Transcript
The Beloved Son
First Baptist Richmond, January 12, 2025
The Baptism of the Lord
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, 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 got to know Debie Thomas at a preaching conference in Denver, Colorado. People had been telling me about this woman who wasn’t exactly a preacher, but, wow, did she have something to say.i I started reading her essays on a website called “Journey with Jesus” and found out they were right. She reads the biblical text like a radiologist reads an MRI, seeing things that other people can’t see. One famous preacher at the conference confessed that when she was working on a difficult gospel passage she would often look to see what Debie Thomas had said about it, and if Debie hadn’t said anything she didn’t know what to do. She would say, “Well, it’s been a good run.”
I got to spend some time with Debie at that conference and learned that she was born in India, but grew up in Boston, the daughter of an evangelical pastor. She spells her name with only one “b”—Debie—and I’ve wondered if it was because her family was so poor when she was born that that’s all they could afford. She’s about 5’2” with curly hair, and just enough of an Indian accent to let you know she never became a true Bostonian. These days she lives in the San Francisco Bay area and serves on the staff of an Episcopal church. Maybe you can guess how much her worldview has changed over the years. But I believe that’s
one of her gifts: that even though she sees things differently now she still has a deep appreciation for the evangelical faith of her childhood, and writes in a way that invites evangelicals in.
For example: I love what she says about the Season of Epiphany being a kind of “thin place,” borrowing that language from Celtic Christianity. The Celts believed there were places in the world where the distance between heaven and earth was unusually thin, places like the Island of Iona. You may not have heard that term before but you know what she’s talking about. You may have your own thin place—the beach maybe, or the mountains—where you feel especially close to God. But her idea is that the entire season of Epiphany could be a thin place, that as we gather for worship in these weeks between Christmas and Lent, as we hear these incredible stories of how God’s “love, majesty, and power” were revealed in Jesus, and as we look deeply at him hoping to see God, we might just do it.
But Debie admits that the stories themselves can be a problem. Take a good look at the one we’ve heard this morning. Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptized by John and he’s not alone. There are hundreds of people who have come for baptism, maybe thousands. But Luke says that after all the people had been baptized, and when Jesus himself had been baptized and was praying, 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.”
That’s an epiphany; a moment when we catch a glimpse of God. Debie says, “During this brief season we leave mangers and swaddling clothes behind, and turn to stories of shimmering revelation. Kings and stars. Doves and
voices. Water. Wine. Transfiguration. The problem? I have never discovered a star in the East. I have never seen the Spirit descend like a dove, or heard a divine Voice in the clouds. I’ve never watched water become wine, or seen Jesus’s clothes blaze white on a mountaintop. Though I have professed belief in a self-revealing God all my life, I have not experienced him in any of the ways the Epiphany stories describe.
“My experience might be unique,” she says, “but I doubt it. I don’t know many 21st century Christians who bask in signs and wonders, who complain that God talks too much, or butts into their lives too often. But I know plenty of believers who experience God as hidden or silent. These are faithful people who long for epiphany—not just for a season, but for lifetimes.” Let me read that again: “these are faithful people who long for epiphany.” In other words, people who would love to catch a glimpse of God but so far haven’t been able to do it.
“So,” she writes, “I stand at the edges of this week’s Gospel reading and find myself afraid to leap. How shall I bridge the gap between an ancient Voice and a modern silence? Heaven opened. A dove descended. God spoke. Really? I want to believe this. I do” (and here’s where I think you can hear her wrestling with the difference between her childhood faith and the faith of her adulthood. She writes): “But to accept the supernatural in Scripture is to plunge into a sea of hard questions. If God spoke audibly in the past, why doesn’t he do so now? If he does, why haven’t I heard him? Is God angry at me? Has he retreated? Changed? Left?
“Or are the ancient stories of Epiphany figurative? Was the dove, in fact, just a dove, and the voice from heaven no more than a nicely timed windstorm? When we speak of epiphanies, are we really just trucking in metaphor? Should we put quotes around all these things? I had a ‘spiritual
experience.’ I felt ‘God.’ He ‘spoke’ to me. Isn’t it embarrassing nowadays to believe in miracles?”
Debie digresses for a moment to talk about what an embarrassment Jesus’ baptism was for the early church but for reasons very different from our modern ones. “What scandalized the Gospel writers,” she says, “was not the miraculous, but the ordinary. Doves and voices? All well and good. But the Messiah placing himself under the tutelage of a rabble-rouser like John? God’s incarnate Son receiving a baptism of repentance? Perfect, untouchable Jesus, wading into that murky water, aligning himself with the great unwashed? And why did God the Father choose that sordid moment to part the clouds and call his Son beloved?”
She says, “I suppose every age has its difficulties with faith. When we’re not busy flattening miracle into mirage, we’re busy instead turning sacrament into scandal. After all, what’s most incredulous about this story? That the Holy Spirit became a bird? That Jesus threw his reputation aside to get dunked alongside sinners? Or that God looked down at the very start of his Son’s ministry and called him Beloved—well before Jesus had accomplished a thing worth praising?”
And then she writes, “Let me ask the question differently: what do we find most impossible to believe for our own lives? That God appears by means so familiar, we often miss him? That our baptisms bind us to all of humanity—not in theory, but in the flesh—such that you and I are kin, responsible for each other in ways we fail too often to honor? Or is it that we are God’s Beloved—not because we’ve done anything to earn it, but because our Father insists on blessing us with his approval?”
