CELEBRATING:
SERMONS
25 - Jan 2009
A sermon delivered by Rev. Gordon How
Jan 25, 2009 - "We Long to Be Valued"
Tuesday's inauguration ceremony was an event of meaning
and hope. It will be long remembered by those who saw
it. There were three highlights for me: Obama's speech,
the instrumental piece (which gives rise to us singing
Hymn 353 this morning) and the benediction prayer (which
I have adapted for our use today). The Inauguration
and all the celebration which surrounded it affirmed
their new President with the spoken words but more so
with a mood and an emotional outpouring from millions.
Affirmation! Being valued by pothers and by God. We
all want to be affirmed and valued … but often
it isn't that way.
A novice cowboy was riding on the open range when,
for the first time in his life, he saw buffalo - two
of them, in fact. He rode up to them, got off his horse,
examined the creatures, and said: "You are the
ugliest, dirtiest, smelliest animals I have ever seen!"
Then he got on his horse and rode away. Whereupon the
one buffalo turned to the other and said, "I thought
out here we were never to hear a discouraging word."
The "range where the deer and the antelope play"
is not the only place we hear discouraging words. Too
often we hear them in our own homes. In the film Wild
Man Blues, Woody Allen's jazz group tours Europe. The
film closes with Woody Allen sitting around the kitchen
table with his elderly parents. Woody, already into
his sixties himself, is talking about how well he and
his group were received in Europe, but his mother doesn't
seem to hear a word he says. "I always wanted you
to be a pharmacist," she says overtop of his words,
and then something to the effect, "If you had gone
into pharmacy, you could have been somebody."
We recently had dinner with a couple, and the woman
told us that her parents wanted her to be a doctor.
She already had three degrees, but her parents were
very disappointed in her. Some of us could relate similar
stories. Perhaps you recall bringing home a report card
and waiting for your parents' approval, like a hearty
"Well done, my child!" Some of us, of course,
waited for the other shoe to drop, the inevitable "What
happened here in mathematics? If you put more effort
into it, you could bring that mark up!"
My aunt thought that following high school her son
should have hired on with the Magee grocery store and
work his way up - a little like Stephen Leacock's John
Smith character in Literary Lapses. He hired on with
a dry-goods establishment and over the course of his
career worked his way up from the ribbon counter to
the collar counter, from the collar counter to the gents'
pants counter, and from the gents' pants to the gents'
fancy shirting. And then, as he got older, they moved
him down again from the gents' fancy shirting to the
gents' pants, and so on, until he was back at the ribbon
counter. That's what my aunt's suggestion sounded like
to my cousin, because he'd had already read Leacock.
The new church year began with the first Sunday of
Advent, and our relationship with Jesus began with his
birth in Bethlehem, and now in Epiphany season we celebrate
another beginning, the beginning of Jesus' ministry,
marked by his baptism, which we sang about and read
this morning. Jesus came to the River Jordan to request
baptism at the hands of John the Baptist, and after
Jesus and John had negotiated which one of them was
humbler than the other, Matthew's version of the story
makes it feel like one of those moments of epiphany
when the heavenly and the earthly meet.
Three years ago, I presided at the grave-side service
of a woman who was buried in a cemetery out in the Valley.
It was a day like last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
when the fog was heavy. The cemetery was located in
a low-lying area, and the fog-enshrouded location lent
an ethereal quality that was breath-taking, almost supernatural.
I imagine a similar ambience at the River Jordan, for
"...when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came
up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened
to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like
a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven
said, 'This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well
pleased.'" Affirmation!
There are echoes of ancient Scripture in this New
Testament account, echoes avoiding the wrath of God;
and about the Spirit brooding over primeval chaos to
bring order and light: and about God's Spirit brooding
over Jesus, to bring about a whole new creation. There
are also implied connections to the dove, a symbolic
figure that appeared soon after creation, when Noah
sent it on a mission to ascertain whether the floods
of judgment had come to an end. The dove returned to
Noah's ark with an olive branch in its beak and thereafter
was a symbol of peace and reconciliation. The descending
dove may also represent an anointing, the bestowal of
a difficult but God-given and God-blessed task. Affirmation!
Then there is the mysterious Voice-from-heaven speaking.
All of this together - the heavens opening, the Spirit
descending like a dove, and the Voice speaking from
above - is Matthew's vivid way of hinting at a reality
beyond description! What moves me, however, is not so
much the heavens, the dove, the Voice - all of this
is common biblical language and imagery - but the message
given to Jesus: "This is my Son, the Beloved, with
whom I am well pleased."
This is the ultimate affirmation! We all long to be
valued - and nothing could be sweeter than to know that
God loves you and is pleased with you. Jesus must have
left his baptism with serenity and strength of purpose,
because he had been given this stamp of Divine approval.
But what about Divine dis-approval? There were certainly
times in the history of God's people when God was displeased
with them. When King David arranged to have Uriah killed,
so that he could have Bathsheba for himself, it displeased
God greatly! It wasn't the only time David displeased
God. The Scriptures tell us that God is displeased when
we take pleasure in our enemy's misfortune! And they
tell us that God is displeased when justice is lacking.
