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.”
My family loves to tell stories. Whether it was heartwarming or embarrassing, funny or brings a tear to the eye, we love to reminisce and relive those memorable moments that have happened in life. One of the stories that my parents loved to tell while I was growing up, and that I loved to hear, was about my baptism. I was baptized on February 5th, 1989 by my mom, who was one of the pastors at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Elgin, Illinois. Pretty cool that I started at that Bethlehem, and now I get to be here at this one. Although admittedly that Bethlehem was never a horse track or a stable like ours was, but I guess we can’t really have a monopoly on the name. It’s a beautiful church, complete with your quintessential Midwestern church basement, and it was right next to a park where, when I was a little older, I would chase the geese in between services. My mom and dad were sitting together with me in a pew while the other pastor who served with my mom was preaching. There’s no real way to say this politely, but umm, during the sermon I … filled my diaper … so loudly and dramatically that everyone within a four-pew-radius was doing that thing where your whole body is silently shaking because you’re trying so hard to stay quiet and not laugh. When I was younger, I thought that was hilarious but now that I have to stand up here in the pulpit every other week and preach, I realize that my criticism of the sermon was perhaps a bit harsh. And if karma is in any way real, I’m sure I will get mine eventually. The excitement didn’t stop there though, because during the baptism I spit my pacifier out and it landed in the font splashing everyone who was standing around it. So not only did I get baptized, but I performed my first remembrance of baptism, as well!
None of that, however, holds a candle to the drama and intrigue that we have in the story of Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan. It’s a little jarring that here we have a fully grown Jesus in our story for today, given the fact that Christmas was just two weeks ago. And John the Baptist is certainly confused by the whole situation. It seems like Jesus’ request has caught him entirely off guard, and we hear him stammer that, if anything, he is the one who needs to be baptized by Jesus, not the other way around. But Jesus insists, so, John baptizes him. And just as he is emerging from the water, the heavens open, and the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove, and we hear this voice proclaim, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This is an integral moment in Jesus’ life, because it will ground all that he does for the rest of his life, the entirety of his ministry, in his identity as the Son of God. It will anchor him to the truth about who he is, so that no matter what life throws his way, no matter what adversity he might face (and as we know there was a lot), he can face it with the sure and certain knowledge that he is God’s beloved son, with whom God is well pleased. And baptism does the same for us. It reminds us both of who we are, and whose we are, and it is an indelible sign of God’s love at work in our lives.
But I think that there are some dangers and potential pitfalls when it comes to how we understand the purpose of baptism as it relates to God’s love. Regardless of whether it happens as a baby, or as a young child or teenager, or even in the twilight of a person’s life, getting baptized is an incredibly important moment; it is a milestone on the journey of faith. But it is important not because it bestows or endows God’s love on the person. While God is most certainly present, both in the words that the pastor says, and in the water that gets splashed in tri-fold blessing, it’s not like they walk up to the font without God’s love, and walk away with it. Because there is never a time when God’s love is absent or withheld from us. Baptism is simply the public recognition, affirmation, and claiming of the love that God has already poured out in the life of that individual. And it is a reminder for all of us of the unconditional nature of God’s love. Part of why I love this story so much is because it is one of the purest and clearest examples that we have of the fact that God’s love is unconditional. Jesus is at the very beginning of his ministry. He hasn’t preached a single sermon, cast out a single demon, performed one healing, or done even the smallest miracle. And yet, God names him beloved, someone with whom God is well pleased. God showers that love and affirmation upon Jesus before he has done a single thing that would make him worthy of, or deserving of such things, and the same is true for us.
And yet, despite that fact. Despite what we’re told in scripture, despite what Pastor Laura and I try to say from this pulpit week after week, despite all of this talk about being beloved children of God, we live in a world where love and affirmation are all too often conditional in nature. They must be earned. They must be bought, bartered, or traded for with effort, action, and accomplishments that make us worthy and deserving of such things. And this transactional understanding of love is reinforced as we are bombarded with messages that tell us we aren’t enough. Aren’t good enough, aren’t important enough, aren’t smart enough, aren’t strong enough, aren’t cool enough, aren’t beautiful enough, aren’t worthy, and aren’t deserving. And then you add into the mix the fact that none of us are perfect and that we all make mistakes. We all do things we wish we hadn’t, say things we wish we hadn’t. We hurt people, sometimes maliciously and sometimes without even realizing it. We act out of fear and insecurity and shame and so often we are not the best versions of ourselves. We’re not even the mediocre versions of ourselves. And all of that can leave us believing that we are indeed unworthy. Unworthy of any kind of love, let alone of God’s incredible love. We reach this point where it’s almost as if we’ve become hardened, calloused, and numb so that even when we hear God’s words spoken directly to us, even when we hear, “You are God’s beloved child, and with you God is well pleased,” the words seem to just bounce off and don’t really sink in. I can read and re-read this passage. I can talk about God’s unconditional love until I’m blue in the face. But some days it just doesn’t even make a dent, and I still feel defective, unworthy, too far gone. That might be just me, but something tells me I’m not the only one.