And then this woman who is not really a preacher begins to preach. She says, “Here’s my real problem with Epiphany: I always, always have a choice—and
most of the time, I don’t want it.” What she means is that she has a choice between believing and not believing when she’s confronted with an incredible story like this one about the baptism of Jesus, but also in the everyday epiphanies of her own life. She says, “I expect God’s revelations to bowl me over. I expect the thin places to dominate my landscape, such that I am left choice-less, powerless, sinless. Freed of all doubts, and spilling over with faith.
“But no. God has not insulted humanity with so little agency; we get to choose. No matter how many times God shows up in my life, I’m free to ignore him. No matter how often he calls me Beloved, I can choose self-loathing instead. No matter how many times I remember my baptism, I’m free to dredge out of the water the very sludge I first threw in. No matter how often I reaffirm my vow to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I’m at liberty to reject you and walk away.”
She digresses again to complain about how, even when you choose to embrace an epiphany, it doesn’t mean that things are going to end well. The star that led the wise men to Jesus also led to the slaughter of the innocents. Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan was followed by forty difficult days in the wilderness. “Yet we speak so glibly of faith, revelation, and baptism,” she writes. “As if it’s all easy. As if what matters most is whether we sprinkle or immerse, baptize babies or adults.” Finally she says,
“I don’t know about you, but I find so much of this maddening. How much nicer it would be if the water in which we baptize were self-evidently holy. But no—it’s just tap water, river water, chlorine. The thin place is a neighborhood, a forest, a hilltop. The voice that might be God might also be wind, thunder, indigestion, or delusion. Is the baby divine? Or have we misread the star? Is this
the body and blood of God’s Son? Or is it a mere hunk of bread? A jug of wine? What I mean,” she says, “is that there is no magic—we practice Epiphany.”
I love that so much. And maybe I’ve been quoting Debie Thomas for all these minutes just to get to this moment where we can talk about practicing Epiphany. Because if she’s right about this, then being there at Jesus’ baptism might not have been enough to convince us. We could have been standing right there in the water with him, we could have heard the heavens ripping open above our heads, we could have seen the Spirit flutter down in the form of a dove, we could have heard the voice of God say, “This is my beloved Son,” and still it might be like that place in John’s Gospel where God spoke and “some said that it thundered.”ii
We have to practice epiphany. We have to look for it, listen for it. We have to believe that God is trying to get through to us, and when we do we begin to experience it everywhere. I’m thinking of my old friend Corky Klingenfuss who was the pastor of the Christian church in New Castle, Kentucky, just around the corner from the church I served. Corky confided in me that he had heard from the search committee of a big church in another state and he was trying to decide whether or not he should talk to them. He started looking for signs, and he began to see them everywhere. We were having coffee one day and he said, “You know, yesterday I was coming up the hill into town and the stoplight (the only stoplight we had in that town) is always red for me. I mean every time. But this time it was green, and I thought, ‘Maybe that’s a sign! Maybe God is telling me to go ahead!’”
You can laugh if you want, but I think it’s true that when we start looking for signs, we begin to see them, and it’s not as if they suddenly popped up—they’ve been there all along. One of the classic epiphanies of the Bible is the burning bush
in Exodus 3. Moses said, “Let me turn aside and see this thing, this bush that burns without being consumed.” But the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once asserted that, “every common bush [is] afire with God,” if you have eyes to see it, if you’re looking for it. I think about that other great epiphany in Scripture, when Elijah was on the mountain and there was a wind so strong that it was splitting rocks, and then an earthquake that shook the mountain to its foundations, and after the earthquake a fire (kind of like watching the news these days), but the Lord wasn’t in any of those. It was only after those that Elijah heard the Lord speaking to him in “a still, small voice.”
It reminds me so much of this scene from Luke 3. Unlike the Gospel of Matthew, where God points to Jesus and says in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “This is my beloved Son!” the voice in Luke’s Gospel appears to be for Jesus and Jesus alone. Luke writes, “Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying (presumably alone), 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.”
It’s different to imagine that Jesus was the only one who heard the voice, and maybe even the only one to see the dove. It turns it from a public epiphany into a private one. And yet, on the strength of that whispered voice Jesus was able to endure 40 days in the wilderness, being tempted by the Devil. He kept reminding himself, “I am God’s beloved Son. I am God’s beloved Son.”
But what about us? How do we practice Epiphany? How will we make it through the desert? Debie Thomas writes, “The challenge is always before us. Look again. Look harder. See freshly. Stand in the place that might possibly be
thin, and regardless of how jaded you feel, cling to the possibility of surprise. Epiphany is deep water—you can’t stand on the shore and dip your toes in. You must take a breath and plunge.”
She ends her essay by suggesting that, “Jesus himself is our thin place.iii He’s the one who opens the barrier, and shows us the God we long for. He’s the one who stands in line with us at the water’s edge, willing to immerse himself in shame, scandal, repentance, and pain—all so that we might hear the only Voice that can tell us who we are and whose we are in this sacred season. Listen. We are God’s own. God’s children. God’s pleasure. Even in the deepest water, we are Beloved.”iv
—Jim Somerville © 2025 and Debie Thomas © 2016
