Sunday January 11th, 2026 Worship

This week, Emily and I were watching TV, when James Earl Jones appeared as one of the episode guest stars. From Darth Vader to Mufasa, James Earl Jones has a very distinctive voice. For some reason, it was always a voice like his or Morgan Freeman’s that I imagined as God’s voice coming from the heavens when I hear the story of Jesus’ baptism. I want there to be some dramatic flair to it, as the sky opens and the Spirit descends like a dove, and this deep voice proclaims, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17). But, I also know that if I were to say that in one of my Seminary papers, I would have received a note of W.I.T.T. in red marker in the margins. Where in the text?
Something that I had never realized growing up was that I had always assumed that God’s voice was this deep, male voice and only ever sounded like these specific actors or the man who narrated the voice of God for the Concordia Christmas concerts. Perhaps it’s because of the way that God had been portrayed in movies and church plays, but it wasn’t until I was in college that my thinking began to change when my campus pastor articulated that God’s voice didn’t just have to sound like that. This interpretation of how God sounds isn’t Biblical; we don’t know what God sounds like. And, when we assume this is the only way that God speaks to us, we miss out on so many of the ways that God is communicating with us. It’s one of the many assumptions which gets made that narrows down our understanding of what God is up to in the world, which is particularly troubling in a week when the story of Jesus’ baptism is expanding our view of what God is doing and who God is for.
The reality of Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’ baptism is much more nuanced than we might imagine, and not quite as dramatic as my brain tries to make it, but it still holds significant importance for how we relate to our faith and our own identities today. Instead of this great scene laid out before the all people, Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t even give any indication as to who all is witnessing this parting of the clouds. Can all those gathered see or is this just a special moment between God and Jesus as he comes up out of the water? The “This is my Son…” part makes it a bit confusing, especially since Matthew’s Gospel really only notes that Jesus saw the heavens open and the Spirit descend (Matthew 3: 16-17). One view puts this solely as an event for Jesus, wherein he understands more about his own identity and Belovedness, while the other view, in a sense, sets up the justification for how he is able to do everything that he is about to and why people should trust him. Either way, the story of baptism is one that is inherently grounded in our identities, and who we understand ourselves to be in relation to God.
No matter who specifically witnessed these events, there are several truths that are affirmed for us within the story. The first is this recognition of God’s voice being active. It is God’s voice that speaks over the waters of creation, that can bring about destruction, that is used in our claiming in our baptisms, and calls us forward from that point on. These are acts of intentionality; God doesn’t just do these things at random. This is an important foundation for what Luke writes about in Acts, when Peter baptizes the Centurion, claiming through this action that God shows no partiality between Gentiles and Jews (Acts 10: 34-43). We often forget this fact in our world today, wanting to say that some are worthy of love while others are not because of their nationality, skin-color, primary language, sexuality, gender identity, or socio-economic status. We want God to be for us, not for us and those people over there, when that is not the reality that God has shown throughout our Scriptural narrative.
So, we get this truth about who God is, but the other truth that is affirmed for us relates to what happens for us in baptism. As I’ve said before, baptism is an outward claiming of our already inward reality. Jesus’ baptism really highlights that for us, because so often we want to say that people are only loved by God after they have been baptized. Again, it tries to divide people into two groups, us and them, the worthy and the not-worthy. Yet, when we get this story right after the Christmas story, it is clear to see the ways that God has already claimed Jesus and called him Beloved long before he’s a 30-year-old wading into the waters of the Jordan. It is from his identity as the Beloved of God that Jesus is able to bring about the Good News, but we cannot ignore all the angels that appeared to the people in his life before and after his birth, proclaiming the good news of great joy! It wasn’t like God just started loving him from the point of his baptism on! Jesus’ Belovedness doesn’t become true the moment he is baptized, that is just the moment that it is made more clear to himself and those around him.
His baptism is also the event which kickstarts his ministry which we hear about in the Gospels. It is a sign that Jesus enters into this ministry with us; we become co-workers in the Gospel. He is undergoing the same ritual that everyone else does through this rite of baptism, even going so far as to go to the same place as everyone else, instead of going to a set apart place and being baptized in secret. And, because it is from his baptism onward that we hear about Jesus’ ministry, it stands to be noted that God proclaims being “well-pleased” (Matthew 3: 17b) with Jesus before any of his official acts of ministry have begun.
When we think about our own lives, I’m willing to say then that it is the very act of our creation, our existence, that is well-pleasing to God, not the output that we are able to produce. We are called Beloved by God without having to prove our worth to God or anyone else. This story of Jesus’ baptism today then is one that empowers us to live into the ways that we have been created by God, because, by leaning into our identity as the Beloved, we are able to move closer to thriving. But what we do is not what determines our Belovedness in the eyes of God; that has already been established.
If God has created us all as the Beloved and desires for creation to thrive, we need to look at why we want to strip that identity from so many people. Perhaps it is because we want to feel special and we feel we cannot do that if we share this identity with everyone. We want so much to justify all of our violence and hatred, but what about that is Christlike? How do we forget that when Jesus comes out of the waters of the Jordan, it marks a new chapter for us moving forward. Yet we easily turn our backs on that when it is no longer convenient. We forget the Belovedness that belongs to all people, as we watch violence tear apart communities in Minneapolis, Portland, Venezuela, Syria, and all the other places the news doesn’t deem worthy of reporting; saying those people weren’t like us. They deserved it.
This is the same narrative that God has been pushing back against throughout Scripture, including in today’s story of Jesus’ baptism and Peter’s teaching and baptism of the Centurion and his family. I don’t know how to change this tendency of our world. But, I can continue to stand up here and proclaim these truths as we understand them, hoping that they begin to sink into our hearts and minds for us to recall when the world tells us differently. And, I know that as Lutherans, we often want to sit back and be quiet, but our world is calling for us to continue to step forward and share these truths. In love for God and the world that God created, as we keep slowly pushing the world toward God’s sense of justice. The road is long and the competing voices are loud, but together we can find where God is calling to us from our own identity as Beloveds. Pronounced over us in our births and reminded to us again through the waters of baptism. “[You are my child], the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17)