Geneva Presbyterian Church

Weekly Sermon

January 13, 2002 - "My Child, With Whom I am Well Pleased"

The Reverend Anne Benefield

Geneva Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 42:1-9,21 Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to himand he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased." Prayer: Lord, baptize us again with your Holy Spirit that we might open our minds to your thoughts, raise our voices in your words, and give our hands to do your work in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. There is a question that often comes to mind when the story of Jesus' baptism is read. "Why did Jesus get baptized?" If you have been wondering about that, you are in good company. Christians have been wondering about it for the past two thousand years. Since Jesus was without sin, did he go to John to be baptized for the remission of sin? Many answers have been given, but I think that one answer rings true to the gospel. The answer is in the words that God says at Jesus' baptism. There we will see the words that God spoke at Jesus' baptism. God said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased." This identification of Jesus by God includes two images, which until that moment had never been combined. The first phrase, "This is my Son," comes from Psalm 2:7. It is a phrase used to designate the Messiah, the anointed King. When God calls Jesus "Son", God is announcing that Jesus is the Messiah. The second phrase, "with whom I am well pleased," comes from Isaiah 42. It is a description of the "Suffering Servant." God's blessing of Jesus brings two elements together: Jesus is the Messiah, but his power will not be the power of the high and mighty. His power will be based on loving servanthood. Jesus puts himself on the side of the humble, the downtrodden, the sinner. It's an incredible idea-miraculous and healing. Jesus will let nothing separate us from him-not even sin! He is baptized, though he is sinless, because in this act he becomes one with us in all the pain of our sin. When Jesus is baptized to show his solidarity with us, the foundation is set for our adoption as children of God. After the resurrection, Jesus gives the disciples the great commission to go out into all the world and make disciples of all people and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That is when he invites all people to become children of God through him. Since we are adopted by God, God's blessing of Jesus becomes our blessing. We are loved by God. Jesus is pleasing to God. Are we pleasing to God? Is God pleased with us in thought, word, and deed? When we accept with joy the blessing of God, we also accept God's call to self-examination. Are our thoughts pleasing to God? Are we thinking good thoughts? The power of positive thinking has become well known, but my favorite prescription for positive thoughts comes from Philippians 4:8, where we are told to think on whatever is true and noble, right and pure, just and lovely. Unfortunately, we don't always focus on the good. Our thoughts can become cynical and unkind. We can find plenty of reasons for judging others harshly from the individual person whose attitudes irritate us to the nation we despise for the horrors they have visited upon us. The trouble is that when our thoughts are filled with hate we are sinning against God, our neighbors and ourselves. The Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhists, proclaims "my religion is kindness," and he has lived out those words in kindness and gentleness. The Communist Chinese have destroyed the culture of which he was the religious leader, but he carries no hatred of them. He says, "They've taken my home away from me; I will not allow them to conquer my heart with hatred as well." (John R. Hughes, Broken-Winged Flights: Forays into the Realm of Truth, Joy, & Freedom, 1998, p. 34) Are our words pleasing to God? Words, of course, are like toothpaste, once they're out it's impossible to get them back in. When I was growing up my mother used to quote Proverbs 16:24 which reads, "Pleasant words are like the honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body." I'm not always good at following that proverb, but I know it is true. We have a choice: We can share life-giving words or life-killing words. In the marketplace of life, we can share God's words of love and encouragement. There is an interesting story that Tony de Mello told in Heart of the Enlightened: "The devotee knelt to be initiated into discipleship. The guru whispered the sacred mantra into his ear, warning him not to reveal it to anyone. "'What will happen if I do?' asked the devotee. "Said the guru, 'Anyone to whom you reveal the mantra will be liberated from the bondage of ignorance and suffering, but you yourself will be excluded from discipleship and suffer damnation.' "No sooner had he heard those words than the devotee rushed to the marketplace, collected a large crowd around him, and repeated the sacred