Baptism of Christ, January 13, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

Beloved

Lucy Forster-Smith
Senior Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Isaiah 43:1–7
Luke 3:15–17, 21–22

Why did Jesus become human when he could have stayed God? Why was he baptized with us when he could have stayed on the banks of the Jordan and supervised? . . . Because he loves us, and because he has come to lead us through the waters of life and death into life eternal.

Barbara Brown Taylor

People have been in exile for a very long time. Whether the exile is political or social or religious, as it was with the Israelites who were captive in Babylon, or whether the exile is more contemporary—people who cannot bear to look a brother in the eye, who won’t pick up the phone when they see the caller ID is their sister; people who find themselves addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, video games, or shopping—exile, is a state of being far from home, far from our truest selves. It is very uncomfortable and very real.

Our scripture lesson from Isaiah is from a part of the book of Isaiah that is assumed to be spoken by a different Isaiah than is heard in chapters 1–39. In chapter 40 we hear the words “Comfort, comfort my people. . . . Speak tenderly to Jerusalem . . . . that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.” These words come to a people in exile who have been devasted by the Babylonian armies, who have lived on the banks of the Euphrates River in an alien culture for decades. The community’s heart has been stabbed by devastating warfare, with little hope for much new or different to come to them. After the words of comfort and release in chapter 40, we find in chapter 42 reminders of the ways the community strayed from the path. We hear how they trusted in false gods and turned their back on the one God—Yahweh. The searingly honest recitation tells of how totally messed up the people of Israel were and how their straying ways led them right to the mouth of the lion, the seat of fury of a God who would judge their actions. “It is not accidental,” says Paul Hanson, “that one of the harshest descriptions of divine judgment in the Bible precedes one of scripture’s purest descriptions of love.”

An aspect of our liberal Protestant tradition is that we steer clear of judgment or calling one another out on places where we may be misguided or simply wrong. I think it serves us well to err on the side of grace rather than the mantle of absolutes. We all have had moments in our lives when we’ve missed the mark or messed up in a relationship; times when an innocent comment or action has veered off course and suddenly you find yourself in over your head. We miss the mark. We carry Protestant guilt, but if we preachers here at Fourth Church started preaching some heavy-handed, damning message, I believe we would miss the fullness of the gospel. Yet judgment and holding people accountable is part of the story; the exile part of the story is not only in the prophets of old but also in the New Testament.

John the Baptist, in today’s Gospel reading, certainly was no Casper Milktoast in his leveling message of winnowing forks and baptism by fire and in his earlier fighting words when he calls those coming to be baptized a brood of vipers who, if they didn’t change their hearts, would burn like chaff in unquenchable fire. Of course it would be easy to make John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, out as the hard-hitting cousin, the one with the shrill message, the one who preached grim justice, warned people of the rough lot that was ahead if they didn’t clean up their act. By contrast, we could see cousin Jesus as the sweet little Jesus boy, the Lamb of God, the one who preached forgiveness, grace, nonstop love, taking up the cause of the outcast and accepting us no matter. Neither is the full picture, of course, because God’s love and God’s saving light, the path that we are called to tread, is one of imponderable mystery and paradox. If we look at our lives, we realize that suffering is often a prelude to healing; brokenness is a condition to restoring wholeness; tragedy gives rise to hope; and powerlessness awakens a new and singing power.

God loves the exiled ones so terribly much, and the conversation that arises from the Isaiah text between God and the people is one that is radically relational, one that is honest to a tee. The relationship between God and the people insists on full accounting for the injustices, disrespectful behavior, spitting in the eye of God, missing the mark—that is sin, exile. I picture these people living day-to-day existence. All their dreams, hopes, love, and their very future is assumed to be gone. Sure, they still make love; still birth children; still see the sky clustered with tiny birds; they still hold a fractal of hope, but the threat of a final negation is real. Indeed, they are in exile. And into this defeated reality come words that are so tender, so intimate, so awakening to their tired spirits that we almost weep with them as we hear them. That next word after the scathing words of Isaiah 42 is a word of love, pure and simple. And these words are spoken to a people who wonder if they have a future.

