Baptism of Our Lord

a prison sermon

Mosaic in Saint John Bosco's church, Paris

About 12 years ago, I went on a solo, 48 hour silent retreat. It was during a time in my life when I was stretched very thin with work and kids and life. I was “driven”. I was all in all the time. I was a force to be reckoned with. And I was exhausted.

So I went to a Catholic retreat house outside town where I was matched up for spiritual direction with a tiny little nun named Sister Eileen. I remember thinking it an absurd idea to take spiritual direction from someone I just met.  Because, you know, I’m complicated….clearly way too complex for someone to “get me” in an hour long meeting.  Ends up I was right.  It didn’t take an hour for Sister Eileen to get me.  It took like, 5 minutes for her to get me.  See, I was hoping she’d give me work to do.  You know, spiritual practices…. Stations of the cross, contemplative prayer, saying the Our Father, lectio divina…instead, she looked me in the eye and said, Nadia.  I actually don’t think you should DO anything while you are here.  I want you to just walk the grounds and settle into the knowledge that God loves you totally apart from anything you do or don’t do.

I thought, man…that sounds awful. 

And I was right…because seriously, as soon as I tried, I just started crying.

For some reason, there was something painful for me about the idea of being loved completely apart from what I do or do not do.  It’s perhaps the thing we want most in life, and yet the possibility of it, stung.  I’m not even sure why. Maybe because it only highlighted how much being loved apart from what we do or don’t do is so rarely something we ever encounter. 

So here it is,  the new year…the time when we are resolving to improve ourselves, resolving and perhaps already failing to be more awesome, more beautiful, more disciplined…which is of course to say, more worthy of love, - so maybe this is a perfect time to hear about the day when Jesus was baptized in the Jordon.

         The story itself is amazing. We are told that like, basically everybody was flocking to the Jordan River to get baptized by John the Baptist. He’d been preaching about repentance and preparing the way of the Lord. And so people were coming in droves to get that fresh start. A mass of unwashed sinners all crowding around, waiting their turn.  Sun beating down, mosquitoes buzzing, children screaming. I imagine it was a serious crowd carrying with them all the things they had done and not done.  All their sins and betrayals and misdemeanors. The cases they caught and the ones for which they never got caught.

John’s arms had to have been tired from baptizing that many people.  Tired from preparing the crowd for the big thing God was about to be doing in their midst.  One person after another. Preparing that one for the Lord and then the next one for the Lord and then holy crap, the next one IS the Lord!

And then things get crazy - the heavens open, the spirit descends and God speaks. It’s like the heavens could not contain the pure Gospel love of God and it just kind of had to spill out all over everything.

You know the one thing I love most about the Baptism of our Lord text is not just that God the Father says “This is my son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased”, but that God says this - before Jesus had really done anything. Think about that.  God did not say “this is my son in whom I am well pleased because he has proved to me that he deserves it, he has quiet time with me each morning and always reads his Torah and because boy can he heal a leper.”  Nope. As far as we know Jesus hadn’t even done anything yet and he was called beloved. The one in whom the Father was well pleased.

That’s God for you. And I mean that literally.  That is God FOR YOU.

Because in your own baptism, God proclaims that in you his beloved children, God is also well pleased. In the waters of your baptism, God claimed and named you as God’s own. Whether it was as an infant or a youth or an adult. Whether your baptism happened in a church you can’t even remember, or in a river at Summer Camp or in a church you love or one that no longer allows you to take communion - your baptism, not matter the circumstance, was not an act of faith that you or someone else was giving to God – your baptism was most certainly an act of God upon you. And as is my tradition whenever preaching about baptism, here’s my standard offer: if you have never been baptized, come talk to me or Pastor Samm -  because you already belong to God. You are already God’s beloved.

I heard a story a few months back on the radio, about how experiments have been done where elementary school teachers were told at the beginning of the term that certain children in their classroom were gifted, regardless of how smart they actually were – and the study showed that by the end of the year those same kids were scoring off the charts from their peers.

They became what they were believed to be.

And you know what? God is like that.  God is like a teacher who has been tricked into thinking you are “gifted” and then treats you like you are special and then that’s what you end up being.

I was in a 12 step meeting the other day when one of the old guys, a guy who has been sober for like, 45 years said something so simple and so casual but something that made me shake my head and wonder what it would be like if we all really believed it.  As we were all discussing what our “higher power” is like, what the “God of our understanding” is like, he said “I don’t know about you, but my God is crazy about me”.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that. For most of my life I’ve heard the saying “God loves you”.  But it always feels more like an empty slogan like, don’t worry, be happy, or something. For someone to say, Nadia, God loves you, feels almost compulsory. Like God loves me kinda because he has to since I’m one of his kids.  But to say my God is crazy about me. I don't know.  That’s different.

That feels like the kind of pure Gospel love the heavens could not contain and it just kind of has to spill out all over everything. The kind of love you can walk around a Catholic retreat house being aware of, and maybe crying a little bit because of it. A love that is yours quite apart from what you do or don’t do. The kind of love that breaks your heart and then makes it bigger, A love that creates belovedness in the one it rests upon.

So, Beloveds… Be loved. Just sit and be loved. Even if it hurts.  Just sit and be loved and be the beloved of God. Because that is who you already are. Amen.