Monday, January 14, 2013

Sermon for January 13, 2013: "You are My Beloved"

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

All quotations from scripture come from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, with the exception of the Psalms, which come from The Book of Common Prayer, 1979. Not all scripture passages from the lectionary may be quoted or referenced in a given Sunday's sermon. For more information on the lectionary used in The Episcopal Church, please visit http://www.lectionarypage.net/.

“You are My Beloved”
The Rev. Nicholas S. Szobota
January 13, 2013
Christ Church, West River, Maryland
First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord


What if? What if each of us here today did not exist? How would that impact the world? Last month, some of us may have watched “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which George Bailey gets to experience a world in which he never existed. He saw how much he mattered to the world, and how different, how much worse, people’s lives were without him.

What if each one of us had made different choices in our life up to this point? “The Butterfly Effect,” a movie from ten years ago starring Ashton Kutcher, features a character able to return to previous points in his life and make different decisions. He quickly discovers that his life becomes worse and worse the more he tries to fix things using this power.

A “what if” of this sort appears in today’s reading from Luke’s gospel: What if John the Baptist were not there? The lectionary hides this a bit. There is a gap in today’s reading. After John the Baptist talks about the one coming who is greater than he, we miss a part from Luke 3:18-20:

So, with many other exhortations, he [John the Baptist] proclaimed the good news to the people. But Herod the ruler, who had been rebuked by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added to them all by shutting John in prison.

Then, our reading for today picks up with these words:
           
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened…

Note that the text starts speaking in the passive voice. All the people get baptized, and Jesus gets baptized, but the text does not mention who does the baptizing. Scholars and biblical commentators suggest that Luke has set up a situation in which John has gone to prison, as indicated in 3:20, and therefore someone else must have baptized Jesus.

We have the benefit of knowing all four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and John clearly place John the Baptist at the Jordan River when Jesus gets baptized, so it’s easy for the mind to apply that situation to Jesus’ baptism in Luke. Perhaps Luke stuck in those verses about John going to prison as an aside, a bit out of sequence.

Luke might have had another point, though: no one, not even John the Baptist, for whom out of all the gospels Luke gives the most extensive biography, complete with a story about his birth and biological relationship to Jesus, no one is indispensable to God’s plans. God’s plans for the world, what God intends to do through Jesus, will occur whether John the Baptist is there or not.

Frighteningly enough, not one of us needs to be here for God’s purposes to unfold. This concept stretches back to creation. God was already complete, whole, infinite, and eternal before God brought the world, or any of us, into being. God was getting along just fine without us, thank you very much, especially when one considers the inevitable human habit of falling short of the image in which God made us. Each one of us makes mistakes, has faults, and sins.

Yet, this situation presents a startling revelation of God’s love. God does not need us, in fact we often get in the way, yet God still loves us. The stories of the Bible contain case after case of this. Although God acts wrathfully in many circumstances, the overall message presents God as loving, forgiving, and merciful. One should question and delve deeper into the stories that exhibit God’s wrath, but not without attention to the whole.

Each one of us exists not because God needs us, but because God loves us. In the midst of that love, God has a purpose for us. God has places for us to go and growth for us to achieve so that, gradually, each one of us falls a bit less short of the image of God in which she or has been made. The shortest distance from where each one of us is now to where God wants us to go is across, as between any two points, a straight line. Yet, I suspect each one of us takes that journey via the long, curving route. Some of us do such a good job of taking a route that twists and curves back over itself so many times that it might not seem much progress has been made at all. Nevertheless, God loves us; God goes with us on that journey and urges us forward.

Regardless of how far any of us have progressed, regardless of how twisted the path has become, God’s words to us are his words to Jesus after Jesus’ baptism, whether that baptism was performed by John the Baptist or not: “You are my Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (see Luke 3:22). God’s love remains on a constant on our journey, perhaps the only constant. May each one of us move forward on the path to the person God wants us to become with those words ringing in our ears.

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