Yeah, But...

And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."

-Matthew 3:17

As I was preparing my sermon last week, I kept coming back to the identity that is revealed in Jesus' baptism: The Son, The Beloved. I found myself asking a whole bunch of theological questions about the idea that when we are "in Christ," which is in fact the central claim of the New Testament, we share that identity.  It was one of those weeks where I'm not sure my training in theology was helpful; so many of the questions began with "Yeah, but..."

For those not familiar with the beautiful, but frustrating discipline of formal theological discourse, it often seems from a distance as an exercise in talking a lot but not saying anything. The process of making concrete statements about something as ineffable as the divine nature is fraught with uncertainty. It doesn't take very long reading Kierkegaard, or the dialogue/argument between Kant and Hume, to realize that, once upon a time, theology was the realm of intellectual giants, and for good reason. It also doesn't take very long to realize that these intellectual giants, weren't always going to be pragmatically useful to the "average" seeker.  The work was desperately important though; at the dawn of the scientific age, intense exploration needed to be done into the foundations of human being or else we risk losing our humanity.

I maintain that we still need to practice this theology, even if it doesn't necessarily make for winsome sermon illustrations, and so I often spend a good part of my week wrestling with asking questions that may not matter much to anyone else, and sorting through whether or not it needs to be said out loud. As I set up my theological questions about the identity of Christ as the Beloved, it became increasingly obvious that, in my own mind, I was having trouble actually accepting that identity, not for Jesus, but for myself.  It seemed rather presumptuous after all, and I have been the student/victim of several hundred years of "reformed" doctrine, that starts with our fallen, sinful nature.  I also have a pretty good handle on the reality that I am, indeed, a wretched sinner, incapable of doing good apart from God. So the implication that "In Christ," my identity is different, was giving me trouble.

As it turns out, this has been a problem for people for a very long time, since the very beginning really.  The Apostle Paul goes through this same internal dialogue in his letter to Romans and elsewhere: "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Romans 7: 24-25)  It is very difficult to put aside our "body of death" that is held in a seemingly unbreakable bondage to sin and shame and trust that God's love extends to us.  When we glimpse the reality, of God's love, our sinful nature immediately wants to rationalize it away with a whole slew of "Yeah, but..." statements.  Of course our theology gets fraught and opaque when we cannot fundamentally accept that our core identity is that of the Beloved.

The Spirit is the only way we are able to gain clarity on this front.  We need to hear it and be assured of it, pretty much daily.  As I do this preaching thing for longer and longer, I'm finding that there is really only one sermon to preach in a thousand different ways: God loves you.