In You I am Well
Pleased
By Rev Steven R
Mitchell
Mountain View
United, Aurora, Co 11-17-2013
Based on Matthew 3:16-17
“In
you I am well pleased.” I think these words are words that each one of
us wishes to hear at some point in our lives.
When we are children, we are given a lot of messages of what our parents
expect of us. One common expectation is
in our behavior, of having good manners: be sure to say ‘thank you’ or ‘no
thank you’, many of us were taught to address our elders with ‘Mr. or Mrs.’, we
were not to fight with our siblings in public.
Achievements in academics and sports are often expectations by our
parents.
As parents work at
developing these expectations, they are often perceived by their children as
nagging. Take the B+ on the report card scenario:
“Now you know you can make an A if you
just apply yourself a little more.”
What children don’t often hear from their parents is the “I am well pleased” with you phrase.
When
I was growing up, my dad had a set of expectations for me. None of which I ever seemed to be able to
achieve. His two older brothers had sons
who were very adapted to sports. I was
not so adapt in sports. I was also 7
years younger than my two cousins, so by the time I was old enough to play
sports in Jr and Sr High, I was competing against my dad’s memories of how his
two nephews played. I remember not being
allowed to play in the sports that I wanted to play in, because they were not
fitting my dad’s image of what sports boys were supposed to play. By Jr High, I felt like a failure in my dad’s
eyes. It didn’t matter what I did, it
was never good enough in his eyes.
When
I surprised my parents about wanting to go to college, they were not very eager
about that idea either. But if I was
going off to college, then I was suppose to study something of substance; again
I failed them when I chose Music Performance as my major. Then one day, something very extraordinary
occurred, my father showed up for one of my music performances
unannounced. Dad wanted to meet all of
my classmates, making a huge production of his visit. What I learned later from my mother was that
dad didn’t tell her that he was driving the several hundred miles to come and
watch me sing. It was the first time
that I could ever remember where I was receiving approval of my dad. On that day, it was like the story of Jesus
being baptized, and the dove coming down from Heaven landing on my head as my
father bestowed his blessing upon me.
As
I grew older, I was able to understand my father’s behavior better. Dad was an eighth grade drop-out, over time
he developed a drinking problem that interfered with his goals in life, he
never had the advantages that were provided to me in communication skills or
parenting practice, he grew up in a time when children were seen but not heard.
My father didn’t possess the skills that were needed to nurture his
expectations for me in a positive manner, and it took all the courage that he
could muster to show me in that simple act of showing up on campus unannounced
that he not only loved me, but cared about the choices that I was making with
my life, and that he was “well pleased” with his son. In that one moment my father gave me the
confidence that I would need to act upon my dreams to this very day.
As
we celebrate the act of baptism of Cruz this morning, I think about all of the
potential that he has in his future.
Will he become President of the United States, or a famous brain surgeon,
a teacher perhaps, or maybe a mortgage person, or have a career in marketing? I am sure that Jon and Laura each have
certain dreams and hopes for Cruz; as parents it’s a natural thing for us to have
high expectations for our children. Yet
I have to remember what Njeri Kingangi said in a conversation one evening over
dinner, that the hardest thing for her to do was to let her son live his own
dreams and be proud in his achieving them.
Our
scripture talks about another parent God, who I am sure had expectations for
his son. I can just hear Jesus saying to
his buddies, John, James, and Peter as they were sitting around their dorm room
at the Academy of Jewish Law: “Yeah, my
dad expects me to save the world.” “He
expects me to be a great preacher when I graduate from this place.”
What do you suppose, God really expected of Jesus? For that matter, what do you suppose God
really expects of each one of us? Does
he expect us to ‘save’ the world? I grew
up hearing a lot of conversation around the idea of “God’s will” for our
lives. That suggests that God has
expectations of us, and it is our job to figure out what that expectation is. Most of us will never do anything in our
lives that will particularly “set the world on fire.” So does this mean that we are not living up
to our potential?
What
was it that Jesus had done up to that point in his life when he was baptized that
made God say, “…in you I am well pleased.”
Well, he must have had some schooling because he understood Hebrew
Scripture to the point that it amazed his elders. When he was 12 yrs old, he ran off and forgot to tell his
parents where he was going, and there are stories in Gnostic writings that say
Jesus as a child got really made at one of his playmates and struck him dead by
just speaking. As the oldest son, he leaves
his widowed mother with young children still at home, to follow some crazy
cousin preaching outside of Jerusalem.
Some of these behaviors don’t sound like things that a “good” son would
particularly be praised for. In fact,
they sound a lot like things we as “ordinary” people would be found doing.
The
key is in the very first part of the statement, “you are my child…” What parent can argue with this point of
view? When a new child is born, it’s not
just the parents, but the community that becomes filled with joy over the new
birth. We oohed and awed when Mackenzie
was born a couple of years ago; we oohed and awed when Cruz was born, and we
will once again owe and awe when the next infant is born around Christmas. We do this because we see the new potential,
new promise in new life and it fills us with joy. We are again able to dream for these little
ones, a life that will be filled with such achievements; in these new little
lives we are given Hope for the future!
Yet,
even if that life filled with new promise doesn’t exactly full fill our
expectations, we still can say to them, “you
are my child, my beloved, in you I am well pleased.” We can do that, because they are our
children. God said this of Jesus, and
God says it of us
Yet,
I wonder if we really believe God when he is telling us, “You are my child, my beloved; in
you I am well pleased.” Do you
believe this or are you feeling that somehow you are living your life short changed? I think God just wants us to be who we are –
nothing more, nothing less. But I know
for a fact that God loves you and is
well pleased with you, because you are his child! There isn’t any more that I can say on this
fact, other than ask you if you really believe that God is well pleased with
you? You don’t have to do anything for
that approval, but just be yourself.
Whether we have gone through a formal baptismal ceremony or not, the
fact is, that we are all baptized in God’s love, we just have to understand how
happy God is that each one of us is his child.
Amen
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