Revealed

Matthew 3:13-17

One of the first things you find out when you sit down to systematically study the stories of Jesus’ life is that everybody’s got an angle. In other words, each gospel writer tells the same story a little differently. It’s like reading a news story told by People magazine, Business Week, and Scientific American: every publication has a different audience and a different agenda about what’s important in that event.

All four gospel writers, for example, tell us about a meeting between John the Baptist and his cousin Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Only three of them tell us that John baptized Jesus, and only one of them – the one we heard this morning – tells us that John objected.

Matthew is worried about what people will think of Jesus going through this repentance ritual: The Son of God isn’t sinful and in need of cleansing, is he? Or is he a lesser prophet than John – I mean, he went to John for baptism…?

Matthew doesn’t want us to believe any of that for even a minute, so he shows us this little vignette, where “John would have prevented [Jesus], saying ‘I need to be baptized by you…’” and Jesus has to persuade John into upsetting the heavenly hierarchy.

Then John baptizes Jesus, pushing him down into the flowing Jordan River, all the way under, and pulling him back up, in a single ritual that combines metaphors for washing with crossing from death to life, and from slavery to freedom in the fulfillment of God’s promises.

And as Jesus rises from the water, God’s Spirit rests on him, and God’s voice announces, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

This ritual of baptism doesn’t “cleanse” Jesus, it reveals him.

Reveals him as God’s own the way the star does at his birth, and reveals him anew as God’s Beloved, as one in whom God delights. It sets that belovedness free in the world, propelling Jesus into the public ministry that yielded so much miracle and wonder.

Years ago, at some stage deep in the thickets of the ordination process, I got yet another set of questions about academic and spiritual preparation to answer and return to the Commission on Ministry. I dutifully filled them out, until I got to the bottom of the page: In a short paragraph, what will your ordination mean to the church?

I was stumped.

I mean, I knew what it would mean to me to complete this long and arduous process and become a priest, but what could one person’s ordination mean to the Whole Church? Globally, universally??

I phoned my friends (this was before Facebook). I struggled. I wrote terrible drafts. I felt sort of arrogant even asking if my ordination would impact the whole church.

But struggling with that question finally brought me around to the realization that sacraments – like ordination, like marriage, baptism, eucharist – are not meant only, or primarily, to benefit us with privilege, nourishment, blessing. They do, of course, but primarily, these sacraments are meant to set God’s gifts free within us for the sake of God’s whole beloved world.

When I talk to families who bring infants or children to the church for baptism, very few of them (none, to date) suggest that they’ve come to send forth their children as ambassadors for God, to preach and serve and change the world, as vessels of God’s Holy Spirit.

But that’s exactly what we promise and pray for in baptism. It’s what we all promise when we – all of us together – renew our own baptismal covenant at every baptism in the Episcopal church.

Baptism most certainly brings a new person – infant, child or adult – into a new life among the family of God, embraces the person in God’s protection, and promises welcome and forgiveness that we depend on throughout our lives.

But more than that, baptism is meant to set us free; to unleash and enhance our gifts of love and service for the sake of the world, to reveal and release God’s gifts within us,

to reveal and release our most holy selves: our selves as God’s beloved.

Think about that for a moment.

Do you think of yourself primarily as God’s beloved?

Is that how you introduce yourself?

What you think of when someone asks you to describe yourself, wonders who you are?

Because you are.

Proclaimed and revealed to the world at your baptism as God’s delight, God’s deeply, dearly loved child.

What does it mean, in your heart, to be so utterly beloved?   For that to be the first thing you know about yourself?

What limits might be released in you, if you trust in that true and real love, no matter what?
What fear might hold you less tightly, or even let you go?
Most of us experience – in small ways or great – some fear of embarrassment, failure, shame, regret, loss. Can those fears stand up to being so deeply, wholly beloved?

Consider your doubts – reasonable, real doubts about yourself, or theology, or your fellow humans – and remember that God – knowing those doubts – trusts you beyond all doubt and reason.

Are there hidden griefs, old pains, regrets and offenses that you can’t love in yourself? What does it mean to be – in the midst of that – thoroughly loved by God?

What might this belovedness set free, in you?

The church has a few ideas about what God might set free in us, through our baptism; about what God might reveal in us, as God’s beloved. And the church reminds us of that, asking us to renew our baptismal covenant - proclaiming our call to serve and preach and change the world - as we remember Jesus’ baptism today; as we join with Maris and Jackson who come for baptism today.

The church reminds us, God reminds us, through the stories of the gospel, through the objections of John, through the words of our prayers, that like Jesus’ baptism, our own baptism is not a simple act of repentance – not even as simple as inclusion, or blessing, though it is all of that – but an act of revelation, meant to wash us free of the fears and doubts and burdens and limits that guide us into the things we come to regret,

free us to be our most holy selves,

revealed to the world as God’s beloved.

My brothers and sisters, children of God, beloved of God,

what do you suppose God is ready, today, to release, and reveal in you?