mantra for all to hear. "The disciples later reported this to the guru and demanded that the man be expelled from the monastery for his disobedience. "The guru smiled and said, 'He has no need of anything I can teach. His action has shown him to be a guru in his own right.'" [Tony de Mello, Heart of the Enlightened: A Book of Meditations, (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 40] The final question is: Are our deeds pleasing to God? So often, we try to separate our spiritual lives from our secular lives, but as Christians, we are called to live faithfully to the Word of God. We have to risk looking and feeling uncomfortable, trusting in God for the courage we need. David Niven returned to England from Hollywood to join the British Army in 1939. Since he had served in the army before, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and given a platoon. Just before Christmas they were sent to France . The troops were not happy. It was early in the war and many felt it was just a "phony war." For the troops, the worse part may have been that they were being commanded by a Hollywood actor! David Niven wrote, "The men were not mutinous-but they were certainly 40 of the least well-disposed characters I ever have been associated with, let alone been in command of." On Christmas Eve, they were given no leave because the unit might see action the next day. They were billeted in the shabby stables of a country farm. David Niven was in the habit of kneeling down beside his bed for a simple prayer every night. He wasn't sure what to do. If he knelt down to pray in front of the hostile group of men, they might see it as just one more act of their Hollywood actor lieutenant. On the other hand, Niven had been thinking all day about the Christ's coming into the world, and his heart simply would not let him go to bed without thanking God. Summoning up his courage, he knelt down to quietly pray in the barn. At first, there were snickers, but soon the laughter died away. When he finished, Niven looked sheepishly around the stable to see every man in the unit on his knees in prayer. [Paraphrased by Bob Beringer from The Guideposts Christmas Treasury, page 125, Guideposts Associates, Carmel, New York, 1972] Do we have the courage to be pleasing to God in our deeds? Are our words pleasing to God? Do our thought please God? Perhaps it all seems a little too hard to do. It seems like so much work to guard our thoughts against unkindness. Maybe it seems flowery to speak healing, supportive words. Surely, we'd feel silly kneeling to pray or even saying a prayer in a restaurant. But when we remember what Jesus Christ has done for us, it doesn't seem like too much. In one of his books, the Reverend Bob Beringer, the long-time pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Metuchen, says that years ago he remembers someone telling: "A modern parable of the Last Judgement. All the people on earth were gathered before Almighty God on a great plain, but they were an angry crowd. They mumbled and murmured about what right God had to judge their lives. There were black slaves who questioned how God could possibly understand the indignities and humiliation they had suffered at the hands of white oppressors. There were Jewish victims of the Holocaust who angrily protested God's ability to judge their lives without having lived through the horror of the gas chambers. On and on it went with the world's people questioning God's right to judge them until someone came up with an idea. Representatives from every group on earth would draw up a bill of particulars that God must fulfill before any judgement could take place. Here is what was included in that set of requirements for God: Let God be born as a poor Jew. Let God be rejected by the most important people of the time. Let God's only friends be those who are held in contempt by the world. Let God be betrayed by someone trusted. Let God be indicted and convicted on false charges in a court. Let God know torture, abandonment by friends, and the finality of death. "As this bill of particulars was read off to the assembled multitudes gathered on the plain, a great cheer went up. Then it grew strangely quiet as one by one of the world's people began to realize that God had already in Jesus Christ suffered every single requirement on that list! The great hold of Jesus Christ on the hearts of people lies simply in the fact that God has already walked in our human shoes, sat where we must sit, and experienced every form of suffering we can ever endure." [Robert A. Beringer, Something's Coming…Something Great! (Lima, Ohio: C.S.S. Publishing Co., Inc, 1992) p. 47-48.] God in Jesus Christ won't let anything separate us from him-not even sin. That's why he was baptized by John for the remission of sins, our sins, not his. Amen. think on whatever is true and noble, right and pure, just and lovely… Proverbs 16:24 "Pleasant words are like the honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body."