And then we come to church and hear this lovely story of Jesus going down to the river to be baptized, and we have to ask ourselves, what does this nice sweet story have to do with a world where a horrible shooting like yesterday’s in Tucson can occur. What, in fact, does it have to do with the everyday lives that most of us lead?
Heather Murray Elkins, professor of preaching and worship at Drew Theological Seminary, tells this story that might help us begin to make a connection. She was leading a pastor’s retreat, several days long. At the beginning, she instructed the pastors gathered to spend the next few days searching through the Bible for a story that told their own story. The Word speaks through our lives, she says, the Word is living and active. And somewhere in it we should each be able to find our own story, the story that utters us. And that story will give us a new name, a Biblical name that speaks our lives.
On the last day of conference, she asked each person to tell their biblical name. She set up a circle of chairs with one chair in the center, and each person took a turn to tell their biblical name, and explain how it told their story. They took turns, names were spoken: Jacob, Rebekah, Mary, Peter, John. Then it came turn for one young man to sit in the center chair, and he sat. He sat for a long time in silence, till the silence became uncomfortable and people began to fidget and look at their watches. Finally, Heather asked: “Do you have a name to speak for us?”
He said: ‘I can’t speak a name from the Bible, because I have another name. This name is so strong that no other name can overcome it. My father gave me this name, and it was repeated so often that it has become a part of me. I can’t imagine myself by any other name.”
Silence fell again. Finally, Heather asked: “What is this name? Will you share it?” And the young man answered: “My name is, Not Good Enough.” And he began to cry.
The pastors all sat in silence, shocked. Someone was drowning, said Heather, and here we were, a room full of lifeguards, and no one knew what to do. But after a moment, a spirit swept the room, she said, like a wind, or maybe just an impulse, and one by one, people stood, walked to him, laid hands on him. And several of them began to speak, words they hadn’t rehearsed, words that came to each one separately. One after another they said these words: “You are my Child, my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
We don’t have any way of knowing how Jesus felt when he was baptized. We don’t know what made him one day put down his hammer, take off his apron, and walk out of his father’s carpenter shop, and walk south to find his crazy cousin John on the banks of the river Jordan. We don’t know what struck him as he listened to his cousin preach about One who was to come, who would baptize with water and fire, or what made him decide to walk down into the river and wade in the water. We don’t know whether he felt he was good enough to be the Messiah.
What we know was that he apparently answered the call to baptism, not because he needed his sins forgiven, but simply because it was God’s call. And we know that as he emerged, dripping, from the baptismal water, he heard a voice that named him, affirmed him, and loved him. “You are my Son, my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
All 4 gospels tell us that Jesus’ baptism was the beginning of his ministry. That somehow this affirmation of his identity as God’s Beloved Son was foundational to everything Jesus would ever accomplish or teach or lead. It was in a sense, his commissioning ceremony, his anointing as the Messiah. It was the moment when God’s affirmation gave Jesus his identity, and his identity empowered him for his world-transforming mission.
On this first Sunday after the end of the 12 days of Christmas, the question of Jesus’ identity is fresh in our minds. We know who Jesus was: the Son of God. But it helps for us to understand what the people who first gave him that title would have meant by it. When people of Jesus’ time said that Jesus was the Son of God, they would have had in mind what a son was in their culture. A son was not only expected to enter into his father’s business. A son was considered to represent his father in every way – if the father was honored and respected, so was the son, and vice versa. You could look at a son and understand who his father was.
With Jesus, this title of Son of God tells us this: if Jesus is the Son of God, then we know that Jesus is like God, Jesus is God-like. This was utterly shocking to the people of Jesus’ time, for a person to claim to be God-like. So shocking that it is one reason they put him to death. But it gets even more shocking the more you think about it, because the converse is also true: if God is Jesus’ father, then we know that God is Jesus-like. God does all the things that Jesus does. God eats with sinners, God heals the sick, God proclaims good news to the poor, God opens the eyes of the blind, God says to love our enemies and then puts that love into action by forgiving his killers from the cross, God gives his own life for the sake of the people he loves. This is God, the creator of heaven and earth, who is claiming Jesus for his Son, and on the cross it is God who is dying for us.
And the implications go on and on, because it doesn’t stop there. Not only is Jesus God-like and not only is God Jesus-like – shocking though those are. Here’s the kicker: in our baptisms, God is claiming us as God’s children too. We become one with Jesus in our baptism. And that means that we too have become God-like. And in claiming us, in becoming one of us, God has become like us. We can look at each other and say: you are baptized. And that means that God is Bob-like, God is Susan-like, God is Christine-like, God is Dorothy-like. We can look at each other, baptized children of God, and see God in each other.
Now sit with that for a moment. Sit with that idea: I am a baptized child of God, and that means that God said to me: You are my beloved child, and with you I am well pleased. Now ask yourself: what are the implications of that as I live out my life?
It is said that Martin Luther, the prophet of the Reformation, as he was trapped in a castle in Wartburg, hiding from the church officials who wanted to bring him to trial, struggled with the darkness of despair. And as he struggled, he would repeat to himself over and over: I am baptized, I am baptized, I am baptized. He wrote it on a sign above his bed, he scratched it into the wood of his desk. That assurance of who he was and how much he was loved gave him the strength he needed to continue his mission. So much that throughout life, he would tell others: Remember your baptism.
Many of us were baptized as infants, and we can’t remember the event. But that’s not what Martin Luther meant by “remember your baptism.” We remember our baptism by living into it, by accepting our identity as children of God, by realizing that as God’s children we have been initiated into the family business: to heal the sick, to associate with sinners and all those in need of God’s love, to open the eyes of the blind, to proclaim good news to the poor, to give ourselves for each other, to change the world.
We remember our baptism when we work to bring justice and peace to our hurting world, a world in a sad and troubled state that was brought home to the citizens of Arizona forcefully yesterday in that terrible shooting of 18 people. A world where a senseless act of violence like this can happen is a world where people have forgotten about God’s love, where people are failing to see God’s image in one another, where anger and violence has taken the place of careful and compassionate debate, where people have forgotten the spirit of God that dwells in them and in others around them, where people think it’s okay to see each other as objects instead of beloved children of God. Our world is in desperate need of God’s love, it’s crying out for people willing to live out a ministry of love, remembering our baptism.
Which is what we do today, on this celebration of the baptism of Jesus. Not just remember his baptism, but also remember our own. Remember who we are and whose we are. Remember that we are like God, and God is like us. Which means that no matter what names the world has given us, no matter what life situation we struggle with, no matter who we think we are or who we have been told we are, only one thing matters, only one name defines us, only one label will be ours for eternity: We are God’s children, God’s beloved. And because we are God’s children, God empowers us to change the world.
Heather Murray Elkins continued her story of the young man who believed his only name was, “Not Good Enough.” She says that after the conference was over and everything was packed up, she saw him in the parking lot and went over to him. She asked, “I have to know, will what happened make any difference to you?” He answered, “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I feel like something inside me had been broken, and it’s not any more. And what I do know is that it will make a difference every time I baptize someone else. Every time I hold a child in my arms to baptize him, or every time I put my hand into the water to name another human being, I will remember who he is, and I will remember who I am.”
And that, she says, is the secret of our baptism.
We are God’s beloved children, and in us God is well pleased.
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