Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7 | Acts 10:34-38 | Matthew 3:13-17

Almighty, everliving God who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit may always be well-pleasing to you.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We’re about to begin the ordinary time.  The ordinary time is the time we reflect, focusing on one of the synoptic gospels to look more thoroughly into the biography of this God/man, Jesus.  He has within himself and within the experience he had the experience that all of us are destined to have.  We have to pay attention to him.  He is the model.  He is the example.  He is who we are to become.  When I grew up, I think I was told that, but one of the things I misunderstood was I felt that Jesus was unique.  He wasn’t like me exactly.  Well, he was human, but he had one thing that I never had, and that was he was sinless — sinless.  And I have to say that, when I grew up in my Catholic Church, I felt that sin was — well, it was obviously the most important thing that I was taught that I must avoid, but it seemed that the descriptions of the sins that I was told that would separate me from God were mostly my human weaknesses.  I would tell a lie.  I would steal a cookie.  I would get angry, but when you look at sin, the essence of sin, the real, mortal, deadly sin is the only one that is really dangerous.  The others are signs that we need help and we need support, but the basic core thing that we are — where it’s so important for us to avoid is an out and out rejection of God.  And generally, people don’t necessarily make that decision, “I reject God,” but they rather say, “I am the best source of what I need for my life.  I am my own savior, my best chance to be who I want to be.  I have to do it.  I have to do it.”  And you add to that kind of egocentric focus, you add that you have to be sinless at the same time.  It seems that the majority of my religions in my early years was primarily how to avoid sin, which I mean by that, how not to make mistakes, and basically how to try my best to be the person that I knew God wanted me to be.  And I thought that was to imitate him, and I thought it was perfection.  But I don’t think that anymore.  I don’t want you to think that anymore.  

So today we celebrate the baptism of Jesus.  The interesting thing about Jesus is he is 100 percent human — 100 percent human.  I don't know how you can be 100 percent human and not struggle with weaknesses and make mistakes, and those are not necessarily sins like I was taught.  One thing I can say about Jesus, I know that he never, ever gave up on his Father.  He didn’t always want to do what his Father asked him to do, but he never, ever doubted his Father’s love for him or his Father’s call for him to be someone in the world that would be essential to the world’s wellbeing.  He knew he had a purpose.  He knew he was loved, and he was promised that he would be safe.  “Nothing will harm you, Son, nothing.”  And Jesus believed that.  He showed he believed that in the temptations in the desert when he was asked to test and, “See if God is really going to take care of you.  Jump off the parapet and see if angel catches you.”  Well, that was just a way of saying, “If you want to prove it, that means you must doubt it.”  He said, “No, I know I’m going to be safe.”  So what is it that Jesus had that we don’t have naturally?  What is it about him that is so different than we are in a sense, in terms of his humanity?  And that was his capacity to receive 100 percent of divinity, that he was free, by some mysterious way, as a full human being, to surrender 1,000 percent to a being living inside of him, guiding him, being his mentor, not explaining everything to him, not making him successful at everything he did.  

I’ve always thought, if I trusted in God and turned to him and said, “God, you do this through me,” it would be spectacular.  It’s be wonderful.  I’d be a miracle man.  Why wasn’t Jesus more successful with his disciples while he lived on this earth?  Why wasn’t he more successful with the temple?  Why did he get so cross ways with them?  Why didn’t he take his time and maybe take 20, 30, 40 years to slowly teach and make people aware of who he was and what he’s here to teach?  No, it worked out the way it worked out, and it wasn’t in any way, shape or form, one might say, perfect.  God, perfection, it’s such a — every time I say the word, I get a little chill, because it’s just the word that I used to use all the time for my goal, and now I don’t want to be perfect.  I want to be perfectly myself.  I want to be who I am, and I want to grow.  I know I can’t grow without mistakes and faults, and I know, if I’m going to do what Jesus did, if I’m going to allow God to enter into me — and I think it’s so interesting that he begins his public ministry by making a very dramatic statement that, “I am not doing this work on my own.”  That’s why I think he asked John to baptize him, because he said baptism is the symbol.  It is the celebration.  It is the thing we need to know and be aware of, that we have a God who, at some moment, will enter into our lives and be present to us in a way that is absolutely beyond our imagining.  Nothing is more important to me than teaching that one single doctrine of faith.  God dwells in his people.  He loves them.  He’s on their side.  He wants nothing other, for them, than to save them.  That’s what he wants, yet if you’re living in a world of perfection, like I was, and you keep thinking, “Well, the minute I fail,” what I was taught, and I don’t think it was intended this way, but it’s what I received, that God was upset and disgusted even and turned against me instantly, just because I did something that the law told me I shouldn’t do.  And often I felt like I really wasn’t free not to do it, but I did it anyway.  But that didn’t seem to change the teaching that they had given me, that it isn’t always my fault.  The actions I do are not always my fault.  Sometimes they’re just things that I’ve inherited from my ancestors.  Sometimes it’s the family of origin I entered into and taught me all kinds of half-truths and lies, or sometimes it’s the culture that just overwhelms me.  But the point I’m trying to make is this experience of God in us is never in any way, shape or form conditioned on our actions.  I wish somebody had taught me that.  

