Meg Peery McLaughlin
A Life Worth Living: Measuring Up
January 19, 2025
Matthew 3: 13-17
Your bulletin says our text is Matthew 3: 1-17, and that is the text,
But I cannot read it without adding the next phrase in the story, from Matthew 4.
It’s kind of like how there are some names where you have to say the whole name to make I sound right. Do you know what I mean? I think I realized this sometime in middle school. I had a friend Amy Jack. I could not call her just Amy. It wasn’t complete. I find do that here with the Bozymski family, but I think that’s just because Bozymski is so fun to say.
I noticed it even yesterday. I came home and told Jarrett I’d seen Whitney Wade at Trader Joe’s. He said, you know Whitney married John Martin like 20 years ago, she doesn’t go by that name anymore. Sorry, Whitney, some words you just have to speak together. A reading from Matthew 3, and the first part of chapter 4.
As we approach this text, let us pray:
Prepare our hearts, O Lord, to receive your word.
Silence in us any voice but your own,
That in hearing, we may deeply, deeply trust what you say to us. Amen.
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.
Goodness, I love you people and how seriously you all take the gospel.
After my last sermon in this Life Worth Living series,
a dear saint among you asked for a follow up conversation.
He heard me say that health and wealth aren’t the tell-tale signs of a good life—
that we are to be living lives of love.
He was on board, completely, but he wondered—
how do we know when we are doing that?
What’s the measuring stick for a life of love? What does love look like?
We had a really beautiful conversation. I was humbled by the privilege of it.
I was flying high on the Spirit, until words I’d said written on this man’s notebook
You see, as we spoke, he was jotting down notes,
and so was I, it was a great back and forth.
But right there written in pen at the top of his legal pad
were the words VULNERABILITY and SUFFERING.
I mean I know how those words got there—
we’d spoken about how love breaks our hearts open to risk,
it makes us keenly aware of the fragility of life. Love is a raw thing.
And loving the world – not the world as God dreams it to be – but the world as it is – puts us smack dab in the middle of the distance between the two—
And that distance can be gapingly wide and that can, well, it can hurt.
It is still a life worth living, one full of love, but not without what comes with it-
those two glaring words underlined in black ball point pen: vulnerability and suffering.
But. . . great, I thought.
A beloved parishioner came to me asking about love
and I sent him away with . . . . what?
Nothing but a description of wilderness.
—
This week is a wilderness one. On the national stage, but also here.
In a couple hours, these pews will be filled with teenagers and parents gathering to support their friends, Kelly, and Miles and Cole whose dad died too soon. Grief like this is wilderness terrain.
Whenever entrusted with the task of speaking words into something as senseless as death that comes too soon my mind often swims to a sermon by William Sloan Coffin, preached after his own son Alex died.
He says the one thing that should never be said when someone dies is “It is the will of God.” For never do we know enough to say that. And I remember how he would put it this way: When Drue died, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break. And that God is not around for anyone’s protection, but God is there for everyone’s unending support. Minimum protection. Maximum support.
I suppose I say this because if the measure of a life worth living is to avoid the wilderness, nobody will ever measure up.
I think this must be why Matthew tells the story of Jesus baptism the way he does.
Jesus comes to his cousin John,
and after a bit of convincing
John baptizes Jesus in the muddy waters of the Jordan Rivers.
And it is this beautiful scene:
the heavens open,
the Spirit descends as a dove, (which is why we have bird on this font),
and God’s voice booms out with love:
This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.
The lectionary reading ends here,
like it’s all tied up with a bow.
But right after God speaks these words into the world
Jesus is led into the wilderness.
Mark’s Gospel says it even more forcible – the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness – as in picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dragged him into the wilderness.
I don’t think we can leave that out.
Amy Jack. Whitney Wade. They go together.
As biblical scholar Karoline Lewis says: baptism assumes wilderness.
The baptized cannot stick their heads in the sand in this life.
Sunday people become Monday people, especially this Monday people.
Those who are loved, go out into the world to love
—with all it’s vulnerability and suffering.
—
There is a lot of scholarly talk about why Jesus is baptized—
It’s not just John who wonders why Jesus of all people needs a baptism.
Our Lord doesn’t need any washing clean, he is sinless.
But baptism is more than just a cleansing of sin.
Baptism also marks your inclusion into a community.
When we baptized Emily and Graham we affirmed that we are inextricably knit together, committed to one another for the long haul.
So it is with Jesus.
Jesus is baptized because he is un-equiv- uh-kley with us.
He is Emmanuel – God with us.
It is baptism as solidarity.
Every gospel writer show us that Jesus dives headlong into muddy water,
as a willing embrace of our messy humanity.
And not just that, but every Gospel writer lets us hear the voice,
the voice from heaven declaring:
This is my beloved one, with whom I am well pleased.
Those words are not just for Jesus.
Those words echo for all of God’s children; every baptism, everywhere, every time.
—
Many of my formative growing up years in church were spent in a small congregation on the outskirts of Charlotte, NC. And I cannot think of worship there without thinking of a particular voice.
A child’s voice.
The voice of Samuel Williams.
Every single Sunday when the congregation prayed the Lord’s prayer,
Samuel prayed it too.
At the time this started, Samuel couldn’t read yet, but as you know,
that prayer is one we learn by heart, often from an early age.
But when Samuel prayed the prayer, he was always at least a few measures behind.
His voice was a consistent echo to the congregation’s prayer.
And though he was a child, Samuel’s voice was really really loud.
You might think that, even as a child, if you noticed you were behind,
you’d stop as to not be embarrassed.
Or you might think that a mother or father would try to help get you on beat.
But that’s never what happened.
Sunday after Sunday that voice reverberated for everyone to hear.
—
I know that the voice of God can get buried
the voice of our belovedness and belonging can be hard to hear or hard to trust;
when so many other voices try to tell us who we are,
or who we’re not, what we’re worth.
And it’s not just external voices, but those anxious ones from within.
So we take our legal pads and ask our questions about measuring up.
But I am telling you that God’s voice has reverb.
Enough power and echo to last you through any
and every wilderness.
It will keep booming out the truth.
It is a voice we can hear the echo of not just in the moment we are at that font,
but every next measure of lives after.
You are my beloved one. With you I am well pleased.
In his book Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World,
Henri Nouwen says it this way:
“I want you to hear that voice. It comes from a very deep place.
And it says I love you with an everlasting love.
I have knitted you in your mother’s womb.
I’ve written your name in the palm of my hand
and I hold you in the shade of my embrace.
You belong to Me and I belong to you.
Trust that you are the beloved. That is who you truly are.”
Church, this truth is the core of the gospel. This voice tells the truth.
This love is what makes all other loving possible.
And no, it will not protect us from vulnerability or suffering,
but God’s voice will speak this truth to us in every single wilderness
it will reverberate for all time.