The following sermon was preached at saint benedict’s table on Sunday, January 12, 2020. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

I firmly believe that there are two kinds of people in this world. People who know that surprise parties are a bad idea, and monsters.

I’m not a fan of surprise parties or surprises in general.

I like things that I can control and understand.  I like to know what I can expect.

It makes me feel safe.

Surprises, however, are a part of life.

Sometimes, people surprise me by stepping outside of societal expectations and behaving in ways I never would have imagined they would.

Sometimes this is horrifying – think of the stories this week of politicians behaving in ways that resulted in death and threats of war.

But sometimes it’s delightful – think of Harry and Megan announcing that they are going to chart their own paths and no longer live according to the rules set out for members of the British royal family.

And sometimes these sorts of disappointments and delights happen on a much quieter level as well, I am disappointed by the hurtful words of a friend, I am surprised by the extreme generosity of a stranger.

I like to think I can control things in ways that allow me to predict the future but I can’t.

So it’s a good thing that it’s not my job to predict the future.

It was Isaiah’s job though.  It was a large part of John the Baptist’s too. Both of them spoke of things that were going to happen in the future, with no scientifically measurable way of proving that they were indeed correct.

And I think both of them were right in their predictions, and, both of them were surprised by how things turned out.  Jesus was exactly who John the Baptist said he was, and Jesus was nothing like what John the Baptist expected.

Isaiah and John saw some of what was to come and did their best to tell the people about it, but they didn’t see everything.

In the chapters leading up to today’s gospel reading in Matthew we get the stories of Jesus’ birth and very early years and then by chapter 3 Jesus is an adult. A huge swath of his life has gone by and the stories of what happened are not recorded.

Chapter 3 opens with John the Baptist doing what he does best, shouting prophecies and predictions about the future at everyone he meets.  Just before our reading begins he says,

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (11-12)

John doesn’t say, “I think, it’s possible, Jesus might,” he doesn’t hedge his bets at all.   One who is more powerful than I is coming.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

N.T Wright invites us to imagine this scene as if we were attending a huge rock concert and John is the concert manager “whipping us into excitement at the soloist who is going to appear. ‘He’s coming!’ ‘He’s more powerful than me!’ ‘He will give you God’s wind and God’s fire, not just water! He’ll sort you out – he’ll clean out the mess – he’ll clean out God’s farm so only the good wheat is left.’ We’re all on our feet expecting a great leader, perhaps the living God himself, sweeping into the hall with a great explosion, a blaze of light and colour, transforming everything with a single blow.” (21)

John is so certain. His vision of the future is so clear.  And he’s right. And yet, when he meets Jesus, he is also utterly surprised.

When John meets Jesus, Jesus has come to be baptized. This makes no sense. John is surprised and so he questions Jesus saying “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, you should baptize me.”  But Jesus says “No, my kingdom doesn’t work exactly the way you thought it would.  I want you to baptize me.”

And so John consents. He knows who Jesus is, and he is beginning to see that Jesus will always be full of surprises.

Now this is a favourite story of mine so some of you will have heard it before, but I hope you don’t mind hearing it again. A friend of mine had the amazing opportunity to take a graduate course taught by Archbishop Desmund Tutu at Candler School of Theology.

The Archbishop began the course by addressing the students in a very respectful manner saying, “Welcome, I greet you and want to acknowledge the level of training and experience that you all bring into this room as senior students. You’ve all had your theology, biblical studies, exegesis, ethics, pastoral care and so on. I really want to honour that. But I also want to tell you right now at the beginning of the course, that you know nothing.”

And there was this long pause. As an accomplished public speaker, Desmond Tutu knows the power of a pause.  And then he said, “You know nothing, if you do not know that you are beloved. If you do not know that you are beloved of God, in your bone marrow, then you have nothing to offer your people. If you don’t hear your name spoken as beloved and you don’t soak in that, then you have nothing of real value to offer people.”

Then the Arch – because that’s what they called him – the Arch continued, “I am going to spend the next 14 weeks telling you stories of how I was named as beloved and how God loved me into life and how God loved me into ministry and how that experience empowered me.” And as my friend listened he had the sense that he was standing on holy ground. Now, I have never had the opportunity to hear Archbishop Tutu speak, but I have been told that it is a powerful experience because he speaks out of the core of his soul.

