A sermon preached by the Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville, on the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, Sunday, January 12, 2025.
I am not ordinarily one for self-help books or pop-psychology. Its not that I have anything against them. I know that many people find these things helpful. If you are one of those people, don’t let anything I say take away from that. It is that just, for me, I am generally not drawn to that sort of advice.
That said, I was drawn recently to an article that appeared online that touted the “Power of Positive Affirmations”. The article claimed that “research shows that positive thinking can rewire your brain, changing the way you feel about things.”
These positive affirmations are simply positive statements that help you deal with negative feelings, thoughts, and situations. Teachers of the practice tell us that they should be guided by the “three P’s.” No, they are not, “price, price, and price.” Rather they are (1) present, (2) personal, and (3) positive. They should be rooted in the present moment and stated in the present tense; they should be personal, they should be about you; and they are positive, which is to say that they should be aspirational and encourage positive thinking. The Internet—which we know is full of wisdom—describes all sorts of benefits that come from this practice, backed up with significant research.
This may sound too simple; we may have difficultly believing that repeating the same words will change anything about the reality of our life or life around us. But the science argues that positive affirmations work because of what is called ‘neuroplasticity,’ basically the brain’s ability to adapt to new situations.
Have you ever found yourself watching a television program that you really were not enjoying. Perhaps it is some dreadful reality TV program, or an inane drama. Or perhaps, like me, you find yourself glued again to CNN. Sometimes we forget that we can just change the channel. That same little device that lets us turn the TV on, lets us change the channel.
Positive affirmations are a way of changing the channel from the negative thoughts that we too often give space to in our heads, and the messages that we receive from unhelpful voices that tell us that we aren’t good enough, not rich enough, not beautiful enough, not smart enough, not … enough. We listen to these voices, and despite our efforts to believe otherwise, they have a way of wearing us down so that we begin to believe what we are being told even though it is untrue. These messages are mostly lies. But it can be hard to change the channel once we have given space to these messages in our heads.
Positive affirmations help us change the channel. They include messages that for example might say,
- I grow and improve every day.
- I appreciate the opportunities I'vebeen given.
- My life is full of potential.
- I give myself permission to be myself.
- I have the power to change.
- I am courageous.
- I’mallowed to have needs and take up space.
- I am valued.
- I am worthy of love.
- I am enough.
These messages may not seem terribly radical, but they might just change the channel enough to let you breathe again.
Today we are celebrating the Baptism of Our Lord. On this Sunday we are often encouraged and reminded to remember our own baptisms. That often sounds rather difficult for those of us who were baptized as infants. I was about six weeks old when I was baptized. There is nothing I remember about that day. Except, I do remember what I have been told, that on that day I was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and incorporated and welcomed into the fellowship of God’s people. I remember that God said that I am his own beloved child. That is, after all, the affirmation that Jesus himself heard on the day of his baptism, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (v. 22b).
One of the things that often troubles people, churchgoers and biblical scholars alike, is that Jesus submitted to the baptism of John. Among the theological questions that this passage raises is a particularly thorny one: when John’s baptism is so clearly tied to judgment and repentance, why does Jesus get baptized? Up to this point Luke has gone to extraordinary literary measures to establish Jesus’ holiness, which he later reiterates in the temptation scene; so why does the voice from heaven declare Jesus’ participation in a baptism of repentance to be a pleasing gesture?
In Luke’s Gospel, the story of Jesus’ baptism comes before a genealogy and his account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. It is easy to pass over the seemingly banal genealogy that directly follows the baptism, but it holds a clue to our question. The lineage starts with Jesus both joined to and separated from Joseph; it ends with the leap from Seth, the son of Adam, to Adam, the son of God. Along the way, Jesus’ religious and royal lines are established, but not without residual traces of the memory of tragic choices and destructive actions. In fact, Seth’s location in the genealogy causes these traces to linger. Seth is the son born to Adam and Eve, whom tradition considered a replacement for Abel, killed by his brother Cain (Gen 4:25). Jesus stands in a stream of men (they are all men, as Luke, unlike Matthew, does not include women in his genealogy), who show great courage, personal flaws, competing interests, and fragile heroisms.
