

Jesus “announces himself,” F. Dean Lueking writes, “as the fulfiller of the grace which gives sinners who have no standing before God a place to stand in a new relationship to God. He himself is that place.” How do you think that might have affected the expectations of the crowd, who were presumably familiar with the promises in Isaiah?

When Jesus speaks of “righteousness,” a word that appears often in Matthew, he relates it to salvation, which is another word for healing the damage that has been done to our relationship with God. Lueking sees this baptism of Jesus revealing the purpose of Jesus, “to lay his healing hands upon a broken, alienated world to make it right with God again.”

Cracking open the sky

This healing, however, does not come with gentle words and soothing balm, these waters are not calm or crystal pure, and even the sky itself is scarily broken open by the thunderous voice of God overhead: not your typical church baptism!

Commentators observe that the scene offers a response to the ancient cries of the prophets as they observed the broken, alienated world in need of God’s hand: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” Isaiah prayed and, Lueking reminds us that the prophet Ezekiel had similar visions and hopes, just as John did, when he “called the multitudes to the Judean desert to warn of the cracking open and breaking up of the old order. Now that time has come.”

Cracked skies do not sound lovely and reassuring, but Robert Hoch says that Matthew’s dramatic description draws our attention to God’s voice blessing the scene, and the response of creation itself to what is happening. Certainly this was a multi-sensory experience!

Mud and water, sights and sounds

Scholars suggest, then, that this story reminds us of our humanness, our embodiment as creatures of God. Perhaps the mud and the water and the sounds and sights of a reading like this one draw us back to reflection on the Incarnation itself, which is at the heart of the Christmas and Epiphany seasons. The wonder of God taking on human flesh ought to inspire awe, a state that we rarely allow ourselves anymore (although we do seem to seek it, consciously or not, in one experience or another).

Like John, however, we may have mixed feelings about this God-becoming-human mystery. According to Hoch, our initial relief at this good news moves into a “struggle with the complicated (maybe embarrassing) work of using our hands, bodies, and voices (unclean, all of them) to announce the new thing of God in Jesus Christ.”

What does it mean to be human?

And yet, Steven Driver notes the close connection between baptism and “the reality, the physicality, of being human”–because that’s exactly what the Incarnation is about. Like ancient Christians, orthodox and heretic alike, we struggle with the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, and how God could possibly have entered into our embodied existence.

Perhaps, deep down, we just can’t accept our bodies, or this beautiful earth, God’s creation, as good and blessed. We put the spirit above the body, as if we are somehow split in two, and our task then is to minimize and subjugate the pesky body and its frailties and needs, its temptations and demands.

Fully human, fully alive

Driver writes that, rather than being “wispy souls trapped temporarily in a body that is foreign to who we are,” we are physical beings who long to become “fully and completely human,” and to be “renewed” as well, like “all creation.”

So to be both fully human (see Irenaeus) and renewed, it seems that we need to accept our bodies, our physical existence, as good. (Isn’t that what Genesis says, all the way back at the beginning of everything?)

Remembering our baptism

We remember that immediately after this passage, Jesus heads to the desert himself and experiences the great temptations to his faithfulness to his call and his sense of who he is. One of the most powerful sermons that I ever heard on this text was by my pastor, the Rev. Dr. Laurinda Hafner, who imagined Martin Luther exhorting us to “remember your baptism!” (In my many years as a Catholic, I had never heard Luther quoted so beautifully.)

F. Dean Lueking paints a picture of the “anxious” Reformation leader, “as he struggled through the lonely months of his safekeeping in the Wartburg Castle. ‘I am baptized,’ he would scribble on his desktop, and remember his baptism as he battled back despair.”

Rather than a sentimental journey or an effort to recapture lost enthusiasm (ours or that of our parents and godparents), “remembering our baptism” is seeking equilibrium on a storm-tossed sea, getting our bearings, remembering who (and whose) we are, and grounding ourselves in that assurance.

Remembering that we are loved

Rachel Held Evans’ opening chapters to her book, Searching for Sunday, are a moving reflection on remembering our baptism: “Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism,” she writes, “nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness.”

So it’s fair to say that we’re not necessarily remembering the act of being baptized so much as the naming that occurred: not our given name but the deeper identity that was acknowledged. We are loved.

Embarrassing questions?

John Pilch provides background information to the story that helps us imagine the scene, including a geography lesson about the “dry” season when Jesus and the repentant people of Judea could be dipped, “when the Jordan and its streams would have been filled with the winter rains and the sun had warmed the shallow waters to a comfortable temperature.”

Have you ever been in a river, or even in a tank, when someone is baptized? I have, and I found that getting soaked is a good reminder of one’s baptism, when it brings home the power of what was once done to us long ago.
Cracked skies and God’s voice

Pilch also wrestles with that question of Jesus and John, and the embarrassment for early Christians that their leader was baptized by another. This awkward situation, he says, is explained by that cracked sky and the voice of God, affirming that “God is pleased by Jesus’ obedience, which in turn suggests that Jesus deserves obedience from his followers.”