But it was not only those in captivity in Babylon who longed for a word of grace, a word honestly spoken from those who deeply cared about their lives. In Luke’s Gospel, the people waited at the Jordan River to be baptized. Jesus went down to the river to be baptized along with the whole sorry lot of the others. Their exile was also political and social, and certainly they longed for the washing balm of the river. So Jesus lined up with other people and went into the Jordan like the rest of them. But in our Gospel lesson from Luke, it is the aftermath of Jesus’ baptism in which the shining, generous light shone. Heavens opened; a dove came down and a voice: “You are the Beloved; in you I am well pleased.” Like the gracious balm that arrived for those in Babylon, God shows such generous light, shimmering really, in this man, in the light of the world. But it doesn’t end there. That same voice claims each of us as we wade into the waters of baptism and rise to new life. We become the light in the city, the light right now. And God’s word is “You are my beloved ones—when you are in exile, when you are in waters over your head; when you walk through the fires, you shall not be burned. Do not fear. I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine. You are precious in my sight. I love you. I created you for my glory.”

There are many instances in our world where some situation of exile, of being in over our heads, turns around. We often encounter those who figure their life is pretty much washed up and they don’t have a chance. This past week there was a clip on the evening news about Cyntoia Brown, a young woman who had been enslaved to sexual trafficking as a teenager. She had committed a murder, killed a man who bought her for sex. She was tried as an adult at age sixteen and was given a fifty-year sentence. She has served fifteen years of that sentence while being a model prisoner, receiving a college degree. The governor of Tennessee has agreed to commute her sentence. Talk about someone who must have had little hope for her future. Talk about someone whose life was difficult, to say the least. Talk about someone who is in exile, who was a victim of a system of sex trafficking, who saw no way out but to murder someone. And talk about the power of imagination to stay the course, to find a way, and to have a new path ahead. There is something of grace, of the glorious light that shines in epiphany, the heavens opening and the Spirit descending on the world. A child’s face is caressed by a God who won’t let us go. And this is the work of Jesus, who came into the world to be plunged into the rapids of life, who refuses to stand apart from us, who is named as beloved and who prays for us, for this world and for the light to shine!

If the human community is called to anything, it is to trust that God in Jesus has been on the ground, in the water, through the fire, with us. If the human community is called to be anything, it is to be the life-bearing, glory-infused, beloved ones of God. It is to awaken to the mighty forces of God that are a ready force for good in our lives. Even in the most depleted times, in moments when we know nothing but the dimness of exile, we abandon fear, because we have not been abandoned.

Where in your life are you facing exile in this world, from God, or in your heart? What are the things in your life that seem to have no grounds for happening to you or another person? The promise at the core of our lives is that God arrives and God speaks words of grace, of light dawning.

Theologian Paul Tillich linked the grace of God to the providential surprise of grace that erupts from the least-expected places, times, and situations and finds us. Tillich makes this rather shocking statement: “It would be better to refuse God and the church and the Bible than to accept them without grace. For if we accept without grace, we do so in the state of separation.” He goes on, “We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace, . . . . and it certainly does not happen if we try to force it.” Then as if Paul Tillich, the brilliant theologian, can’t contain himself, he says,

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life. . . . It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades. . . . Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. . . . Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”(Paul Tillich, the sermon “You Are Accepted”)

This faith thing is serious business, indeed, just as any relationship we commit to is a serious undertaking. And the eyes light on another, the beloved ones in our lives, the ones who beyond all knowing are those we would die a thousand deaths for, this intimate hallowed relationship approximates the face-to-face loving relationship of the One who calls you by name, who loves you, who is ready to accompany you from all of the small and large exiles of your life for the sake of simply loving you, yes you. For you are the beloved one indeed, and God sees you with eyes washed by God’s grace. Amen and Amen.