Vox
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Click here to view the full sermon video for January 9, 2022 entitled, "Vox."
As a general rule, it’s not considered a good thing when people hear voices. And while that may hold true in the strictly psychiatric sense, the fact is that most of us live with all kinds of voices every day. We live with the external voices of the people we live with and the friends that we spend time with. We live with the voices of the news media, the opinions of talking heads, and the political spin doctors. When it comes to the pandemic we live with the voices of the CDC and public health officials and everyone who has something so say about their guidance and recommendations. And we live with the voices of advertisers and businesses that want our time, our attention and most of all our money. Each voice telling us a story about who we are and what we should or shouldn’t be doing. Then, there are the voices that we have internalized, the things that we have heard so early and so often that we just can’t seem to shake them. Voices that compliment our strengths, or more likely the voices that highlight all our weaknesses and shortcomings. We live with the voice of our parents’ wisdom, their advice and their criticism. We live with the voice of a teacher, or a coach who either encouraged or discouraged us. It’s truly remarkable how much power such voices can have. The child who was told at an early age that they’d never be a strong reader, or good at math who continues to hear that voice well into their adulthood. The athlete who learned how to do more than they imagined they could because someone told them they could, believed they could and then carries that belief with them to do things that might otherwise feel impossible. To make matters more complicated the voices that we live with never seem to agree. They are competing with each other for our hearts and our souls.
A friend who works in the field of psychiatry likes to tell the story of a client who would wince anytime he offered a kind word, whether it was a compliment on something she was wearing, or an observation that praised something she had done. What he intended as an encouraging word appeared to cause her extreme discomfort. Such were the voices that she was living with that told her continually and on a loop that there was nothing good to be said about her. Which raises the question, who do we listen to? Or, more importantly who do we believe?
One of the remarkable things that we have witnessed over the past five years is the erosion of truth. Many of the external voices that we are subject to have discovered that falsehoods can be fed to us as alternative facts. They have come to capitalize on a form of dissembling gaslighting that calls into question things that we can clearly see and muddy the waters such that truth itself becomes discredited. The intended result is to leave us wondering who, if anyone, can be believed. What are the voices we can trust?
In our reading this morning we hear two voices, neither of which belong to Jesus. The first is that of John the Baptist, the wild-eyed desert prophet whom Luke tells us is cousin to Jesus. From John we hear once again the familiar refrain of repentance that we heard during the season of Advent. The powerful voice of John in the wilderness has the people wondering if he might be the Messiah, the promised savior who will deliver them from the heavy hand of the occupying Roman authority. We’re told they were expectant, and John met many of their expectations of what a Messiah might sound like with his strong words and his unequivocal words of judgment. But John insists that there is one more powerful coming, one whose sandal he isn’t worth to untie, one who will winnow and burn with unquenchable fire. Yikes!
We know who he’s talking about, of course. Afterall, Luke is telling us the good news about Jesus. He spent two chapters unfolding his origin story in Bethlehem with a manger, and shepherds and angels. And if all we did was take John’s word for it, we might be a little reluctant to meet and embrace the grown-up Jesus; this too holy to touch carrier of the winnowing fork who baptizes with fire. Thankfully, we have more than just John’s word to go on. If anything, the voice of John sets up what comes next.
Because what comes next, according to Luke, is that when all the people had been baptized, Jesus was baptized too. Jesus was baptized right along with everyone else. Rather than being some elevated, untouchable God man, what we see is what has been promised from the beginning Jesus taking his place right alongside us, with us. And in doing so, the waters of John’s baptism of repentance are transformed into a baptism not just for the forgiveness of sins but a baptism that opens heaven itself to reveal the essential truth that we have to hear. Because when Jesus throws his lot in with us the voice that speaks from the heavens isn’t just for him, it is for us too. What this voice says is, “you are mine.” This voice claims us as children of the divine, sons and daughter. But more than that, this voice calls us beloved. This voice challenges every other external and internal voice that would have us believe that we are unlovable, that would catalog the litany of reasons why no one will or should love us. This voice puts that question to rest by calling us beloved. A word that when broken down is also a promise that we will be loved. You are a child of God, the voice says, who is and always will be loved. And if that weren’t enough, the voice adds, “with you I am well pleased.”
Can we just stop for a second and appreciate those words? They aren’t spoken to Jesus at the end, or even the middle. They aren’t spoken to him as the stone is rolled from his tomb, or while he’s hanging on a Roman cross. They aren’t spoken after he tells a particularly meaningful parable about the realm of God’s active presence in the world, or when a hillside full of people are miraculously fed, or as people are healed and demons cast out. No. The voice from the heavens declares that it is well pleased with Jesus before he’s done any of the things that he will be remembered for and celebrated by the rest of the world. The pleasure of God isn’t dependent upon what he does or doesn’t do, it is the baseline and starting point for everything else that will come.
Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about all the ways we are programmed by all these other voices to strive in what she calls the great human worthiness competition, ranking ourselves in comparison to others. In such a competition, to feel good about ourselves we have to feel above average. If someone looks at our life and our work and says that it’s average, we are devastated. The striving requires that we rank ourselves above others if we want to have any value. To feel beautiful, we need to see the people around us as less beautiful. And our appreciation of our lives and what we have are undermined if we see someone who has more, more approval, more money, more success, more stuff.
When we hear that voice in the waters of baptism claim us as sons and daughters of the Most High God. When we hear that voice call us beloved. When we hear that voice say -before we can strive for and achieve anything- that it is already well-pleased with us. When we listen to that voice, then we begin to see the fulfillment of what John was trying to say. By taking his place with us, and in turn having us take our place with him, Jesus begins to winnow. He winnows every external or internal voice that would have us believe anything less than this fundamental and unchanging truth: that we are beloved children with whom God is well-pleased. Every voice that would gaslight us and sow doubt and undermine who we are and what we have to offer is winnowed in the waters of baptism and burned like so much chaff in the unquenchable fire of God’s persistent and unrelenting love that will not let us go.
Recently, Lynne Hinton, the Executive Director of the New Mexico Conference of Churches, shared a story about the one thing she wanted of her beloved grandmother’s things after she died. Her siblings and cousins claimed the quilts, the pots and pans, the sewing machine, her well-worn bible. But Lynne the only thing Lynne wanted was a long-handled hand mirror that had been part of a set with a brush and comb that we lost long ago. It wasn’t all that remarkable, and she couldn’t ever remember her grandmother having much use for it. She never wore much makeup or checked herself in the mirror. But she wanted it, even without knowing why for several years. And then one day it struck her. “I have never thought of myself as being special or important,” she writes. “In fact, I would have to say that I have spent much of my life feeling inferior, insignificant, not quite good enough. But as I stared at myself in that old and well-worn mirror, I realized that I never felt that way when I was with my grandmother. She always made me feel special and significant and beautiful. She always told me that I could do anything, that I could be anybody…I wanted to keep with me for as long as I live my grandmother’s image of me. I have always longed to see myself as she saw me.”
This is why we return to the waters of our baptism, not just on this Sunday when we reaffirm the promise of that covenant, but every Sunday when we are called not just to confess our sins, but to hear once again the voice that claims us, calls us beloved and says it is already well-pleased with us. We come to the waters of our baptism to see and know ourselves as God has always seen and known us. Listening for the only voice that can always be trusted to tell us the truth.