Perhaps Jesus knows he can’t address our human condition unless he gets down into the mud, or into the tank, with us. Unless he gets baptized, just like the rest of us. But Thomas Long also describes “the righteousness of God…the way God works in the world to set things right.” In other words, by responding to that ancient cry of the prophets, and “coming down” to fix the mess we have made.

“Troubled” water?

While many scholars address themes in this text like Jesus’ identity as the beloved Son of God (and Matthew’s persistent claim for that), or the presence and relationship of all three persons in the Trinity at this scene (even without an explicit Trinitarian theology being presented), the most interesting and stirring interpretation comes from Richard Swanson.

He gives new meaning to the words, “troubled waters” with words like “killed…erupts…explodes…accuses.” And he speaks of John’s fire, and snakes and judgment, but mostly “fire, and fire, and fire, unquenchable fire.” And the winnowing hook, too, to prepare us for the “sharp divisions” brought by “a Jesus who erupts just as John erupts. The face of the earth will change.”

Drawn to the wilderness

Swanson doesn’t really connect this scene to our own baptisms, and after reading his stirring reflection, it’s harder to see the connection between them. Instead, he sketches a picture of faithful Jews being drawn out into the wilderness, “to volunteer for service, to be washed, purified to participate in the long-awaited new thing that God was doing in the world.”

Rather than comforting or sweet, there is a “disturbing force” in “John’s eruption. The face of the earth was changing. Jews came out to enlist.” Swanson’s powerful, if disconcerting, reflection draws us back to fire and water, the many uses of burning (including “Herod’s murderous attempt to defend Empire by burning hope out of the Jewish people”), and the power of being washed and readied for service.

It’s another way to remember our baptism, perhaps a different lens through which we might look at it in our memory, and certainly a long way from the beautiful babies in white dresses receiving a gentle sprinkle of water on the forehead.

Still, that word, “beloved”

Still, in the midst of fire and water and snakes, and skies breaking open, there is that word: beloved. When the skies open, the words we hear are “beloved” and “listen,” hardly words of judgment or words that should inspire fear.

Consider your own baptism (if you are baptized), in light of this story, and whether you can imagine yourself as beloved. Then consider the same question about each person, child or adult, in your congregation, as a beloved child of God, and whether pausing to remember that would affect how you (and others in the church) treat that person–if we see them as God sees them.

Remember whose you are

Not that baptism makes us beloved, but it certainly does remind us that we are. (Marilynne Robinson brilliantly wrote in her novel, Gilead, about baptism: “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.”)

How does this sense of who and whose we are come alive in baptism? Have you ever felt that baptisms have become for many–perhaps even for you–a less-than-powerful ritual, an occasion for gifts and parties, a misunderstood theological statement? What would happen if we pronounced each newly baptized Christian not only beloved, but a beloved servant of God?

Righteous or self-righteous?

What does “righteousness” mean to you? Does it have an ironically unpleasant connotation, as in “self-righteous” religiosity? How have you experienced the Spirit of God within you, at what times and in what circumstances? What difference did it make in your life?

How does God’s Spirit work in us today, move through us today, speak to us still today, calling us in this time and place to do new things? What former things have passed away, or need to pass away, and what new words of hope need to be spoken? What is the transformation that needs to happen, or is happening beneath our gaze, even now?

A preaching commentary on this text (with book titles) is at http://www.ucc.org/worship_samuel.

The Rev. Kathryn Matthews (matthewsk@ucc.org) retired in 2016 after serving as the dean of Amistad Chapel at the national offices of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio (https://www.facebook.com/AmistadChapel).

You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.

For further reflection:

Anne Lamott, 21st century
“Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking.”

Matthew Arnold, 19th century
“Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.”

Karl Jung, 20th century
“Bidden or unbidden, God is present.”

Lao Tzu. 6th century B.C.E.
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and water is clear?”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, 20th century
“The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.”

Unknown
The old Irish when immersing a babe at baptism left out the right arm so that it would remain pagan for good fighting.

Mahatma Gandhi, 20th century
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Leonardo da Vinci, 15th century
“Water is the driving force in nature.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel, 20th century
“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging, 20th century
“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”
and
“Our identity rests in God’s relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.”

Payne Best, 20th century
“Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive….He was one of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God was real and close.”

Victor Hugo. 19th century
“What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!”

Henry David Thoreau, 19th century
“Life in us is like the water in a river.”

Julian of Norwich, 14th century
“And thus I understood that any man or woman who deliberately chooses God in this life, out of love, may be sure that he or she is loved without end….Some of us believe that God is almighty and may do everything, and that [God] is all-wise and can do everything, but that [God] is all love and shall do all, that we fail to see.”

Lao Tzu, 6th century B.C.E.
“Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it.”

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 20th century
“Water is life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.”

Liturgy Training Publications
“When the convert emerges from the water, the world seems changed. The world has not changed, it is always wonderful and horrible, iniquitous and filled with beauty. But now, after baptism, the eyes that see the world have changed.”

Jan Richardson, 21st century
“That the small-g graces flow out from Big Grace and come to meet us in the midst of our daily life, helping us know we are beloved and inspiring us to respond in love to an often graceless world.”

Marilynne Robinson, 21st century
“Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.”

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