Sermon: You're My Dear Child

Luke 3:15-22

You’re My Dear Child

James Sledge                                       January 10, 2016 – Baptism of the Lord

Have you ever known someone who was going through a tough time and disappeared from church? Illness or the death of a loved one sometimes causes a faith crisis that pulls people away, but I’m thinking more of folks who disappear after something that might cause people to judge them.

It doesn’t happen as much with divorce as it once did, but some folks still feel embarrassed enough to stop attending. Graduate to things such as getting arrested or some other form of public humiliation, and it becomes much more likely that people won’t show their face around the church. Church is, after all, a place for good, respectable people.

I thought about respectable people as I read Luke’s take on Jesus’ baptism. All the gospel writers have their own take on it. Apparently the event was well enough known that they need to address this potentially embarrassing episode. Why would Jesus need a baptism of repentance and forgiveness after all?

Matthew’s gospel has John the Baptist raise the question of “Why?” directly, but Luke does something different. There is no conversation with John. Jesus does not speak at all. Instead Luke merely throws Jesus in with all the other folks going to John. Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…

With no apparent fanfare, Jesus got in line with everyone else, with the “brood of vipers” who came out to the wilderness to be baptized. Jesus joined with those who felt they needed to turn their lives around, who needed God to forgive them. And this was hardly the last time. No wonder the religious folk would say Jesus wasn’t respectable enough, calling him “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Luke 7:34)

As Jesus prayed following his baptism, the Holy Spirit descended on him and a voice said, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” I love the way the Cotton Patch Gospel renders this, “You are my dear Son; I’m proud of you.” Sounds like something a good, southern Momma would say.

Part of the good news of the gospel is that God looks at each of us and says, “You are my dear child.” Like any loving parent, God can find some reason in the worst of us to say, “I’m proud of you.” But I have a feeling that Luke is telling us more with this story. I wonder if part of what prompts God to say, “I’m proud of you” isn’t the two things Luke tells us Jesus did at his baptism. The first I’ve already mentioned, getting in line with everyone else. The second is something that Luke’s gospel emphasizes over and over: Jesus in prayer.

Jesus ministry is steeped in prayer. It is at the center of all he does. Jesus, I imagine, would have appreciated the words supposedly spoken by the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. "I have so much to do that if I didn't spend at least three hours a day in prayer I would never get it all done.” How different from my tendency to pray if I have enough time.

In fact, I wonder how often we in the Church look much like Jesus at his baptism, hanging out with all those less than respectable folks, and deep in prayer. The fact that so many people think that Church is a place for respectable people makes me wonder about the first. My own experience with prayer at Church gives me pause regarding the second.

We certainly have lovely, liturgical prayers in worship, but it can be quite different outside worship. How many of you have ever attended a church meeting: Session, Deacons, or some committee? What sort of prayer did you see there?

Very often I’ve seen something like what pastor and author Graham Standish writes about in his book, Becoming a Blessed Church. He describes a typical meeting where someone offers a prayer asking God to bless the work they are about to do. Then God is asked to wait outside, perhaps go get a cup of coffee, while they do their work. Afterwards, they invite God back in and pray for God's blessing on what just transpired.

Perhaps that’s bit overstated, but how many of those church meetings you’ve attended featured prayer in the heart of the meeting? How many of them actively sought to draw on the Holy Spirit in order to understand God’s will, or to be strengthened for doing it?

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One of the real joys for me as pastor here is that I get to do a lot of baptisms, something many colleagues rarely get to do. I love baptisms but I do worry that we may not understand them very well.

Some folks think of baptism as a kind of spiritual inoculation. Others think of it as a nice ritual that the grandparents will appreciate. But Presbyterians believe that in baptism, God actually does something. In baptism, God says to us, “You are my beloved child; I’m proud of you.” In baptism God joins us to Christ, makes us his brothers and sisters, so that we become something different than we were before. In baptism the gift of the Spirit is conferred on us.

As brothers and sisters of Christ, one of the Church’s biggest jobs is to help the baptized learn what it means to live out this new identity. We are called to help one another incarnate Christ, to make him tangible to the world. In his baptism and in his life, Jesus shows us how beloved children should live and act in order to make God proud.

“You are my dear child; I’m proud of you,” God says to Jesus, and to us. And when we have felt the warm embrace of God’s love in Christ, how can we help but want to live and act in the ways our brother Jesus shows us?