Beloved and Pleasing

Beloved and Pleasing
Matthew 3:3-17
Baptism of the Lord
12 January 2007

Perhaps I am revealing too much when I say that I have voices in my head. But I do not think I am alone in this, or even remotely rare. Honestly, now, don’t you hear them too?

Stop and listen a minute and see what is there. Some old advertising jingles perhaps? A TV theme song or two? A few favorite movie quotes? Maybe you hear a running list of all the things you need to get done in a day: laundry, litter box, bills, papers, drop the kids off, pick the kids up, make dinner, do dishes, lather, rinse, repeat. I would venture to guess that many or even most of us have quite the din inside our heads, which may be why so many of us keep the radio going or the TV blaring – to drown all our own chaos out.

If we listen really hard, though, I think that underneath the racket we might hear the deeper messages most of us carry around. They are quieter voices, but more persistent. They lodged in our minds and hearts a very long time ago, and stayed there. Sometimes all they say is just one word, over and over, echoing like some sort of verdict on our lives. Lazy. Loser. Victim. Drama Queen. Problem-child. Stupid. Fatso. Show-off. Burden. Guilty.

With those voices sometimes there comes another, more seductive one, saying something like: Prove yourself. Try harder. Do better. Do more. Be somebody different. Be someone worth loving.

And if we listen to these voices long enough, we find that we can spend our whole lives reaching. Reaching for approval, for love, for respect. Reaching to overcome the labels that we feel are hanging over our lives. That reach gives us the sense that the most important movement in life is up, forward. So we speak of climbing the corporate ladder, moving up the payscale, being at the top of our game, getting ahead. For life to be good, for us to be worthy, apparently we must move up.

This language of ascent tends to be part of our religious understanding too. We speak of “the man upstairs.” We direct our prayers and our thoughts upward. We sing of climbing Jacob’s ladder. If our faith matters to us much at all, then we tend to apply the same notions of progress and achievement and attainment to our spiritual journey as we do to the other aspects of our lives. We seek to propel ourselves forward along the spiritual path.

The direction Jesus moved was always first and foremost downward. His first downward movement was in becoming human at all. As Paul so beautifully sings it in his letter to the Phillipians: He did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped at, but, emptying himself, took the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

In today’s passage we find him taking the downward path again, as he makes his way down the bank of the Jordan to be baptized by his wild cousin John. John won’t have it. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

It is strange, isn’t it, that the Son of God would come seeking this baptism from a prophet preaching repentance? Why would he need this cleansing, this symbol of reform? He had nothing to repent of; his life did not need reforming. And yet over John’s protests he insists, using the same words his mother used when told she would bear this child of God: Let it be. And down he goes, pushed under the water. Down, down, down. His whole life was a going down, a giving away - of his power, his healing touch, his love, and finally his life.

This was the shape of his life – a downward arc from equality with God, to shared vulnerability with humanity. Whatever else his baptism must mean, this is part of it – he submitted himself to the same waters we go through. He was showing us that he is in this mess with us.

For Matthew, though, the accent of this story falls on what happens when he comes up from the water. The heavens open. The Spirit of God descends like a dove and lands on him. And a voice from heaven declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And with that voice still ringing in his ears, he is led out into the wilderness where he will be tempted for a very long time. And he will resist. His whole life will be a resistance, a defiance of the constant invitation to be what others think he should be. And by his resistance he will show the world the face of God. By his resistance he will announce peace, pronounce hope, overcome death, overthrow evil, and bring a new kind of life. [?]

What would your life, what would your living, look like if this were the voice you heard over and under all the others? This is my child, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. In baptism, Christ showed his solidarity with us. In baptism, we also share solidarity with him – which is to say, we take on his identity. We find ourselves in him. We find this voice speaking over us, and over all the muddy waters of our lives. This is my child, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

No more grasping at acceptance, belonging, status, because the voice we hear claims us: my child.

No more doing what we can to earn love or approval, because the voice we hear declares us: beloved.

No more staking ourselves, our worth, our work on pleasing others because this voice pronounces us: pleasing.

Can you imagine the freedom and the power that would come with hearing – and believing – such a voice as this? Can you imagine the healing of the world that would come through people who are set free to love and serve because they have heard and believed such a voice as this?

Jesus showed us that freedom and power in every choice he made. Still wet from those waters, he went to the desert, where he looked the devil in the eye and defied every temptation the devil offered. He could resist the seduction of proving himself, because his identity had already been pronounced, he had already been claimed. He had nothing more to strive for, but to give himself away. And that is what he set to doing, in freedom, in power, in love.

Haven’t you noticed that the freest people in the world are the ones who have nothing left to prove?

That’s you and me, friends. In actuality, we have nothing to prove about ourselves, nothing to earn. Most of us just don’t live that way yet. How do we get there? To that place of freedom, and the power that comes with it, of identity rooted in a reality that we don’t have to create for ourselves, but is instead created and claimed for us? How do we get there?

If we follow him, then the way we go is down. Down into those waters, down into the arms of Christ’s love, down into the letting go of self and the peeling away of our ego and the things we let matter too much. The direction of the Christian spiritual journey might properly be understood as a descent, as we begin to confront our darker unconscious motivations and values, and submit them to repentance, which is to say, to turn them over, to let them go. [Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love]

What this means, then, is total surrender. Surrender of ourselves, our motivations, our values, our decision-making. We climb down off the throne of our own lives and sink with him under those cleansing waters, then rise again to follow, which is to serve, to love. The words that we hear, on our rising, are not a stamp of approval on anything we’ve done. They are a seal, a sign, a claim, of who we are, and whose we are, and what our lives are meant to be. And the words themselves are what make it possible. You are my child, my beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.

To surrender to Christ’s way is to submit our lives to the claim of those sweet words. We think of repentance as turning from our old ways, our old sins. But this is repentance, too. To turn from those old voices, the old labels that hang over our lives. To choose each day not to live by who they say we are, but by the gentle truth of this other voice. You are my child, my beloved, with whom I am well-pleased.

To believe otherwise is to shackle ourselves to an inaccurate understanding of our reality. If we can surrender those shackles we can be made free to move out from ourselves, to move beyond our self-centered world of trying to do better and get better on our own steam, and to move instead towards the world out there in service and in love. When we are free from the grasping, free from the proving, we are finally free to take on the powerful responsibility our true identity implies – loving God, loving the world, and proclaiming God’s love for the world in all that we do. Which is to say that the choices we make, the way we choose to exist in this world, begin to reflect the Voice we have heard. Our lives begin to sing, as his did, with that beautiful Voice, a voice of hope, and great power, and great intimacy, and great love.

That Voice spoke once, long ago, in the very beginning, saying: It is good. It is very good. And we were loved from that beginning. But we turned away, and our love failed, and things got broken – like promises, and hearts, and lives, and our own sense of what’s real and what’s good. So God’s love came down, came to claim us again, to show us again what’s real, and what’s good, to set things right. And that Voice was heard again, over those waters, and through the life of Jesus. And if we can let go the other voices in our ears, and let ourselves be laid down into those great arms of love, we can hear the Voice too: This is my child, my beloved, with whom I am well-pleased. Can you hear it? The healing of the world is in that voice. May your life and mine ring with it.