Thomas Kleinert
There was a time when you were only known as “the baby.” Your parents, your siblings, really anyone who dreamed or knew about you — they only spoke of you as “the baby.” They spoke with joy, certainly, and with anticipation and hope, but you were still just “the baby,” a tiny mystery of a person. Depending on the year of your birth or how much confidence your parents had in blurry ultrasound images, they may not even have known if you were a boy or a girl, or if there were more than one of you.
At some point during the pregnancy, your family started making lists of possible names for “the baby;” girls’ names, boys’ names, names that aren’t gender specific. They may have listed grandparents, aunts and uncles, best friends and favorite characters, names that would go well with the family name or start with the same letter as your siblings’ first names, or names that capture courage, kindness, or whatever other trait they hoped you would embody. And as the due date drew closer, the list got shorter. Eventually the moment came when they looked at you and they just knew what your name was going to be, and they spoke it. For the very first time, you were called by your name. You were no longer just “the baby,” you were somebody.
Mary and Joseph didn’t start with a list. The angel told Mary, according to Luke, “You will name him Jesus,” and according to Matthew, it was Joseph who was told by an angel, “You are to name him Jesus.”[1] So that was settled months before Mary even started to show.
The two readings we heard today are powerful, beautiful affirmations of identity, and in each, God is speaking in the first person singular, addressing somebody directly, through the voice of the prophet or a voice from heaven.
“I have called you by name,” says the creator-of-you, Jacob, the shaper-of-you, Israel, “You are mine.”
“You are my beloved son, I delight in you,” says the voice from heaven to Jesus, who’s just been baptized and anointed with the Holy Spirit for his mission.
I love that we get to hear these words of affirmation at the beginning of the year, this year in particular, when we mustn’t forget who and whose we are, and who it is we follow on the way to God’s reign.
Isaiah gives us exuberant poetry, addressed to a people stuck in desolation. In Isaiah’s message, the Babylonian exile is described as a punishment, or at least a consequence, of the people’s failure to honor God’s commandments, God’s torah, God’s instruction for faithful living. God, says Isaiah, turned away from them. God gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and poured upon him the heat of this anger and the fury of war; but [Jacob] did not take it to heart. Isaiah vividly describes the exiles as a people robbed and plundered, all of them trapped in holes and hidden in prisons. They are sinking in hopelessness, and there’s no one to rescue. There’s no one, says Isaiah, to say, “Restore!”[2] No one.
And in that desolate landscape of devastating silence, Isaiah stands and proclaims the new word, the word of the One who makes all things new. “But now,” shouts Isaiah — now there is someone to say, “Restore!” Now God speaks the new word declaring an end to judgment and captivity, and the promise of homecoming rises like a song in the morning.
Oh, we’ve heard the prophet tell us of the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it,[3] but now he speaks of us, he speaks of God’s people and who we are:
Thus says the Lord, the One who created you, O Jacob, who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.
Rise up, stand up, remember who you are. Remember, you have been created, shaped, called, claimed and redeemed for a purpose: you are the children of Abraham and Sarah, countless as the stars — I have called you by name; you are mine, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.[4]
In Isaiah’s proclamation, the Creator of heaven and earth speaks to God’s people “like a lover,” as Anathea Portier-Young put it, “whose heart is bursting, who has waited an eternity just to say their name.”[5] And the Holy One of Israel will do all that is necessary to secure their release and homecoming. Why?
Because you are precious in my sight and honored and I love you.
These words are spoken first and foremost and irrevocably to the Jewish people who have lived as people of the promise since the days of Abraham and Sarah. And we are invited to hear them addressed also to us, to all whom Jesus Christ has embraced as his siblings, all who pray with him for the coming of God’s reign, all who follow him on the way and enact with him at his table “the great ingathering of God’s beloved from all of God’s creation.”[6] For the end will be what God has spoken from the beginning: the feast of life when all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. In the company of Jesus, we dare to hope that when God says “everyone” it means everyone: everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Home from our exiles, all of us scattered ones who forget so easily.
Today we celebrate that Jesus gets in the water with us. It may seem counterintuitive to step into the river of repentance when the oceans are rising and powerful storms are flooding the land. But when fires rage bigger, faster, and hotter than anytime on record, stepping into the river of repentance feels like the saving proposition it is. Today we celebrate the gift of this river, and that Jesus steps into it with us, not because he needs to, but because he wants to. He wants to be where we are, so we can be where he is. We step into the river of repentance with our sins and regrets, our guilt and shame and fear, and we pray that like water, grace is washing it all away, until we are who we were made to be, until we know who we are.
And Jesus steps into that very river in deep solidarity with us — and he drowns in it, drowns in our sin, in our helpless brokenness, in our fear and ready violence, in all the heavy lovelessness we carry. All of it. Drowns in it.
And you’ve heard the story, you know he rises, and you know the heaven is opened and the Holy Spirit descends, but now the voice from heaven speaks, and he hears it, he knows it, and he only hopes that we hear it too:“You are my Son, the Beloved, in whom I delight.” He knows this; this is the song in his heart. He hopes we hear the words as addressed not only to him, but to all of us.
In Luke’s narration of the gospel, the scene by the river is followed by a lengthy genealogy: name after name, generation after generation, the whole long line that makes Jesus who he is, going back all the way to Adam and Eve — but the voice from heaven has already declared who he is, has already spoken his true name.
We are all deeply shaped by our ancestors and what they have done and left undone, by the legacy of their dreams and the pain of their trauma, but Jesus reveals who we are: God’s beloved in whom God delights. This relationship is the one that shapes and heals and fulfills all the others that make us who we are.
God’s love for us is the one relationship in life we can’t screw up. We can deny it, sure; we can ignore it, neglect it, forget it, and run away from it, but we cannot end it. Nothing we do or refuse to do will change who we are: God’s own, God’s beloved, God’s delight.
Often we forget. We may forget because we’re busy making a name for ourselves. We may forget because others have convinced us that we are not worthy of love, too insignificant for any kind of attention. We may forget because pain and shame have buried our sense of self as God’s own.
What are we to do about our forgetfulness? We follow Jesus, he’ll remind us. We pray, and at least occasionally we let God do all the talking. And again and again we gather at the homecoming table for the feast of life, the great ingathering of God’s beloved from all of God’s creation.
There was a time when you were only known as “the baby.” Yet long before anyone would think of what to call you, God named you: God’s own, God’s beloved, God’s delight.
Do not fear, for I am with you, says the Lord. I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, Give them up, and to the south, Do not withhold. Bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth — everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.
[1] Luke 1:32; Matthew 1:21
[2] See Isaiah 42:22-25
[3] Isaiah 42:5
[4] Isaiah 43:21
[5] Anathea Portier-Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/baptism-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-isaiah-431-7
[6] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (WBC), 54.