God is Still Speaking

Matthew 3:13-17; Psalm 29

Cate was an 8th grader when she came to talk to me about getting baptized. She had been baptized as an infant in the Episcopal church, which, of course, meant a lot to her parents. They were supportive of her taking her own spiritual path – obviously, she had found her way into a Baptist youth group. But they didn’t want anything to diminish the meaning of her first baptism, so she found herself in a spiritual/emotional tug-of-war with her parents. She wanted help explaining to them why she was choosing baptism now. She found the words to explain to me that her sprinkling as an infant had been THEIR choice and the holy dunking she was after was HER choosing to take responsibility for her own relationship with God. Cate was right in line developmentally as a thoughtful adolescent who was coming into her own beliefs and a more personal faith system.[1] I assured her that she didn’t have to denounce her infant baptism to receive a believer’s baptism. In fact, she could reassure her parents that they had set her on this path long ago. What they had wanted for her – an authentic, personal faith relationship in response to God’s love – she was now CHOOSING for herself. She was choosing God. She didn’t NEED to be baptized again, but she CHOSE to make her own statement of faith in that church community. And so, Cate was baptized on a Sunday morning. Her parents were there to support her decision, and she was able to move through the wilderness of adolescence buoyed by that physical, watery, spiritual experience.

The gospel of Matthew omits Jesus’ adolescence and young adulthood. Thomas Bohache says this gives us permission to forgive ourselves for the wandering we might have done in the wilderness of those years, or of the ways we were mis-named, or misunderstood by others in our early lives. God is at work, loving us into learning the truth about ourselves.[2] If this sermon has a thesis statement, that is it.

 Jesus comes walking down the bank of the Jordan one day and no one is more surprised to see him than his cousin John. John has been living in the wilderness, gathering followers who join his movement, and baptizing anyone who bears the fruit of true repentance.  Inasmuch, John says, “What are you doing here?” when Jesus presents himself for baptism. Something is amiss. Shouldn’t Jesus be baptizing him, not the other way around? I imagine John shaking his head and scratching his lumberjack beard.   Perhaps Jesus is asking for a physically immersive, spiritual experience to mark this moment. Perhaps Jesus came to the Jordan that day to signal to everyone that he was ready to take the mantle of the movement John was running; to take it over and fulfill God’s dream of restoring the world. Jesus assures him that this is the way it should be. No, Jesus didn’t have to be baptized, if we only see baptism as a sign of repentance. But if we see it as a sign of coming out to himself and the world as the Messiah for the people, then it makes sense why the Son of God  submitted himself to John at the river that day.  Yes, Jesus CHOSE to be baptized, to be outed publicly, and to lay claim to his own identity.[3] That day, he submitted himself to God’s call.

I believe that God was speaking even before God’s voice broke through the heavens, in the person of John. John recognized what God was doing and what Jesus was capable of doing. The look in John’s eyes, the strength of his hands, the words he said – in all of it God was speaking, certifying Jesus’ rank and calling in this movement.

God often speaks through the least likely places and people. And thank God for them, those people who speak words of blessing and help us find our way in God’s plan – who baptize us in love and purpose.  On the most challenging days ahead, Jesus would be able to recall when his robes dripped with the baptism of John, someone who believed in what God was doing, who believed in him. The memory of this experience would take him across many difficult thresholds.

But the words, spoken most powerfully and alive with purpose, that would sustain him through the darkest wilderness, were God’s. Words that named Jesus as the beloved child of God. God has spoken this belovedness over all creation, reiterated powerfully in the words of the 29th Psalm. God’s voice thunders over the waters, just as it did at creation, baptizing the whole earth in love and purpose. Everything that came into existence in our world goes back to a generosity that acted as it did out of sheer love.[4]

John Claypool authored a little book titled, God is an Amateur – a provocative title for sure. It contains eight sermons, the first of which he called, “Amateurism, God and Ourselves.” Walter Shurden calls it, “vintage Claypool as he returns… to the first chapter of Genesis, as he did so often, to talk…about who God is and who we are… An amateur, Claypool insisted, had nothing to do with incompetence or lack of professionalism,” but the word “originally meant someone who did something for the pure love of doing it.” That’s who God is - an amateur.  God acted in creation out of sheer love. God gave Jesus to the world out of sheer love. God couldn’t help but call Jesus into ministry, knowing what it would cost, because of unrelenting love. Amateurs. “That’s what God wants for each of us, to choose freely, to live creatively, to experience the delight of generosity.”[5]

But this life will run us over sometimes. People we love and trust will disappoint us. Words will break our hearts. But God is at work loving us back to ourselves,  speaking the truth about us into the universe, whispering our belovedness into our ears.

In the words of the great theologian, Gracie Allen, never put a period where God has placed a comma.  That Amateur is always still at work, still speaking.

In the 1970s, when Craig Barnes was about 16 years old and his brother was in college, their parents got divorced. Their mother moved to Dallas to live with her sister. His father, a pastor, left their church (maybe he was forced?) in Long Island, and then, just disappeared leaving Craig and his brother to fend for themselves. There would be no more Monday morning bible verses assigned to them to memorize. No more Saturday nights to be dismissed from the table if they couldn’t recite them immediately when their father pointed at them. By their teen years they had memorized a lot of the Bible, not out of love for the sacred words. Craig’s brother dropped out of college and took a construction job in order to help Craig finish high school. Craig took a job in the afternoons at a gas station. “Together we got by,” he says.  Since they lived in the church’s parsonage, when their father left his post, it was up to them to move their entire family’s belongings out of the house. He doesn’t recall what happened to most of it, just that it felt like they were boxing up everything they had known. Preoccupied with survival, they didn’t talk much about what had happened to them. The following Christmas, the brothers decided to go to Dallas to see their mother, but they didn’t have money to travel, so they did what kids did in the 70s, they set out hitchhiking.

By the time they got to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, they were on the side of I-81 in a blizzard. The cars passing became fewer and fewer. After a couple of hours, a state trooper pulled over, not to lecture them, but who said the interstate had been closed for 2 hours. He said after he cleared a wreck a couple of miles up the road, he would be back to take them to a diner that was still open. On the side of the road, in a blizzard, after months of hustling to survive, the boys began to talk about their situation. Craig says it didn’t go very well after he mentioned that they were basically disposable to the people who were supposed to love them. They tried other topics of conversation to pass the time, but when those dried up, Craig’s brother pointed at him and said, “Romans 8:28!” He says they spent much of that night asking each other to recite the verses of the Bible they had memorized but never truly heard. Then Craig heard himself reciting Isaiah 43: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you… Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” By the time he finished the passage, he was crying. It strikes me how those words from Isaiah describe the scene at the Jordan River with Jesus and John.  That night, a passage about the unrelenting love of God and the belovedness that God names in his children, Craig says it was the turning point in his life. Craig Barnes is the President Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary.

God was still speaking to Craig… even in a blizzard of abandonment and pain.

The voice that helped me understand the belovedness God feels for each of us was Henri Nouwen. I close with a quote from his book, Life of the Beloved:

The world tells you many lies about who you are… Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.”

Amen.

[1] Fowler, James A, Stages of Faith

[2] Bohache, Thomas, Queer Bible Commentary

[3] Chakoian, Christine, Christian Century, In the Lectionary for Jan 11 2025

[4] Shurden, Watler, Christian Ethics Today, God is an Amateur…Reading Claypool #5, Spring 2021

[5] Shurden, Watler, Christian Ethics Today, God is an Amateur…Reading Claypool #5, Spring 2021