That was one of the themes that came up in a new movie that we watched while visiting my parents for Christmas. It’s called Spirited and it’s available on Apple TV. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. And if you don’t have Apple TV my advice would be to wait until all of season three of Ted Lasso gets released, do the free one-week trial, call in sick to work, and do some serious binge watching, and then report back to me. Spirited is a modern take on the classic A Christmas Carol, and it stars Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds. That, in and of itself, should be reason enough to watch it, I know it was for me. The fact that it’s also a musical, and that both Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell sing and do the dance numbers, including tap dancing, is just icing on the cake. What was really amazing about it though, was how well the movie lined up with a lot of our Lutheran theology. I was sitting there watching it thinking to myself, well there’s some really good baptismal theology. Ope, and there’s the notion of Saint and Sinner. Oh, and that’s got Luther written all over it. So much so that I think our youth group, or maybe just all of us, should have a viewing party next Christmas. One of the best parts was when they did a whole song about how insulting the phrase, “Good afternoon” was back when Charles Dickens wrote the original story, and I couldn’t help but hear it in Jamie Newcomb’s voice from when he and Ursula did their rendition of A Christmas Carol back in December.
Now I’m going to try my best to talk about it without any major spoilers. Will Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present. It turns out that the events of A Christmas Carol weren’t a one-time thing, but rather were part of a large-scale haunting operation aimed at making the world a better place. Every year they pick one person, a grouchy menace to society, like Scrooge was, and spend the whole year doing research on that person and preparing for a Christmas Eve haunting that will hopefully inspire them to turn their life around and become a better person. It sounds far-fetched, I know, but if you’ll recall, there were a lot of people wondering if Jeff Bezos had been visited by three ghosts when he announced on Twitter that he would be giving away a large portion of his net worth, so you never know! Anyway, Will Ferrell’s character wants to haunt Ryan Reynolds, whose character runs a media consulting firm that specializes in misinformation and stirring up controversy. The only problem is that Ryan Reynolds character is labeled “unredeemable,” and they don’t waste their time trying to haunt or change people who are considered to be unredeemable. Well, that’s actually not true, because (and minor spoiler alert here) it turns out that Will Ferrell actually is Ebeneezer Scrooge, the original unredeemable. The haunting he experienced so changed his life that when he died, he joined the team and eventually became the Ghost of Christmas Present. And he argues that if it worked for him, it could work again, and thus they’re given the green light to proceed. But Ryan Reynolds proves to be a pretty tough nut to crack, and rather than having him question his life and his choices, he turns things around and it’s Will Ferrell whose conviction begins to slip. He begins to wonder if he truly has been redeemed, or if there’s a part of him that will be forever unredeemable (which is the title of one of the songs they sing). Now, quick pause for all you grammar purists out there silently screaming in your heads that it should be irredeemable – you’re right, but I don’t know what to tell you, maybe unredeemable is just easier to sing. Anyway, Will Ferrell wrestles with the notion that deep down inside, even after all the good he’s done, and all the lives he’s helped change for the better, he worries that none of that really matters, and that he’ll always be unworthy of love, undeserving of forgiveness for the error of his ways, and unable to ever really be a good person. It’s a tale as old as time. Is there such a thing as forgiveness? Redemption? Does the good we do ever truly wipe the slate clean of the wrongs we have also done? These are questions that philosophers and theologians have been trying to answer for centuries, to varied degrees of success. But of course, and ethical quandary like that is no way to end a movie, and after a very dramatic final scene (don’t worry, no more spoilers) he realizes that he is not, in fact, unredeemable. That even though we all have a past, that past does not define who we are. We all have within us the capacity for both good and bad, and each and every day is a new opportunity to be a better person, to do a little good (another title of a song). And that even the smallest act of love can send far-reaching ripples of change out into the world.
Martin Luther believed the same thing to be true. He believed that each and every day, when we wake up and wash our faces (I’m sure he would have included taking a shower if that had been an option at the time) that every morning as we wash our face, we should remember the promises of God that reside in the sacrament of baptism. Because each new day is an opportunity to wash off the failures of yesterday, the ways we fell short, or messed up, and claim our true identity, our identity as beloved children of God. And even on those days when we feel hardened and impervious to God’s words of love, even on days when we wonder if we are unredeemable, even when those words of loving affirmation feel hollow and foreign and certainly not meant for me, we can still cling to the rope that anchors us to who we truly are. And to whose we truly are. And the more that we remind ourselves that we are, in fact, beloved. The more we actively choose to identify with that label. The more we let that identity be what guides how we act in the world, the more likely it is that we will start to actually believe it. The more likely we are to want to go out and be the people God knows we can be. Not so that we can earn God’s love, or deserve it, or be worthy of it. But because we already have it. Amen.
Photo Credits: https://c4so.org/visio-divina-jesus-baptism/, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=474310141402361&set=a.474310101402365, https://media.ascensionpress.com/2019/01/13/why-did-christ-have-to-be-baptized/, https://justbetweenus.org/topics/understanding-gods-love/, https://angelchangart.com/conditional-love, https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/watch-trailer-holiday-comedy-spirited-starring-ferrell-ryan-92537705, https://people.com/movies/spirited-full-trailer-ryan-reynolds-will-ferrell-octavia-spencer-apple-tv/, https://um-insight.net/in-the-church/practicing-faith/5-ways-to-reme/
Sinning boldly with Sam 