Sunday, January 7th, 2024: "Belovedness"

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First United Presbyterian Church

“Belovedness”

Rev. Amy Morgan

January 7, 2024

Luke 3:21-22

21 Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, 22 and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

There’s this thing going around on social media where people ask other people, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” Like many things on social media, I don’t fully understand this viral phenomenon, but it turns out that people, especially men it seems, think about the Roman Empire quite a lot. 

So it occurred to me that it might be interesting to ask Christians, “How often do you think about baptism?” I mean, it’s a pretty important thing to Christians, right? Especially for Reformed Christians, who only have two sacraments, baptism has to carry a heavy load of meaning. But I have a feeling it isn’t really something we think about all that often. And today I hope to change that.

Baptism is a confusing concept. Presbyterians, especially, have complicated the idea tremendously. Our Book of Order states that baptism “holds a deep reservoir of theological meaning, including: dying and rising with Jesus Christ; pardon, cleansing, and renewal; the gift of the Holy Spirit; incorporation into the body of Christ; and a sign of the realm of God.” It goes on to mention that baptism is also a sign of God’s covenant, connecting us with “God’s creative purpose, cleansing power, and redemptive promise from generation to generation.” Oh, and baptism “also represents God’s call to justice and righteousness” and “enacts and seals…God’s redeeming grace offered to all people.”  But wait, there’s more! “Baptism is at once God’s gift of grace, God’s means of grace, and God’s call to respond to that grace” with “repentance, faithfulness, and discipleship.” And finally, “Through Baptism, the Holy Spirit gives the Church its identity and commissions the Church for service in the world.” That reservoir of theological meaning is deep indeed. So deep it’s hard to fathom. 

But, in truth, baptism is a complicated concept in scripture, too. The first we hear of it, John is baptizing crowds of people who have come out into the wilderness for some kind of spiritual cleansing involving repentance. Jesus hasn’t arrived on the scene as an adult yet, so there isn’t originally an explicit connection to faith in Jesus. Jesus himself is baptized right along with “all the people.” Since he was God incarnate, we can assume he didn’t require any cleansing from sin. So what exactly was that about? Later in the New Testament, people sometimes request baptism in response to hearing the good news of Jesus Christ. Sometimes whole households are baptized, including, we might assume, children too young to respond to the gospel. Sometimes hundreds of people are “saved” with no mention of baptism at all. 

This varied practice of baptism in scripture has led Christians throughout the ages to interpret this practice differently. Some believe it is required for salvation and should be administered as soon as a child is born. Others believe it is a response to faith in Jesus and should only be administered once a person has the maturity to make a proclamation of faith. Presbyterians have a tendency to overthink things, and clearly baptism is no exception. 

But if we focus for just a moment on these two little verses in Luke’s gospel, on the baptism of Jesus, we might discover the very simple but very profound meaning of baptism. 

In baptism, whenever and however it takes place, and whoever is involved, God breaks down barriers with belovedness. Baptism is God’s chosen mechanism for destroying anything that might try to come between us and God. And that is because of how baptism conveys and affirms our belovedness. 

Let’s start by looking at how this is demonstrated in Luke’s depiction of Jesus’s baptism. 

First, we might notice that Jesus’s baptism does not start out as something different or special. Jesus, the Son of God, God with us, walks right into the same muddy water as everyone else. Just after Jesus’s baptism, the gospel of Luke offers this long genealogy of Jesus, beginning with Joseph (sort of) and ending with “Adam, son of God.” Now, Luke has by far the longest and most detailed infancy narrative of all four gospels. This genealogy could have been dropped in anywhere between the annunciation and his circumcision. Matthew’s gospel starts out in the very first verse with a genealogy that begins with Abraham. But Luke chooses to hold onto this until after Jesus is baptized alongside ordinary humans. Which says to me that he wanted to emphasize, both in his description of Jesus’s baptism and the shaping of his genealogy, that all humans, descended from the first human made in the image of God, are also children of God, right along with Jesus. Jesus, son of Adam, son of God, brings his full humanity and full divinity into the water right alongside all the children of God who have come to repent of their sins and be cleansed. So the first way God breaks down the barrier between God and humanity is to stand shoulder to shoulder with us in our humanity and our alienation from God. Jesus doesn’t come to be baptized because of his need for repentance. He comes to be with us in our need for repentance, in our need to be reconciled with God and with each other, our need to remember that we are children of God, our need to live into that identity more faithfully. 

