Well Pleased - First Sunday After the Epiphany, Year C

Isaiah 43: 1 – 7 * Luke 3: 15 – 17; 21 – 22

We are at the brink of a new season – a season that can feel just like the bridge, the connective tissue between Christmas and Lent.  In the season after the Epiphany, as the church-y folks call it, we learn more and more about Jesus as he emerges as a prophet, a teacher and the Messiah of God.

 

The season unfolds as if the star that revealed a new King to wise strangers was just the tip of the revelation iceberg.  

 

In this season after Epiphany, we’re going to be looking for revelations of who Jesus is, what that means to us, and how we bear that revelation in the world. And we’re going to root our exploration throughout these next weeks in Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth, perhaps best known for the iconic passage about love.  We’ll be thinking about Jesus as a revelation of God’s love and what that means for us – how we receive, reflect and bear love in the world because of who Jesus was and who Christ is.

I want to start with something of an excursus – a little teaching or reminder that I hope will help us along our journey in this season and generally as a group of folks seeking God’s justice in the world.

 

At Christmas and Epiphany, and in the series we are unfolding in this season after epiphany, we tend to call on the language from John’s gospel about light in the darkness. The light comes into the world - light which cannot be overcome, and the star which the magi followed effectively “lights” their way to Jesus. Light can be a beautiful image.  We describe Jesus as light of the world. But we have to be very careful wielding “darkness” as the other end of the light spectrum. Images of light as good and dark as bad have become part of our cultural fabric here in the Western world, and that cultural fabric has a lot of implicit bias against people with black and brown skin and against things associated with “darkness” – think about mental health as well.  

 

If we are serious about our journey of anti-racism here at Faith, we have to relearn some things about images of light.  And so for today, I want to encourage us to think about light this way – light is about knowing.  If you imagine a dawn breaking, as light builds, we are able to see more and more visual detail. And the opposite of that revelation in the light is unknowing or mystery. I am trying to retrain my brain to think about light at one end of the spectrum and unknowing at the other – It certainly fits with the word “revelation” and therefore hangs well with the idea of “epiphany” as well.

 

Can we let that be vital groundwork for our exploration of God’s word? The image of Jesus as light is about revelation and discovery and knowing.  The opposite of that would be a lack of understanding, a fog, a mystery, a misunderstanding.

 

With that as a guidepost for this bridge season, let’s take a look at our Gospel lesson for today to see what is revealed – so that we might discover truth and knowing, so that we might emerge from some of our unknowing.

 

Luke’s gospel that you heard today is thin on details about Jesus’ baptism by John.  Essentially we get two significant components of the story – John is offering a baptism with water – which might have been understood as a purification related to repentance -  while John is also making it clear that he is not the Messiah who will wield another kind of baptism.  

 

And then, we hear almost in passing that “when all the people had been baptized, Jesus had also been baptized.”  

 

The particular baptism of Jesus – the wading into the water - is not the big event in Luke’s gospel. 

 

The big event in this moment is the opening of heaven, the descending of the Holy Spirit “in a bodily form like a dove” and a voice from the heavens (of God) claiming Jesus as son – “You are my son, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

 

I appreciated the commentator this week that encourages us to pay attention to Jesus wading into the waters of the Jordan along with scores of others – and in this way, Jesus, who would have no need for repentance or ritual purification as the Messiah – enters into the earthy realities of the human world with everybody else. He doesn’t hold out for a private baptism in a secluded location. He’s right there in the teeming humanity of the moment.

 

Have you ever seen images of Hindu purification at the Ganges River?  So many people wading into a river flowing with the grime of life…the same river into which the ashes of the dead are launched. But it is constantly moving water – water that holds all kinds of life – beginnings and endings, hopes and griefs, sustenance and disease, swiftly moving through place by place over bodies here and there all the way to the Bay of Bengal. 

 

In our scripture, Jesus is wading into the Jordan right alongside everyone else. He is wading into moving water carrying the earthy realities of the surrounding countryside. He is wading in with all the humanity that showed up in the wilderness that day.  He is taking on all of the rough edges of shared humanity.  He is not holding himself apart. He is entering into it all.

 

He doesn’t make any speeches, he doesn’t draw attention to himself. He enters into it all. His commitment in the moment is to be with humanity.

 

And there is a voice - the voice of God – “this is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”

 

Will you take a leap with me here?  

 

Jesus wades into the waters of John’s baptism be at one with humanity, to take on the fullness of humanity, to participate in the need to repent of the basic realities of the human condition – of self-centeredness, of greed, of anger, of pride, of envy, of forgetting that God is God and not our human selves.

 

And God claims Jesus in the midst of it. My Son. Beloved.

 

Just like God claims each one of us in baptism.

 

And Jesus has no words. But he leaves that place and gets to work – gets to work of being tested and tried, of teaching and preaching, of feeding and healing, of calling and traveling, of blessing and sacrificing, of turning tables upside down and naming what is broken. 

 

The work of being beloved is just that – messy work.

 

There is a lot to consider in this way of understanding the gospel text.

 

Compared to this moment in Luke’s gospel, I think we as the church have a pretty tame expression of baptism.

 

We often think about baptism as a very personal moment of relationship. A moment when we submit to the waters of baptism and are individually received as God’s beloved. Here in the church, our liturgy reminds us that we are all in this together – we vow as a community to surround the baptized. But here in Luke’s gospel we glimpse a different kind of shared experience. Jesus takes on the full range of human experience by joining in the baptism of repentance that John offers. 

 

It makes me wonder…

 

When you think about your baptism – and if you were baptized, you don’t have memory, but I hope you have thought about what it means to have been claimed that way – when you think about your baptism, what do you understand as YOUR commitment from that time forward?

 

Do we, in our baptism, not only receive God’s blessing but enter into a kind of solidarity with humanity? A solidarity in which we share the gifts and the foibles and shortfalls of the human condition?

 

Where are the places that we must be willing to take on the sins of our shared human experience and repent as a human race? As a collection of believers? As the community of Faith United Methodist Church? As citizens of the United States, maybe? Where are the places that we have fallen short collectively? 

I think about the need to unlearn patterns of self-sufficiency, of scarcity, of bias, of autonomy… in order to be part of the fabric we share – in order to love one another fully and well.

 

And then, what does it mean to us that God’s proclamation of love is for us, too. Us as well. All of us along with Jesus?

 

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus has no words. No words at all. But God has words. 

This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.

 

Do you know that this love is for you? That God loves you? That you are beloved of God?

 

May we hear this claim and live into the responsibility of it. May we keep wading into our shared human condition and receive love well so that we can also reflect it well.

 

May it be so.

Amen.