He is the God of mercy, we know, and he’s also the God of justice.  And I don’t know that we’ve been able to put those two things together, justice and mercy.  I sometimes think that I teach a God that is so sweet and so loving and so kind that he doesn’t give a darn about us doing anything bad.  He’s just crazy about us.  Well, that’s not anything like I want to teach.  No, he has a burning, burning desire to do something for you and for me.  That’s why he dwells inside of us.  He said it over and over and over again.  “I want to open your eyes so you see what’s true.  Get out of lies and half-truths.  I’ll show you what’s true.  I promise I will if you trust in me and go with me.”  And the other thing he said, “I want to free you from this thing that imprisons you, that keeps you from being the person I intended you to be.”  The pressures on you are incredible.  He knows that.  He knows how hard it is to be living an authentic, intentional life.  It is not easy, and it has to stand in the face of so many other people who we respect, perhaps, and who want things from us, and they ask us to live a certain way, because that’s what they think is best for us, and we have to say no, even though we deeply respect and love them.  It’s not easy, and then he promises us, “Look, I’ve created a world for you that is peaceful.  It is not a world of darkness.”  Darkness is in the world.  There’s darkness everywhere.  We just have to — we don’t have to look very far to find pain and suffering and violence and abuse.   Yeah, there’s pain, and there’s suffering and abuse, and there’s dark.  It makes people dark, but then there’s a way to be engaged in a world that is dark, where you have within you this light that frees you from the burdens of excessive shame or fear or anger.  There’s a way to be at peace when your world is just falling apart.  How do you do all that?  How does anybody do these things that go way beyond the basic human nature that we have? 

Human nature was never meant to be alone and work out of its own stuff.  That was the sin of Adam and Eve.  “Tell us what’s right and wrong, and we’ll take it from here.  And give us what we need, and we’ll be fine.”  Autonomy, that’s the great sin.  “I don’t need God.  I don’t want him.  What’s the use of turning to somebody who doesn’t necessarily make himself that clearly known to me?  He doesn’t answer my questions directly, and he’s telling me I need to trust in him living in me, guiding me, and I need to be watching for the signs that he’s giving me.”  Dreams, situation after situation, problems in relationships, are they just accidental problems that just creep in and mess our life up, or are they the signs?  Are they the work of a God that is living in us?  If you don’t believe that you have that kind of resonance inside of you, of truth and light and peace, you can’t try to achieve these goals, because human beings aren’t going to get there, because about the only way you can do it, at least the way I was taught, is you have to do everything perfectly — perfectly.  And then God’s pleased, and then everything starts working out for you.  It’s a really nice, kind of, justice system, and that’s where we started, with justice.  And what is justice?  We’ve turned justice into something it isn’t.  At least it was turned into something different for me, and it was I felt that, when justice was called for, it was, if somebody caused me pain, I had a right and even sometimes an obligation to cause them pain.  Justice is you hurt me; I’ll hurt you back.  You take life; I’ll take your life.  And that’s not the justice of God.  The justice of God is more that things have ramifications, and your actions have ramifications, and you need to face them. You need to look at them.  You need to own them.  You need to know what you’re doing, and then you need to change, struggle to change, ask for forgiveness and reconcile.  That’s justice.  

