God's Love Letter

​For many people, reading the Bible is hard. The Bible was written so long ago that even contemporary translations may not make a lot of sense. And in at least a few places, the Bible seems positively objectionable.
 
That’s not true for everyone, of course. For some people, the Bible speaks right to them from the very first time they tackle it.
 
But I was one of the people who struggled. I first tried to read the Bible when I was in high school, but didn’t get much out of it. Over the next decade or so, I kept coming back to the Bible, for different reasons at different times. But I didn’t start really loving the Bible until I was in my thirties. Ever since then, I have come more and more to appreciate how helpful the Bible can be in our Christian journeys.
 
For those who, like my young self, struggle with Scripture, I am going to give you the key to making sense of it. It’s in the last line of our Gospel reading. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
 
More on that shortly. But first a detour.
 
When I worked at a small college in Georgia, a student told me that she thought of the Bible as God’s love letter to her.
 
Love letters came naturally to mind for this student. Partly that was a function of her age. She was eighteen, and looking for the man of her dreams.
 
Added to that, the campus itself was romantic. It had wide fields of grass, backed by forest, and then a small mountain. Towards the top of the mountain was a cottage built by students long ago called, appropriately, “The House of Dreams.”
 
When I worked at the school, there was a tradition that female students would write notes to their future husbands, and leave the notes in one of the books at the House of Dreams. I myself found one of those notes, but when I realized what it was, I put it back without reading it. Even back then that tradition was old-fashioned, and it has probably died out by now. But it was part of the atmosphere of the college at the time.
 
All that is to say, for this student, love letters were part of her experience or at least part of her world. And for her, the Bible was a giant love letter.
 
Carrie and I are long past the love letter stage! But that student was on to something. If I had to summarize the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, the message of the whole Bible, in just a single phrase, it might be, “God loves us.” God loves us as a group, but also God loves each of us as individuals.
 
We can think of the Bible as like one of those notes in the House of Dreams. It is a declaration of love, written long ago, but addressed to us today as people in a loving relationship with the author.
 
You can find that message all over the Bible, including in our Old Testament reading this morning. God speaks through the prophet to us, God’s people in this time and place. “I, God, have called you by name.” “You are mine.” “Do not fear, for I am with you.” And my favorite: “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” That is God speaking to each of us. A love letter.
 
We get the same message in our Gospel reading, but here there is more to say. It’s the story of Christ’s baptism. But first, why was Christ baptized?
 
The catechism at the back of our Prayerbook (858) says that baptism does four things for us. Baptism gives us (1) “union with Christ in his death and resurrection”; (2) “birth into God’s family the Church”; (3) “forgiveness of sins”; and (4) “new life in the Holy Spirit.”
 
Those are the benefits of baptism, and Christ didn’t need any of them. John the Baptist knew that. When Christ presented himself for baptism, Matthew tells us that “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” (Matthew 3:14)
 
But Jesus insisted because Jesus wanted to show us what happens in baptisms.
 
And here is what happened. “The heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”
 
I was baptized as a baby and don’t remember it. But I am pretty sure the Holy Spirit did NOT descend upon me in bodily form, nor was there an audible voice from heaven.
 
But, in a way, that is what happened. That’s what happened at my baptism and that’s what happens at every baptism. The Holy Spirit may not take bodily form, but the Holy Spirit does descend upon us. There may not be an audible voice from heaven, but God does call us beloved children with whom God is well pleased.
 
It is just like Isaiah says. In baptism, God calls us by name. God claims us as God’s own. God says to us, “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”
 
The very next thing that happens in the Gospel is Jesus being led by the Spirit into the wilderness to face temptation. That’s true for us, too. Ever since my baptism as a baby, I have been facing temptation. Jesus triumphed over his temptations. Sadly, temptation routinely overcomes me. Temptation routinely overcomes all of us.
 
But our weaknesses, our failures, our sins, do not change the basic fact that we are God’s beloved children, with whom God is well pleased. And so, whenever we fall into sin, we repent and return to the Lord, trusting in God’s eternal forgiveness and love.
 
That is the message of the entire Bible. It’s just more obvious in some passages than others.
 
I end with a final point.
 
Carrie and I are currently watching a program called “This is Us” about the complicated relationships within a family. In a recent episode, two middle-aged brothers fight. I mean, a literal fistfight right in the middle of a big crowd. At some point, the brothers realized that they were making fools of themselves, so they stopped fighting and headed home. It was an uncomfortable car ride for both of them.
 
After a few minutes, one brother said to the other, “why have you always resented me, going back to when we were kids?” The other shot back, “because our mother always favored you.”
 
It looks to me like the brothers are going to work things out, but it’s early in the series so we’ll have to see. For my purposes this morning, the point is that a man resented his brother for years, and acted out in all kinds of ways, because he didn’t feel truly and fully loved by their mother. Feeling unloved makes us do bad things.
 
Our parents mostly did the best they could with us. And those of us with children mostly do the best we can with them. I hope my own children both feel deeply loved by me and Carrie.
 
But however well or poorly parents do, the Bible assures us that we can trust God’s love for us. We are precious, and we are honored, in God’s sight. We are God’s beloved children, even when we don’t act like it. And in Christ, God is well pleased with us. That is good news we can rely on.
 
Thanks be to God. Amen.