While Jesus’s baptism doesn’t start out as anything different or special, something special does take place. In this extremely sparse narrative, one little detail Luke chooses to include is that Jesus was praying. Neither Matthew or Mark mention this. But Luke emphasizes that it is in the context of prayer that this cosmic intervention occurs. 

The first thing that happens is the heavens are opened. Other places in the gospels where we see this verb for opened include Jesus opening the eyes of people who cannot see and the ears of those who cannot hear. Jesus opens mouths and opens doors. And after his resurrection, even tombs are opened. Jesus’s baptism, and his connection with God in prayer, opens the gateway between heaven and earth, between divinity and humanity. In prayer, the barrier between God and creation is removed. 

Next, there is this physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit that comes down out of heaven as a dove. The Greek word pneuma, the word used for the Holy Spirit, means breath or wind. It is definitionally this unembodied thing. But here, it is given physical, bodily form. Again, it is only in the gospel of Luke that this detail of “in bodily form” is included. This appearance of the holy and spiritual in physical, material form affirms the holiness and goodness of physical, material things. It demonstrates that God is not only concerned with our spirits. Our bodies matter, too. God’s love for Jesus, and God’s love for us, is body and soul. God’s salvation, God’s redemption, is of our spiritual and physical beings. 

And finally, there are those words of loving affirmation God speaks to Jesus from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The impact of this message for Jesus is not so he could feel good enough, smart enough, or well-liked. Belovedness is not about self-confidence. Belovedness is an identity that overcomes barriers. 

We see this very clearly in the life Jesus lives after this moment. He overcomes the barriers of temptation. He overcomes barriers between those who are deemed “clean” and “unclean,” “righteous” and “sinful,” “worthy” and “unworthy.” He overcomes barriers between Israel and those who are viewed as their enemies. He overcomes the barrier between himself and those who crucified him. And finally, he even overcomes the barrier between life and death. The belovedness spoken to Jesus in his baptism overcomes every barrier we can conceive of. 

And this is what baptism does for us as well.

In baptism, we find ourselves shoulder-to-shoulder with all the children of God, Jesus included, who desire to be restored to loving relationship with God, creation, and humanity. In baptism, we find the courage to pray in ways that open up the existential divide between God and creation. In baptism, we claim our belovedness as God’s children and are empowered to overcome any barrier we can conceive of. In baptism, God breaks down barriers with belovedness. 

In his book, Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen writes, “I must tell you that claiming your own blessedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others. . . . It is remarkable how easy it is to bless others, to speak good things to and about them, to call forth their beauty and truth, when you yourself are in touch with your own blessedness. The blessed one always blesses.”

But it is not always easy for us to claim our blessedness, our belovedness. It is sometimes challenging to hear God’s voice calling us beloved children. Nouwen also wrote that “It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: ‘You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody—unless you can demonstrate the opposite.’ These negative voices are so loud and so persistent that it is easy to believe them. That’s the great trap. It is the trap of self-rejection.”

We fall into this trap constantly. But the power of baptism is that it is a continual experience, not a once-and-done event. Martin Luther wrote that “Although you only receive the sacrament of baptism once, you are continually baptized anew.” The more we think about baptism, in all it’s complexity and all it’s simplicity, the clearer that voice becomes announcing our belovedness. 

This morning, as we celebrate the sacrament of Communion, that sacrament that continually nourishes us in our baptismal identity, we will also be invited to remember our baptism, or to contemplate the meaning of baptism. I will be at the font, and before you come to the table, you may, if you like, come to the font where I will make the sign of the cross on your hand with water and invite you to remember that you are a beloved child of God. You are welcome to participate in this whether you have been baptized or not, whether you cognitively remember your baptism or not. 

In this act of remembrance, my hope is that we will think about baptism more often. And in thinking about baptism, may we be restored to relationship with all of God’s children. May we remember the power of prayer to connect with God. And may our belovedness grow in us a desire to love and bless others. Claiming our belovedness, we can recognize the belovedness of all God’s children and all creation. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.