Two Are Beloved
On Jesus' Baptism and the Shooting in Minneapolis
Matthew 3:13-17
Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. John tried to dissuade Jesus, saying, “I should be baptized by you, and yet you come to me!”
But Jesus replied, “Leave it this way for now. We must do this to completely fulfill God’s justice.” So John reluctantly agreed.
Immediately after Jesus had been baptized and was coming up out of the water, the sky suddenly opened up and Jesus saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and hovering over him. With that, a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Own, my Beloved, on whom my favor rests.”
Apologies for the occasional paper noises!
You know, you sound beautiful. Did you feel that? You sound beautiful. I heard you singing. You sound absolutely gorgeous. I was really touched. You picked it up. We all stepped into it.
In the name of God the Mother, God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit who breathes through us all.
This is a different sermon title than I had prepared. But sometimes it happens. You wake up early in the morning and somebody’s telling you, “Yeah, that was a nice sermon you prepared, just not the one you’re going to be preaching on Sunday.”
I want to hark back for a moment to begin with, to very briefly remind you of what I shared with you on Christmas Eve, which is my firm conviction that the western world changed in character because of the birth, life, death, resurrection, and the ministry of Jesus Christ. That the idea and the living expectation that every human being is valued, belongs, is a child of God—came into the western world. It’s an idea that came up from within the tradition of Judaism. Jesus was a Jew, was born a Jew, died a Jew, learned the lessons of Judaism and interpreted them in a special way. And it was the Christian faith that brought his message forth. And it wasn’t true before. I spoke about that at some length. I want to remind you of that today as we celebrate the baptism of Jesus.
Jesus clearly wanted to be baptized like everybody else. John was at the River Jordan. The people thronged towards him, and up shows Jesus. And John is like, “Wait a moment, I can’t be baptizing you.” And Jesus said, “No, this is how it has to be for now, because this is the right relationship with God that we are enacting, that we are embodying.” The translation we read today talks about God’s justice. The word in Greek is dikaiosyne. We’ve talked about that before. It’s right relationship, righteousness, justice—all of those things put together. The Hebrew word that it comes from is the word tzedakah, righteousness. And so Jesus is saying, “I too need to be in right relationship with God if I am going to be the one in the world that I am intended to be.”
Because of course, the baptism that Jesus stepped into was called by John the baptism of what? Repentance. But we know that word to be metanoia. The Greek word is metanoia, which means not like “I was bad before and now I’m trying to be good,” but “I’m changing my heart and I’m orienting my heart towards God, because that’s where I know my life truly is and that’s where I know the life of the world will be.” And Jesus subjects himself to this baptism to indicate to the world, “I am choosing to orient my heart towards God.” And Jesus has done this more fully than anybody else we have known in history, which is why we follow him.
The baptism of metanoia, of changing of the heart, orienting towards God, then resulted in this display, this opening up of the heavens and a voice saying, “This is my beloved one. In this one, I am well pleased.” Jesus hadn’t preached a word. He hadn’t healed a soul. He had not performed any miracle. And he definitely had not yet died on the cross and been resurrected. Before all those things were to take place, the voice said, “This is my beloved.”
We are not here to earn the belovedness of God. We’re here to orient ourselves towards God and then receive that this is already a fact, that this is already true. We didn’t make it happen. You are already beloved of God. It’s not a stepping stone. It’s not a test. Your baptism—it is a stepping into the reality by saying, “I’m changing my heart towards God.”
Beloved, there are two people whose names I want to speak today who are beloved of God.
The first name is Renee Nicole Good, 37-year-old woman, mother of three, who was shot and killed in Minnesota on Wednesday morning. She was out there in the streets not to be a rabble-rouser, not to cause trouble, but because she had a Christian heart that said, “We are here to welcome the stranger, not to prosecute them. We are here to receive and share from the abundance that we have received with the people who need it the most.”
When Jesus did begin speaking, the first things that he said in his preaching was, “I have come to bring good news to whom?” To the poor. “I have come to bring liberation to the oppressed.” Why? It’s not that he was opposed to those who were rich, but if you’re called to cast a net of salvation for the whole world, you begin at the bottom because then you can lift everybody up. And when that net rises up, those who are at the top and those who are at the bottom will be at the same level. That’s what Jesus came to do. And Renee Nicole Good, in spirit, lived it. She was a good person who lived her faith.
The other person I want to call out as beloved of God is Jonathan Ross, the officer who shot her. Jonathan Ross is an Iraq war veteran who has served many years in various agencies of law enforcement. And we learned in the past week that not so long ago he was dragged by a car—I don’t know if you’ve seen that video—but at fairly high speed, 100 yards down the road. And he must have feared for his life.