Then the Archbishop said, “I just want you to know that this is not a sentimental thing, we’re not talking about love and being beloved as a sentimental thing, we’re talking about a force that can change the world.”

In Desmond Tutu’s case, understanding he was God’s beloved gave him the strength to help overturn apartheid in South Africa. There is nothing wishy washy or sentimental about that.

You know nothing if you do not know that you are beloved of God, in your bone marrow, in the very core of who you are, and if you know this, you can change the world.

At his baptism, God publicly declares that Jesus’ name is beloved child. Jesus, hears that, claims that identity, and that may be one of the first clues in the gospels that Jesus is not like the rest of us.

Because most of us struggle to claim the truth that we are also God’s beloved. We’ve been given so many other names – names like failure, not good enough, or unloveable.  We’ve been given so many negative names that it can be almost impossible to hear God’s voice saying, “You are my beloved child and in you I am well pleased.”

It’s true. Each one of us is God’s beloved child, but be gentle with yourself if that’s difficult to hear and claim as true.

Not everyone who was in the class that day with my friend heard the Arch’s words and knew they were true either. One young woman put up her hand and asked, “but what about sin, and personal responsibility and all that kind of stuff? Surely that impacts how God feels about us?”

And Tutu smiled at her compassionately and said, “My dear, you have no idea how low God’s standards actually are.”

Years later, I was in a conference room at the U of W listening to James Finley and he was speaking on similar things. Some of you may be familiar with his work because Alana Levandoski has done several collaborations with him.

James said that coming to understand that we are God’s beloved children is one of the more important and difficult things that we can do but when we do come to understand ourselves as beloved, we will naturally begin to look around us at all the hurting and struggling people in the world and we will refuse to allow any of them to be left behind. We will want everyone to know that they are God’s beloved as well.

The beloved of God isn’t an exclusive club that only a few of us get to join.  There’s no roped off VIP section in God’s community. We’re all invited to the party, we just don’t all know it yet. Or we know we’ve been invited but for a whole host of reasons we can’t believe it’s true.

But a lot of people do treat it like an exclusive club.  Once they realize they’re in, they suddenly want to create all sorts of lists of who’s out. As if, as a guest at God’s party, they have the right to edit the guest list.  I think James Finley would suggest that this is because they have caught a glimpse of their own belovedness, but it hasn’t fully sunk into their bone marrow.

Because God says everyone who wants to come is welcome to come in. It’s God’s party and so it’s not our place as guests to keep anyone who wants to come from joining in the fun.  In fact, we should model God’s hospitality by inviting people to join the party. We should want anyone to be left out.

This call to refuse to leave anyone out can be found in the words of the baptismal vows of the Anglican church of Canada.

During the baptismal liturgy, the person being baptized is asked a number of questions. Two of those questions really stuck with me this week.

The first is, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

This week, when the world is filled with stories of “us vs them” and talk of war, may we all seek to be people who work for justice and peace among all people. And may we learn to respect the dignity of every human being. Every human being. No one is left out, no one excluded.

No one.

And the second question is this: Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation and respect, sustain, and renew the life of the earth?

This week, with fires raging in Australia that are causing intense damage to the physical landscape and the people and animals that live on that land,  I admit that I feel both overwhelmed and helpless. But I also feel a sense of renewed resolve that I need to find ways to reach out and help those who are suffering and also to acknowledge that climate change is real, that my daily choices play a role in what’s happening, and that I can make changes that are in line with those baptismal vows. Changes that will help me to do a better job of safeguarding the integrity of God’s creation.

I want to say a couple more things about these baptismal vows.

The first, is that if you’re at all interested in learning more about baptism or confirmation then I’d really love for you to come talk to me.

The second, is that while I have highlighted two of the vows that are important to me, I haven’t actually told you my favourite part of the liturgy.

After each one of those questions, the candidate for baptism needs to provide an answer.  And the answer, if they want to be baptized is this:

“I will, with God’s help.”

Embedded right in the liturgy is the understanding that all of these promises are impossible to fulfill on our own. Embedded right in the liturgy is the understanding that none of us are perfect.

In fact, there is a question included in the liturgy about sin that says, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.

Whenever you fall into sin. Failure is expected.

That’s a pretty low standard indeed.

Which you may find surprising, but I believe that’s exactly how God works.  Because God understands how human beings work, and God loves us.

Which is really good news.

In the name of our God who names and claims each one of us as beloved. Amen.