Jonah was quite displeased himself with the way his
tour of Nineveh turned out, but then God wasn't all
that pleased with Jonah's behaviour. So it's not as
if God is always pleased with everything and everyone.
It's possible to displease God, and I was wondering
if it would have been possible for Jesus to displease
God. I imagine that if Jesus had caved in to one of
the temptations he faced in the wilderness, that may
have given God a measure of displeasure. It's a hypothetical
question, I know, but there were certainly others who
were displeased with Jesus. There were many who were
displeased when Jesus sat down to dine with a tax collector.
There were some who were displeased when they discovered
that Jesus' disciples disregarded the rules of fasting.
Some were displeased that Jesus' disciples disregarded
the Sabbath.
Some were so displeased with Jesus that they conspired
to kill him! At one point the chief priests and Pharisees
were displeased with Jesus because he had hurt their
feelings! And they were so displeased with Jesus that
they devised all sorts of tests to trap him, and so
displeased that they put plans in place to arrest him.
It's a good thing God was pleased with Jesus, because
he sure encountered a lot of displeasure from others.
Roland Rolheiser, a Catholic theologian, has remarked
that both conservative and liberal Christians these
days hold up a God whose primary facial expression is
a frown. The God-of-conservatives looks at the world
and sees moral laxity, sexual promiscuity, and liberal
attitudes, and He is very displeased! The God-of-liberals
looks at the world and sees injustice, political in-correctness,
and conservative fixed-mindedness, and She is very displeased!
Both wear a frown on their face. Both exude an aura
of disapproval.
No doubt there is much for God to frown upon, like
selfishness, greed, and unfaithfulness, but neither
the God-of-conservatives nor the God-of-liberals lines
up very well with the God portrayed at Jesus' baptism.
The Voice-from-heaven does not say, "You are my
beloved conservative; with your old-fashioned ways I
am well pleased." The Voice-from-heaven does not
say, "You are my beloved liberal; with your quickness
to adopt the current morality, I am well pleased."
No more than the Voice-from-heaven says, "You are
my beloved workaholic; with your sixty-hour work-week,
I am well pleased."
What is interesting about the story of Jesus' baptism
is that God smiled Her love and blessing upon Jesus
even before Jesus had done anything, even before Jesus
had any idea of what God had in store for him, even
before Jesus had told a single story. Even before Jesus
had healed a single person, or spoken with compassion
to a person in need, God said, "This is my Son,
the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
God was pleased with Jesus, delighted with him! And
God expressed His pleasure with almost childlike delight.
It reminds me of a grandfather who entered a toy shop
just before Christmas, looked around at the various
displays, but returned time and again to a counter featuring
a train set. Finally he said to the clerk, "I'll
take one." The clerk smiled and said, "Your
grandson will love it." "Oh, he will, will
he? Then I'll take two," said the man.
Jesus' baptismal experience revealed God's delight
in him, but God does not reserve a shower of approval
for one child alone; God loves all of God's children
and finds pleasure and delight in all of us. This is
the God of which another New Testament writer said,
"How great is the love (God) has lavished on us,
that we should be called children of God! And that is
what we are! ... Dear friends, now we are children of
God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.
But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him....
For this is the message which you have heard from the
beginning, that we should love one another...."
Raymond Carver, an American short story writer and
poet, died rather early, after a hard life, including
alcoholism. Near the end of his life he found love and
started to pull things together, but then he was hit
with lung cancer. Before he died he wrote in a poem:
"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did. And what did I want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."
What a gift! We long for that sense of affirmation.
We long to be valued. In one of the Christmas cards
we received this year, a mother conveyed her gratitude
for my part in helping to shape a church experience
that was positive for her daughter. Like many of us,
their family has been a part of various churches, some
of them negative experiences. She was very grateful
of her church; it was affirming to read her comments.
Thomas Merton first entered a monastery in 1948, and
for the first decade or more he devoted himself to leaving
the world behind and searching for God's beloved-ness.
One day he left the monastery to run some errands in
the city, where he experienced an emotional and intellectual
epiphany. He was visiting his doctor in the city not
far from the monastery, and coming out of the doctor's
office Merton found himself at a very busy intersection.
In his journal he writes:
"At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center
of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed
with the realization that I loved all those people,
that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not
be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.
It was like waking from a dream of separateness ...(to
take your place as) a member of the human race….
I have the immense joy of being ...a member of a race
in which God Himself became incarnate. ...if only everybody
could realize this! ... There is no way of telling people
that they are all walking around shining like the sun."
That was another moment of God's love and favour descending
upon a human being. May that be our experience as a
community of faith. May we look at each other with new
eyes, knowing that each one of us is beloved of God,
and is a child of God, in whom God is pleased. Pleased
indeed! Amen.
Sermon Resources: Matthew 3:13-17; Isaiah 42:1-9. D.
Friesen.
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Shaughnessy Heights United Church
congregation is a Christian faith community respecting
each other in our diversity and reaching out to all
who seek God’s love.
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West 33rd Avenue,
Vancouver, BC V6M 1A7
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