Sermon: Beloved Children

Luke 3:15-22
Beloved Children
James Sledge                                                                                     January 9, 2022

Baptism of Jesus, Lorenzo Scott, 1987

from Art in the Christian Tradition,
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library

It’s John the Baptist again. We heard from him before Christmas, yelling for people to repent, to bear fruit worthy of repentance, to stop thinking that their religious affiliation or heritage would somehow suffice. And his voice echoes again post-Christmas. He’s still yelling about how something big is upon us, and we’d better get ready. 

As we catch the last echoes of John’s voice, we hear warnings of impending judgment. One is coming who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Or perhaps John says the one coming would baptize with a holy wind and with fire. It’s not possible to say with absolute certainty because the word Luke writes can mean either wind or spirit. But for Luke, wind and fire both go with the Holy Spirit as he makes clear when he tells the story of the disciples receiving the Spirit at Pentecost.

Wind and fire, the Holy Spirit, the wheat separated from the chaff; the images are more than a little disturbing. The Messiah is coming, a new age is dawning, and new day when the Spirit will be poured out, when a divine wind will turn things upside down. “Get ready!” says John.

Then the echoes die away, and John is gone. His warning still reverberates, but he is no longer there. That’s quite literally the case in Luke’s gospel. Luke pushes John off the stage so that Jesus can stand there. John has prepared the way for the one who is more powerful. Now that one is here and John steps aside. Luke goes so far as to report John’s arrest before he mentions Jesus’ baptism. 

And so as the echoes of John’s voice fade away, we move to the baptism of Jesus. Well, not really. Luke tells us nothing of the baptism itself. With John safely offstage, Luke places Jesus there, but it is after he has been baptized. There is no river Jordan; there is no water; there is no John. There is simply Jesus praying. Whether other people are still there, Luke does not say. And then the heaven is opened, a sign of what John had been saying. A new day is indeed dawning. The last days are arriving.  Judgment is drawing near. The Holy Spirit physically and tangibly, in a form that looks like a dove, comes down onto Jesus. And God says to Jesus. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

A beloved child. That’s the language of close relationships, of family. For many of us, family is where we learn about love, where we experience being loved. Families are interesting, complicated things. Some of you probably got together with your family at Christmas, even with Covid.

For me, and perhaps for many of you, family is a place where we are known, warts and all. The masks we wear for the rest of the world don’t work so well with those who’ve known you intimately over many years. When I think back on my family life, I have my share of regrets, times when I was a terrible son or sibling or father or husband. And yet, despite my many failings, family is the one place in the world where I am sure that I am loved, that I am beloved.

Surely Jesus knows full well that he is beloved. Did he really need a heavenly voice to remind him, “You are my Son, the Beloved”? After all, the Holy Spirit had been entwined in Jesus’ life since before his birth. The arrival of the Spirit at this moment doesn’t make him God’s Son, doesn’t make him beloved. He is all that by birth. But Jesus is about to set out on a most difficult road that will test him severely. Perhaps even he needed reassurance that God’s love would never leave him.

In the book of Acts, which has the same author as Luke, the first believers have an experience at Pentecost that is similar to the one Jesus has in our gospel reading today. Here Jesus is pictured sometime after his baptism, praying. There the believers are pictured sometime after the resurrection, praying. In both cases, the Holy Spirit, tangibly and visibly descends upon them, and they are empowered for ministry, for proclaiming the new day that is dawning, for bearing witness to the divine wind that is stirring up the world. They are reassured that God is with them, that God loves them.

In the Pentecost story, nothing is said about God speaking to the believers. No voice says, “You are my child.” Or at least Luke doesn’t report it. I like to think that they did hear something of that sort. Perhaps Luke left is out because he didn’t want Christians getting confused and thinking that their relationship with God was the same as Jesus’ unique relationship with God.  It’s true that we aren’t conceived by the Holy Spirit. We may not be natural born children of God, but it is abundantly clear that God loves us, that God sees us as beloved children.

The gospels link the Spirit and Jesus hearing he is beloved with his baptism. It’s a linkage that the Christian tradition has long maintained with its own practice of baptism. It has never been absolute, as if baptizing someone mechanically transmits the Spirit. But the Spirit has always been understood to be active in baptism, with God reaching out via the Spirit to claim and adopt. At least that’s what classic Christian theology says.

In practice, baptism has a number of different understandings. Among those like us who practice infant baptism, it is sometimes seen as little more than something parents, or grandparents, want “done” to a child. It is an important ritual and, for some, gets understood as a religious counterpart to childhood vaccinations, a religious inoculation if you will.

Among churches that do only adult baptisms, baptism is often understood primarily as a statement of faith, a ritual marking a person’s decision to give her life to Jesus. It’s a kind of personal commitment ceremony.

Neither of these understandings requires the Spirit to play much of a role. Babies get “done,” and their parents never bring them back to church again. People decide to believe in Jesus and be baptized without a thought about a driving wind stirring things up, with no inkling that the Spirit is equipping and empowering them for ministry that proclaims God’s coming new day.

It keeps baptism a lot less complicated if we don’t invite the Spirit in. No getting caught up in that divine wind. No danger of hearing God’s voice and having to wrestle with the implications of God claiming us despite knowing our deepest secrets, despite knowing the things we hope even our families don’t know.

Whenever a young child is brought for baptism here, the parents reaffirm their faith, remembering that they have been claimed by God’s love in Christ through water and the Spirit. They claim that they are members of God’s family and promise to teach the ways of that family to their child.

We in the congregation reaffirm our faith as well. We say that we too have been claimed by God’s love, that we too, by water and Spirit are members of that same family, and we will do our part to teach the family’s ways to this new sibling of ours.

And even though we in the church, maybe especially we in the Presbyterian church, have gotten pretty good at keeping the Spirit at bay, that divine wind is present at baptism, moving among us, patiently waiting for us to open our hearts, waiting for the day when each of us hears that heavenly voice, “You are my beloved child.” 

By the power of the Spirit, you are God’s beloved child, and by that same Spirit, you have been equipped for ministry, to share God’s love with the world. And oh, how the world needs to be caught up in that love.