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What God Really Thinks of You

What God Really Thinks of You

Last updated on: October 14, 2015 at 8:00 pm by Amy Butler

What God Really Thinks of You 2015-10-14T20:00:02-04:00 Amy Butler

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What God Really Thinks of You

Matthew 3:13-17

I’m so glad you’re here this morning! Today we begin several weeks of talking about identity, values, and mission of our congregation—this church. If you’re newer to Calvary, these next few weeks will be a great time to listen and think and learn about who this congregation is. But we start the conversation today, on Baptism of Jesus Sunday, with a little more personal exploration, asking who we are—each one of us—as we begin talking about who we are together.

In this congregation we are a big mix of many different traditions. For example, let’s take a quick poll. How many of you grew up Baptist? How many some other kind of Christian tradition? How many didn’t grow up in church at all?

And coming from different backgrounds as we do, the blessing we had earlier in the service might be new to some of us. As our congregation is Baptist in tradition, we don’t baptize babies—we wait until you’re old enough to be dunked willingly. But we do bless our children as the gifts they are to us, as we did Fin and Cormic Scheiber this morning. You might have noticed that as we blessed them we also announced their names publicly. We do that because we know that they are beginning a journey to live into their full gift and potential as beloved, created children of God, and to do that, they have to know who they are. They have to know their names, the names that they’re given by their parents and most of all, the names they’re assigned by God. They have to know their names, and we have to know ours, too.

Fin and Cormic probably won’t remember this little naming and blessing, but that’s okay. Like the rest of us, they’ve begun a life-long process of knowing their names and claiming their identities as beloved children of God. And all of us try our whole lives long to hear our true names—to truly know in the deepest part of who we are that we are each beloved children of God.

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A few years ago I went to a wedding shower at which all the guests walked in the door and someone slapped a nametag on our backs. As an icebreaker we had to talk with folks and try to find out who our “match” was at the party. I was delighted to finally find my match, Brad Pitt, and claim my nametag, which read, of course, “Angelina Jolie.” (I’ve always wanted to be Angelina Jolie, and that got worse when I visited Cambodia and Angkor Wat a few years ago and tried to relive scenes from her movie Tomb Raider.) Anyway, as you might imagine, I was pretty excited that my nametag said “Angelina Jolie,” so I promptly peeled it off the back of my shirt and slapped it on the front.en of God—in a world that assigns all kinds of other names to us.

Later that day I was meeting a friend for dinner, and all throughout the dinner I thought I saw the waitress looking at me funny. Finally, as she brought the check to our table she said, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I keep wondering: is that really your name?”

I still had the nametag on.

No, sadly, Angelina Jolie is not really my name. But I, along with every other human being on this planet, am struggling to remember my name, because to do what you’re meant to do, to be who you’re meant to be on this journey of life, you have to know who you are.

Jesus had this struggle, too. I mean, our gospel accounts of his life and ministry don’t really detail too many periods of internal angst for Jesus the Christ, but we’re here 2000 years after he lived and there’s been a lot of textual redaction in the meantime. That is, the text has been cleaned up to make him more holy than he was. I have to believe he did have crises of identity, questions of who he was in the larger picture. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have truly shared our human experience, would he?

One of the things that makes the Christian faith unique in the ranks of world religions is that at Christmas we declare that “God is with us”…that God stepped into human skin and lived a human life. This idea of God taking on the human experience is not without controversy. Here’s a little church history lesson for you.

When Constantine became emperor of the Roman Empire and made Christianity the state religion, he believed unity of the Church was important to the political strength of the empire. So, in 325 he called a meeting, the Council at Nicea, to settle disputes about the nature of Christ. After long meetings, the council finally issued the Nicene Creed, agreeing that Jesus was both fully man and fully God, with the same divine nature as the God.

But there was still ongoing controversy, so on October 8, 451, the largest of all church councils was convened at Chalcedon. Five or six hundred bishops of the early church attended, representing many conflicting views. After much wrangling, they adopted a new creed which re-affirmed both the divine and human natures of Christ recognized at Nicea and also stated that the two natures of Christ were “without confusion, without conversion, without severance, and without division.” So, that pretty much settled everything.

Riiiiight.

All of that to say that our desperate yet conflicted need to understand Jesus as human and yet divine has been going on for a long, long time. And no matter how we try to hang words around it, we long for a God who knows what it’s like to be us, because human life is hard and we struggle to know who we really are and who we’re really meant to be.

Jesus did, too.

Some of us come to organized religion, not out of obligation, but out of desperation, searching for God in the middle of life’s questions and pain.

Jesus did, too.

Some of us go out into the world and hear conflicting messages, names others assign us, and we find it hard to remember who we really are.

Jesus did, too.

In today’s gospel passage Jesus walked down a dusty Galilean road, right at the beginning of his ministry, wondering about all these things. And when he got to the river he ran smack into all of those people who had been listening to John the Baptist, asking questions of their own. Here’s the kind of people they were: unable to find comfort or assurance in traditional religion, convinced that the religious teachings of the day could not address their questions, desperate enough to trek to the desert to listen to a man many thought was crazy, confused about who they were in a society and religious climate riddled with conflicting messages. They weren’t sure they were going to be able to find the answers they needed in the messages they heard at the temple or from their Roman governmental leaders; they needed, like we do, to know who they were.