Jesus was born from—as well as into—a world of systemic sin, and his baptism is a signal that he understood the full implications of the incarnation. He was not merely identifying with or showing solidarity with the human world; he was fully acknowledging its tragic structure. There is no innocent, no perfect, no unambiguous, no controllable, indeed no sinless, choices in this world. All choices must be made within a context of a system that precedes and impinges upon them. All life is touched by sin.
Jesus presented himself for baptism as an act of solidarity with a nation and a world of sinners. Jesus simply got in line with everyone who had been broken by the “wear and tear” of this selfish world and had all but given up on themselves and their God. When the line of downtrodden and sin-sick people formed to receive John’s baptism, in hopes of new beginnings through a return to God, Jesus joined them. At his baptism, he identified with the damaged and broken people who needed God. If there is anything that Jesus does that God is applauding, it is this.
One of the things that is distinctive of Luke’s telling of the story of Jesus’ baptism is that he says virtually nothing about the actual baptism of Jesus. He tells us only the events after “all the people,” including Jesus, have been baptized. Luke may have done this to avoid the question that apparently troubled Matthew, and which we have spoken about, why Jesus would submit to a baptism of repentance by John, especially if John is “not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” But more positively, Luke adds to Mark’s account that it is while Jesus “was praying” that “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him.” This shifts the experience of the epiphany from the act of being baptized to the practice of prayer.
Throughout his Gospel, Luke will show us Jesus praying. He prays before he calls his first disciples (6:12); before he asks the who they think he is (9:18); at the time of his transfiguration (9:29), before teaching his disciples how to pray (11:1); and on the night of his arrest (22:31); and finally at his death (22:41).
For Luke, this characteristic of Jesus as a person who prays will also be a characteristic of his church. In Luke’s sequel to his Gospel—The Book of Acts of the Apostles—Luke shows us the church in prayer as they wait for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:8, 14). And after the Holy Spirit comes upon them at Pentecost, they continue a regular practice of prayer (Acts 2:42, et. al). Jesus was empowered for and guided in his ministry through prayer, so too are his followers down to this day.
As we remember our own baptism today, we might reflect upon how we are called by God into God’s mission and empowered, first through our baptism, but then through prayer. What is our experience of prayer? What moments of epiphany does our life of prayer and worship provide us? What does our communion with God in prayer teach us about God and about ourselves? How does our relationship with God, nurtured in prayer, empower us to live as God’s beloved?
As for the message of the voice from heaven that Jesus receives, Luke follows Mark’s wording exactly, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (3:22). This message is directed to Jesus himself, rather than to the listeners in the crowd as in Matthew’s telling of this story (Mt 3:17). This is a message for Jesus’ own self-understanding as God’s Son. The actual words draw upon the biblical tradition. Psalm 2, verse 7, has these words used at the coronation of Israel’s king as the son of God; and Isaiah 42, verse 1, provides a description of the servant of God. The biblical concept of the ‘Son of God,’ refers not only to God’s sovereignty, but to God’s service.
In conclusion, I would invite us to consider the power of such an affirmation as comes to us in our own baptism in our own lives. “You are my child,” God says. “You are beloved.” “I am well pleased with you.”
When we receive an affirmation such as this from a significant person in our lives, we are strengthened in our identity, will, and our ability to act from that secure identity. Without such an affirmation, most people will struggle with low self-esteem. Most people will struggle with the messages the world too often pushes upon us, telling us that we are not good enough. The good news is that we are—we are in Christ, each of us—“the beloved children of God.”
This morning, I am taking a page from Sarah’s sermon last week where she concluded, sending us home at the end of the service with a word to carry us through the year. I heard many of you comment on how apt you found your unique word to be.
This morning, I would like to send you each home with a ‘positive affirmation.’ Tape it to a mirror, post it on the fridge, fold it up and put it in your wallet, but repeat it often. It will speak the truth to you. May it help you to change the channel from the lies you have been told. Unlike Sarah’s words she gifted us with, the affirmations you will receive are not unique. They are all the same. They will have us speak to ourselves the truth about ourselves and remind us, “I am a beloved child of God.” +
