Christ Lutheran Church: Welcome

Title

Belonging

The Baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 43:1-11, Luke 3:15-22

Rev. Dave R. Garwick

When I was a boy, what I wanted so desperately was to belong. I think that was because we moved just about every year. By the time I graduated from high school I had attended thirteen schools. And that was after I had been forced to leave my high school in the last half of my senior year for another high school. I have now lived in thirty five homes. And it seemed like every time we moved to another school, it was after school had started. So I was the dummy who never could figure out how to open my locker, the stupid new kid who always got lost finding his next classroom. I still have nightmares about that – just had my last one two nights ago. I never got to try out for anything, never got chosen for anything, never belonged to a group of friends.

Maybe that is why Boy Scouts became so important to me. No matter where we moved, there was always a troop I could join. I could be like everyone else. We had the same uniforms. We had the same ranks. And we all started out as Tenderfoot scouts. I eventually came to learn that “Tenderfoot” essentially meant “bait” for the older scouts – no different from just any other brotherhood or sisterhood. You had to go through a bunch of silly initiation exercises. I remember our first camporee one late autumn where hundreds of scouts from dozens of troops from all over the area got together. At night the campfire smoke just hung in the air and you could see dozens of campfires as far as the eye could see. And I got to visit most of them on that night. Why? Because the older scouts made a couple of us Tenderfoot go from troop to troop and campfire to campfire asking if we could borrow “fifty feet of shoreline.” We thought that meant something like a long rope. Of course, every campfire we visited knew exactly what we were being put up to and they would play along, sending us to the next troop a quarter mile further out, “cause we loaned ours to that troop”. That went on all night long. We put up with the humiliation of this and a number of other less speakable indignities. Why? For the same reason sorority and fraternity pledges put up with all the hazing. In order to belong when you feel all alone in this world.

With teenagers, this takes the form called “peer pressure”. But adults also have needs to belong. Hence the exclusive country clubs, the gated communities, the secret lodges and sororities, the “us” versus “them” competition between fans of opposing athletic teams. Hence the people who go looking for love in all the wrong places – this need to belong. In fact, I believe that this need to belong is one of the strongest and most basic needs of the human being. I’ll go one step further: our desperate need to belong is reflecting something much deeper yet. Our need to belong to each other is a reflection of our need to belong to the One who created us, the One who is waiting for us, the One who gives us life, the One who gives us meaning, who in fact gives us our meaning for existence.

Maybe that is why I reacted the way I did when I read the Old Testament lesson this morning. I don’t know how many times I have read this same passage over the years. But this time something lit up inside me. “This is what the Lord says—He who created you, O Jacob, He who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are Mine.”

When I read this it was like something warmed within me. God himself spoke up and said, “You are mine.” You are mine. I belong. In the eighth Psalm, King David looked up into the heavens and said that when he looked up at the moon and the stars, he asked God why the Creator would even notice the puny likes of us, to say nothing about how God had raised up humans to be just a little less that divine. But through the prophet Isaiah here, God is saying so much more. He is saying that we are HIS. We actually BELONG to Him!

You know, that is the word we so often use when we talk about the people or organizations with we affiliate. We say, “I belong to Rotary.” Really? Think about that. Are you saying that Rotary owns you? “I belong to Christ Lutheran Church.” You do? “She’s my girl – she belongs to me.”

No, when we use that “belong” language I think we are unconsciously revealing our need to belong. But only the One who created us will always really be with us when we pass through the waters and guarantee that they will not overwhelm us. Only God can promise that when we walk through the fire, He will guarantee that we will not be burned. Only God can really redeem us by sacrificing Another for us. Only God has paid for us. Only God can say that we belong to Him.

But here’s the “kicker”. God was not saying these words to us. He was speaking to the blood descendents of Abraham – the Jews, eight hundred years before Jesus was born. Most of us are not the blood descendants of Abraham. We are not Jews. So where does that leave us? Do we not really not then belong after all? Where it leaves us is out in the cold, back to looking to belong to anything, anyone who will have us, even if it means looking for love in all the wrong places. We have to fill this most basic, most desperate need somehow. How cruel to only get to eavesdrop on God saying all these wonderful things to OTHER people, allowing them belong to Him, but not us.

And that IS where we would be, were it not for something that happened in a muddy little stream on the Jordan side of the Jordan river just across from Jericho when God himself insisted that HE himself be baptized with the same baptism that He would offer each of us. And with that, baptized into Jesus we ARE now counted among the people who belong to God. We have been adopted through the same baptism that HE experienced.

Before that we were no people at all. But because of what Jesus did at the Jordan, we also are now His people. We belong. We belong to Him. We belong.

Because of Christ.