And then along came Jesus.

He waded into the muddy water and asked John the Baptist to dunk him under, to bless him and name him. And that’s all so strange and beautiful. What kind of God starts a message to the world by getting dunked under the water like everybody else, only to come up dripping, sputtering, rubbing the silt out of his eyes? A “God with skin on,” as one of my mentors used to say. A God who knows what it’s like to be us, who wonders like we do: “Who am I and what am I meant to do with my life?”

It was into this context of questions, with everyone wondering what was going on and where and when God might ever appear to clear things up, that the first glimmer of light started to shine. Just as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens opened and the Spirit of God descended on Jesus like a dove. The Gospel of Matthew says the Spirit “alighted” on him. And Jesus—and everyone standing there in the sticky mud of the Jordan river bank, heard the voice from heaven answering his question. “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Beloved. That was his name. That was the name God gave him. And that is what God has named you, too—you and you and you and me and you. Beloved.

Fred Craddock is one of the most gifted preachers living in America today. A few years ago I heard him tell this story:

He and his wife were just starting out—he was a new and young preacher. They didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t take vacations frequently, so it was quite a treat when they had an opportunity to slip away to the mountains of Tennessee for a few quiet days in a remote cabin.

One day they went into the little town nearby to have lunch and they saw in the local diner an elderly man going from table to table greeting diners. Eventually the man made his way to their table and, learning that Fred was a pastor, he insisted on telling him a story.

If you happen to be a pastor you will know that public knowledge of your vocation often leads to the very strangest conversations. Craddock, truth be told, didn’t really want to hear this man’s story—he was on vacation! But he sighed and made room for the man to sit down and tell his story.

The man said he had been born a few miles from that very spot, right on the other side of the mountain. There was great shame in his childhood, he said, because his mother had not been married when he was born. His family struggled with backbreaking poverty. He learned young to stay to himself at school and to work hard at drowning the insults that were sure to come his way. A big part of his childhood was hearing, over and over, the word, “Bastard!” whispered under folks’ breath whenever he and his mother walked by.

Because of this pain, this little boy stayed as far out of the limelight as he could muster. He went to school and came home and that was about it.

When he was about twelve, word began to spread that there was a revival in town. A big tent was set up right on the edge of town and everyone was talking about what was going on there. Apparently there was a preacher visiting who could spin words like you have never heard before.

He lived a lonely life, that boy, and as word of this new preacher trickled gradually his way, the boy began to get curious about the new entertainment in town. Finally the boy decided he had to hear the preacher, so he snuck into the revival one night, almost undercover, and he found that the stories were true. The preacher left all of them sitting on the edge of their seats, just waiting for what he had to say next.

The boy came back again the next night. And the next. But he was always careful to slip in late, sit in the back, duck down in the pew to remain unnoticed, and always leave early, before anyone could question his right to be in church or throw any insult in his direction.

On the last night of the revival the boy was so caught up in the service that he forgot to slip out early. When the service was over he turned to leave and suddenly he felt a big hand on his shoulder. As he whipped around, he saw the face of the preacher.

The preacher said, “Who are you, son? You look familiar! Who is your father?”

The boy’s heart sank at the dreaded question, but then—perhaps seeing the boy’s panic—the preacher went on:

“Wait a minute. I know who you are. The family resemblance is unmistakable. You are a beloved child of God!

With that he patted the boy on the back and added, “That’s quite an inheritance, son. You go now…and claim it!”

“You know,” that man told Fred and his wife at the end of his story, “that moment when I heard what God thought of me…that changed my life.” Then he thanked Fred and his wife for listening and moved on to visit at another table.

As they finished up their lunch, laughing again at the strange experiences preachers everywhere have—even at lunch at a diner in the mountains of Tennessee—their waitress stopped by the table. “Do you know who that man is?” she asked. No, they didn’t. She explained that he was Ben Hooper, a local legend. He had been raised right there in their little town, risen out of poverty to become a lawyer, and then elected to two consecutive terms as governor of the state of Tennessee.

Out in this cold, hard world we hear messages every single day, messages telling us who we are. Not good enough, a failure, disappointing, unhappy, incapable of loving or being loved.

But those voices are not calling us by our real names.

If we could ever pause, even for just a moment, to notice the divine spark of life and love placed in each one of us by our Creator, we might begin to discover who we are—who we really are. And once we know who we really are, we’re bound to do audacious things, like follow a star…or start to believe a little, tiny bit…or whisper a prayer…or love someone we couldn’t love before…or forgive, even ourselves. Knowing who we are, who we really are, and who God has created us to be is where we begin today.

In a moment, Pastor Edgar and I will walk through the congregation holding bowls of water. You’re invited to touch the water and remember, as Jesus did that day in the muddy water of the Jordan river, what God really thinks of you: that you are a precious, beloved child of God. That’s your name. And what a name it is. Now, go claim it.

Amen.

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What God Really Thinks of You

What God Really Thinks of You

Matthew 3:13-17

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