I know it happens to me all the time.  You’ll have somebody do something really lousy to you and treat you really rotten, and you don’t really — I always think that, when people do things, we think that they’re absolutely free not to, and it’s all about us.  At least that’s what happens to me.  But no, people do things they don’t mean to do.  Their actions are not necessarily who they really are.  Why do we say, if a person acts in a certain way, he is that?  A person who lies is a liar.  A person who murders is a murderer.  A person who has abused someone is an abuser.  Like that becomes that identity.  What is our identity?  What is it about us that God is so pleased with?   He said to his Son, “You’re my Son.  I think you’re wonderful.”  Isn’t he saying that to every single person?  Every time I baptize a child or an adult, I say something like that very clearly in the ritual.  You are God’s beloved son.  He lives inside of you.  He is your light.  He is your wisdom.  He is your direction.  He is all that, yet when I was growing up, I always felt like I lost that presence of God whenever my actions were against what the church or he or the law or whatever said, so I was doomed.  How can you grow without making mistakes?  And if a mistake makes you unacceptable to God, then you don’t have him inside of you, and the vicious cycle just goes round and round and round.  How can we possibly conceive of a God who’s created us, knows us inside and out, knows our ancestors, knows everything in us that would make us capable of doing the things that we need to do?  There’s some people that just can’t do certain things.  That’s just not in their ability.  People that can’t see or can’t walk or can’t talk, we don’t call that evil, because it’s not something they’re responsible for.  Well, can you say that same thing about certain things that people do instinctively or without thinking?  I think you can.  I think there’s a way for, when justice is seen as something that needs to be seen as fair and equal and should be resolved, you can also add to that a tremendous thing that God has also added to justice, and that’s mercy.  

Mercy, what is mercy?  The best words I can say to you about mercy is it’s a form of compassion and empathy — compassion and empathy.  What is compassion?  It’s being able to feel something that a person’s going through.  It kind of understands another person’s pain, and if justice has to do with inflicting pain, then we’ll be probably caught up in a lot of creating pain for people, thinking this is the right thing to do.  But mercy says no.  No, understand who they are.  Understand their weaknesses.  Know they’re like you.  Know how many times you would need someone to say to you, because you’ve done something intuitively or instinctively, without thinking, and hurting them.  Would you want them to turn around and say, “I know that wasn’t you.  I’m there for you.  I’m there with you.  I’m connected to you.  I love you”?  That’s compassion.  Empathy, same thing, only it goes a little deeper.  Empathy is knowing someone’s pain because you have directly experienced it, and you’re somehow experiencing it with them.  Experiencing pain with someone is a creative force that brings life into this world.  It’s called grace.  It’s called forgiveness, understanding, but how do we do this work without a conviction that there’s a divine force in us that is doing the work with us?  If you’re counting on your human nature to be perfect, you’re going to fail or become a really dangerous, egocentric person, but if you know somehow that there’s a force, and the force is going to combat every negative feeling you have because of perhaps the way you’ve been treated or the way you see the world unfolding in front of you, it’s going to say a contradictory message.  “No, this is all for you.  I love you.  I’m inside of you.  I’m not going to let anything harm you.  You’re safe.  You’re loved.  You have a purpose.”  

There’s no way someone can sit down with a chart and show you everything that’s happening in your life to say, “Can’t you see it?  It’s so obvious.”  No, it may never be obvious to you, but that’s the mystery of faith.  It’s believing in something, and the belief is so real and so strong that you are affected by it even though you can’t understand it.  That’s the life that God has called us to live.  It’s called a spiritual life.  

Father, the simplicity of your message, your love for us, your desire to be a part of us, your willingness to share your life and your wisdom with us slips through our fingers, I think, because people are trying too hard to make us into something that we’re not necessarily ready to be yet.  So give all those who lead others in their spiritual journey for patience and for wisdom and to ensure that the goals that they set do not simply create a world of oppression and depression but lead one into a life of great light.  And we ask this through Christ, our Lord, amen.