Matthew 3:13-17
“Well Pleased”
In a story in the Upper Room Devotional a number of years ago a woman from Ohio named Lois Wilson wrote: “On the first day of each community college art class I taught, I would ask the students to write a brief answer to the question: “Who are you?”
Later, I was eager to read their responses.”
One of the answers I’ve never forgotten was ‘I am a child of God.’”
Lois continued, “This young woman’s response left me in awe that she was so grounded in her faith.
It also led me to question myself: ‘Would I have replied this way?’”
How about you?
Would you reply this way?
Life is so very short, is it not?
I was born in 1968 and say I live until 2056—that’s not bad, right?
But that’s it.
Now, you may be thinking, “I came along a little bit later than you, and so I have a few more years,” or “I came along a bit earlier so I probably have fewer years ahead of me than you.”
But it doesn’t make a huge difference in the whole scheme of things.
We all have a limited amount of time and our lives go by very, very fast.
It’s like a flash in the pan.
And throughout our lives, throughout these short years the question that most of us spend our lives trying to answer, according to Henry Nouewen, whether we know it or not, is: “Who am I?”
You might be sitting here thinking, “That’s not true for me.”
And maybe it’s not, but I bet many of us who do this aren’t even aware of it.
One answer we might give to the question “Who am I?” is “I am what I do.”
I think a lot of us answer this question this way, especially in our hyper-competitive world.
For instance, when I have a little success in life that might cause me to feel good about myself, but when I fail I might start feeling low.
Then, as I get older, I might say to myself, “I can’t do a whole lot anymore, but look at what I did in the past.”
“Look what I built or look at my children…look, look, look at what I did.”
(pause)
Another way we might answer the question of “Who am I” is “I am what other people say about me.”
A lot of us do this when we are kids and it can get us into all sorts of trouble, but we do it as adults as well, don’t we?...
…and what other people say about us can be VERY powerful.
Sometimes it can be the most important thing.
For instance, if people have good things to say about me, I can walk around feeling good, feeling free.
But when someone starts talking behind my back, or when somebody starts saying negative things about me, I might start feeling sad, depressed, less than.
I think most of us can relate to this on some level.
Think about it, have you ever gotten like a hundred compliments about something, but then, say, one person doesn’t like what you are doing or how you are doing it—they are upset with you for some reason and that’s the only thing you can remember—it’s the only thing you can focus on and it ruins just about everything.
This has happened to me throughout my life.
If someone says something mean or negative or hurtful to me in the morning, it can ruin my entire day.
Or, if it’s on a Thursday or Friday it can ruin my entire weekend.
(Pause)
Another answer we might give in order to try and figure out who we are is: “I am what I have.”
We might say, “I have a good background, or good parents, or a good education, or good health or I have a lot of material possessions.”
But the problem with this is that as soon as I lose any of it—say a family member dies or my health starts to go down or I lose my money I can fall into darkness.
I can slip into despair.
As human beings, a lot of our energy can go into these claims: “I am what I do,” “I am what other people say about me,” and “I am what I have.”
And this puts our lives, our happiness, and our identities at the mercy of our highs and lows.
And then, we might obsess over staying above a certain line, we may obsess over surviving.
And then we die.
And when we are dead, after a while, no one talks about us, not enough to matter to us, anyway.
We don’t have material things anymore and the ups and downs of surviving is not surviving at all.
And what little life we had ends up being nothing in the end.
(pause)
But this whole thing, all this stuff I’ve been talking about is wrong!
It’s a lie.
This is NOT who you are; this is NOT who I am!
And this lie is at the root of why we get caught up in violence and destruction.
It’s the root of war, misery and selfishness.
It’s why we have a hard time loving God, our neighbors and ourselves!
In our Gospel Lesson for this morning, the time has come for Jesus to come to Nazareth in Galilee to be baptized by John in the Jordan.
And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.
And a voice came from heaven: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
That’s who Jesus was.
That was his identity.
Jesus heard God’s voice and he believed it and he clung to that voice as he lived out his life.
And there were times when people praised him, and there were times when people rejected him.
When he entered Jerusalem at the beginning of his last week on earth people shouted, “Hosanna!”
But by the end of that week, people screamed, “Crucify him!”
Then they did it.
They nailed him to a cross!
But through it all, Jesus held on to the TRUTH—He is God’s Son, God loves him and with him, God is well pleased!
And because Jesus believed this it enabled him to live triumphantly in a world that kept rejecting him, or praising him, or laughing at him, or spitting on him.
Who he was didn’t depend on what he did, or what other people said about him, or what he had.
He was God’s Son, who God loves.
And God was pleased with him.
And that is all that mattered.
And if there is nothing else you or I hear this morning, let’s hear this: “You are God’s son, you are God’s daughter.
God loves you.
God is pleased with you.”
We have to hear this, don’t we?
We have to hear it, not so much with our ears, but with our hearts—through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and THAT is what changes our lives!
“I have loved you with an everlasting love,” God says in Jeremiah.
“I have engraved your name on the palm of my hands,” God says in Isaiah.
And in Psalm 139 God says, “I created your inmost being; I knit you together in my mother’s womb.”
“I love you.
You are mine and I am yours.”
You belong to me and no one can snatch you out of my hands!”
Have you heard this?
Do you hear this?
Do you know this?
Because it’s true—You are a beloved child of God!
And yes, the other voices come in to try and steal this from us...try to steal the identity God bestows upon us.
The other voices come in and try and confuse us.
But the truth is that we are loved by God!
And that is what we affirm at our baptism.
If we believe this, if we hold onto it, if we continue to nurture this our lives will become more and more like the life of Christ.
And we will be rejected at times, and we will be praised at other times and we will still have loses but we will live as people who are no longer searching for our identity—no longer trying to answer the question of “Who am I?”
We will know who and whose we are.
In 1st John it says, “We love because God first loved us.”
And the great struggle in life…
…and I’m not saying it will be easy because it’s not, but the great struggle in life is to claim that love---that God first loves us—no matter who we are, no matter what we are, no matter where we are.
Every time we are tempted to feel bitter, to lash out, to feel sorry for ourselves, to feel like a loser or a no one can we go back and say: “No! I am loved by God. That is who I am and no one can take that away”?
I pray we can.
It’s not easy, but I think it is the key to being able to live—to really live and to be able to fully love God and love others.
That’s my goal.
I’m not there, but it’s my goal.
Will you join me?
Praise God.
Amen.
