In Sunday’s sermon I proposed that Jesus knew who he was. The first 30 years of his life before his public ministry began he was practicing “becoming”. Luke 3:21-23 is the culmination of Jesus’s identity formation. First in verse 21 he is baptized in the Jordan river by his cousins John the Baptist. John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance but Jesus was without sin. So why did Jesus participate in this act? In doing so Jesus completely identifies with the human experience. In Hebrews 4:15 it tells us that Jesus is able to sympathize with our weakness. The word translated as sympathize can also be translated as empathize or suffer with. Jesus is fully human and is able to suffer with us in our captivity to sin and empathize with us as we suffer the effects of living in a world where evil still wreaks havoc. So much so that he suffers and dies. He knows us and has lived the realities of our existence.
After he is baptized while he is praying verse 22 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is the core of Jesus identity as Emmanuel, God with us in the flesh, fully human and fully God. Jesus is God’s beloved. This defines who he is and furthermore, he is bathed in God’s favor, pleasure, grace, mercy and love. God is pleased with Jesus before he begins his public ministry, before he has performed miracles, preached the good news of the Kingdom, or forgiven sins. Before he has called out sin and injustice and challenged the oppressive power structures of the day. God is pleased with Jesus because he is His Beloved.
You are God’s beloved and God is well pleased with you not because of what you do but because of who you are. You are God’s beloved beautifully and uniquely made, as the Westminster Catechism puts it, to love and enjoy fellowship with God forever.
As we begin our new sermon series, Emmanuel: God in the neighborhood. I would like for us to think about two things: Who are you? Who you are in the neighborhood is more important than what you do. In other words who we are informs and directs our action. It will not be something we will not be something we consciously have to make a decision to do but rather naturally flow from who we are as God’s beloved.
To answer the question, Who am I? I talked about Jane McGonigal’s book Superheater: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient. In it she references Dr. Martin Seligman and Dr. Christopher Petersen’s work that focused on identify core character strengths. “Together they studied nearly 100 cultures around the world and tested 150,000 subjects in order to determine the full range of virtues that both bring happiness and increase our resilience every time we use them.” They created a Values in Action (VIA) survey* to help people identify their top 5 core character strengths. I suggested that knowing our strengths and values is a way that we can answer the question: Who am I? We are all God’s beloved, “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14) and knowing our values and core character strengths help us to know more deeply how that specifically takes shape in each of us. God exists as the Trinity. One God in three persons; unity in diversity exists within the Godhead. We are one in Christ as God’s beloved and each unique people who express the diversity and fullness of God’s love in our diversity. As the Apostle Paul puts its we, “the body does not consist of one member but of many.” We are not hands or feet.
This week take some time to be bored and to be still before God. Whisper the word beloved to remind you of your core identity. Ask God to show you your core character strengths and values and simply live in the neighborhood. Lastly, pray that the Holy Spirit would fill you as it did Jesus, for it is God’s Spirit that lives in us and empowers our living and being in the neighborhood.
*HERE is the VIA survey if you would like to use it to think about your core character strengths.