What we don’t appreciate and what has not been named is that this produces trauma. And trauma is an experience that is so overwhelming that our psyche says, “I need to protect myself.” And how does the psyche do that? It’s very good at this: “I’m going to isolate it. I’m not going to make it part of my entire being, but I’m going to create an isolated bubble in my being. And if I can just keep it there, I don’t have to keep paying attention to this fear, this overwhelming fear of my own death that I was feeling in that moment.”
This trauma experience lives in our psyche, in our bodies, but in an isolated place. And in that isolated place, we don’t have access to the entirety of all our human resources of our mind, body, and spirit. And when we are—this is interesting—sometimes we are thrown back in the experience of trauma by an event, something that happens outside. This is called a trigger, which is a very interesting word in the context of a shooting, very unfortunate word, but that’s what it’s called. And when you are triggered and you’re thrown back in the experience of your trauma, you do not have access to the other parts of your brain, your mind, and your body. In other words, you cannot think. Literally, you cannot think. You cannot pass good judgment. And I think that’s exactly what we saw. There was no good judgment at play in his actions on Wednesday morning.
When somebody’s in a traumatized state, what they need is support, because there are people—and there’s an increasing number of people—there’s an increasing recognition of the fact that we need trauma care, and people know how to do this. But it’s complicated. It’s complicated. But particularly within the Veterans Administration, an increasing number of people know and understand how trauma lives in the body and how you slowly but surely can heal people from it. Some people are so traumatized they can’t fully do it. They can’t fully recover. You’ve all met people who are operating from a moment of trauma at some point in your life, I am sure. I am sure.
When thinking stops—and so our government then has dehumanized both these individuals. I don’t want to make it sound like losing your life and operating from a moment of trauma is the same thing. But what I do want to emphasize is they were both dehumanized by our government.
Renee Nicole Good—it took them two hours to stamp her as a domestic terrorist and to deny her basic humanity in that moment, to deny even her right to live, which is only given to us in every document that we know and hold sacred, and definitely in the scripture, in the Declaration of Independence, in the Constitution, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Everywhere we have written anything of importance, the right to live exists. And by branding her a domestic terrorist, they said she no longer had that right. She forfeited that right. It is not the government’s call ever, ever to make that pronouncement. They couldn’t even call it a tragedy.
Jonathan Ross was also dehumanized, because if he had been seen as a full-life human being who is honestly trying to serve his country in the best way that he knows how to do it—not a way that I would agree with, not a path that I would have chosen, but I am convinced that he knew he was trying to serve his country in the best way that he knew how—and this government completely erased his experience. Completely erased it. Did not want to fork up the support and say, “That was a traumatizing experience. We need to restore you to wholeness.” That is our duty in our country.
We have in this country sent people abroad to fight wars that I completely disagree with. But I 100% agree that those who have done that need to come back and need to be caught in a net of support, because they have lived horrendous experiences, things that nobody should have to live through. They need to be restored to wholeness. And we denied that. We denied that to Jonathan Ross and also to Renee Nicole Good.
In modern theologies, when we talk about the word “sin,” we try to not make sin this individual problem where “I have sinned and now I need to repent and make up for what I have done wrong.” What we talk about most of the time is what we call structural sin. There’s a system that we are embedded in, and the system does not honor our lives, does not honor our wholeness. That is a structural sin that was on full display this week to absurd levels by our government.
About a year and a half ago, or a little less, I said this is a time to hold on to our spiritual values, to dig in deeper to what we know and believe to be true about the life of God in us and our purpose in the world. Values of love for your neighbor, love of God, basic kindness and respect, values of welcome, values of remembering one another—that if you forget, my purpose is to tell you and remind you that you are beloved of God. That’s what we hold on to. That is the truth that we continue to celebrate. That is the truth that was announced by the Spirit when the heavens opened up at the moment that Jesus was baptized. It wasn’t dependent on anything that needed to happen, not on anything that needed to be done.
But in a time when we have a government that claims the mantle of Christianity, claims that mantle, it is also important for us to speak up and remember what the gospel really teaches us and who Jesus really came for. And it wasn’t the rich, wasn’t the powerful—it was the poor and the oppressed. Why? So that we all can be saved. All can be saved.
Let me finish. Renee Nicole Good, like Jesus, stood in this truth, lived these values. And like Jesus, she died. So let’s honor her fully and completely in the way that we know how.
Amen.