Sermon: Becoming the Beloved (Matthew 3:13-17)

Reflection on Matthew 3:13-17

Preached at Hope United Church on January 11, 2026.

Scripture Reading: Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Audio Recording:

Transcript:

“Being the beloved is the origin and the fulfilment of the life of the Spirit.”

So says the renowned theologian Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved, where he reflects on Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, and the moment that the voice of God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

For Nouwen, this statement… being the beloved… extends to all of us. The moment that we acknowledge that we, too, are beloved children of God, we allow God to claim us.

I remember during my first year of seminary, I enrolled in a class called Multi-Religious Theological Education and Leadership. I had recently returned to the church after a somewhat mystical call to ministry, and I was still figuring out my relationship to the Faith.

Although I was raised Christian, I had also spent many formative years exploring other spiritual traditions and contemporary forms of spirituality. So when I entered seminary, I carried a vision: to help make spirituality accessible, and to build bridges between Christianity and other ways of understanding God.

That’s why I decided to enroll in two degrees at Emmanuel College — the Master of Divinity and the Master of Psycho-Spiritual Studies — training both as a minister and a psychotherapist.

So for this class, Multi-Religious Theological Education and Leadership, we were asked to interview someone who embodied the kind of work we one day hoped to do. So I interviewed a man I’ll call Mr. M.

Mr. M was a Christian with an interfaith life. His sister is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher — the very same teacher I had travelled with to India years earlier. He was raised Eastern Catholic, I Protestant. He had worked in congregational or parish ministry and was also a psychotherapist. He was someone who bridged worlds, which is what I was hoping to do.

So when I sat down to interview him, the first thing he said to me shocked me.

He said, “Much of our theology is toxic and immature.”

Oh? Well. That got my attention.

I asked him what he meant.

He said, “We often begin theology with sin and redemption. But a good theology begins with original blessing and original divinity.”

This idea stayed with me for some time.

Now it wasn’t entirely foreign to me, and perhaps it’s not that foreign to you.

To be made in the image of God suggests that there is something inherently good, something blessed, about being human.

In Buddhism, it’s said that to be born human is a great privilege — because only human beings can awaken spiritually. To be human, and to encounter spiritual teaching at all, is considered a sign of even greater blessing.

So it made sense to me that human life could be deeply blessed and that a part of us, the human soul perhaps, might even be divine… even amidst all of the suffering that we as human beings experience, and even amongst the real pain and injustice of our world.

But how did that idea – the idea that we are blessed, divine, and beloved - fit with the wider church’s emphasis on original sin? Now the United Church of Canada does not emphasize the doctrine of original sin, and yet we must admit that this idea has its roots in Western Christianity and most of us grew up with this idea of sin looming over our heads… even if we didn’t agree with it.

And I will be honest in saying it was this idea that turned me away from the Faith for many years.

So as I continued studying theology, this became clearer in my mind and heart.

One thing that I discovered was that the doctrine of original sin was coined by the historic church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, a 4th-5th century theologian.

Interestingly, the doctrine itself is not explicitly found in Scripture, and many branches of Eastern Christianity do not believe in original sin, or hold the same ideas as the Western Church.

Yet in the West, Augustine’s theology became foundational, for better or for worse.

I have met many people who grew up with a version of original sin that contributed to deep feelings of guilt and shame… where the idea of being beloved, blessed, or divine felt completely inaccessible.

Maybe some of you know that experience.

I remember my evangelical grandmother saying to me as a teenager, “Jesus died for your sins.”
And honestly, my teenage brain didn’t get it.

What sins? I thought. How did someone who lived two thousand years ago die for my sins now?

More recently, I’ve come to read some of St. Augustine’s work more carefully — including his Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love — which is a pretty short treatise on Augustine’s theology, translated from Latin.

And I was very surprised to read that St. Augustine actually insists that human beings are originally good. And that the very fact that we exist is because of the goodness of the Creator. And even though there is this idea that we have ‘fallen’, our goodness was never erased.

This is why redemption is possible at all - because goodness remains. Because within us is the capacity for Christ, the divine life that Jesus fully embodied.

This vision is echoed beautifully by the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich.

In her visionary work Revelations of Divine Love, Julian describes humanity’s fall not as guilt deserving punishment, but as suffering deserving compassion.

She had a vision of a Lord and a servant — the servant is Adam, representing all of humanity. The Lord of course is God. And in this vision she describes the Lord and the servant as having a deep mutual love and affection for one another. The servant wants to please the Lord, and the Lord unconditionally loves the servant. And so in her vision, she sees the servant running off to eagerly serve the Lord, and while running trips and falls into a ditch, and is badly hurt. The servant now in the ditch, can no longer see the Lord, and falls into deep despair.

The Lord, seeing that the servant has been hurt, feels deep compassion and care for the servant who is now in pain. And so, God, through the person of Jesus, the Christ, descends into the ditch to retrieve the servant… And in this way, through Jesus, God descends into the ditch with Adam, uniting himself fully with humanity to prevent “endless death.”

The idea of ‘Sin’, in this vision, is not something to be punished, or even something that we have done wrong… it is pain that has afflicted God’s beloved, that God longs to heal.

And so, this brings us back to the waters of baptism.

At the Jordan, Jesus does not repent of sin.
He does not earn approval.
He simply receives a name.

Beloved.

And that same belovedness rests on us.

The idea of original sin was never meant to chain us. It was never meant to erase our worth or create guilt and shame for simply being human. It was meant to liberate us… to explain why a beloved humanity can still cause harm — it explains why human beings have been at war for over 98% of our lived history… why systemic injustices exist, why entire peoples have been oppressed and abused…

And it explains why we live as dual beings – there is an inner tension between the Spirit and the ego, between love and fear. We have the seed of the divine within us, that through God’s grace can come to flourish, and yet we are susceptible to egoic emotions - such as greed, fear, jealousy, exaggerated pride, and pettiness.

And yet, God still says: You are mine.

So today let us imagine that we are entering the waters of the Jordan.

We are coming to be cleansed and refreshed by love.
To be reconciled within ourselves.
To remember who we are.

And over us, as over Jesus, God speaks:

“You are my beloved. With you, I am well pleased.”

As Henri Nouwen reminds us:
“Being the beloved is the origin and the fulfilment of the life of the Spirit.”

Being beloved is where we begin, and it is where we will end.
Being beloved is both our origin and our destiny.

Amen.