The Father Is Pleased with You

I want to read to you what I think is the most profound Father's Day text I know. Matthew 3:13. Hear the word of God. 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, 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 the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. The voice from heaven said, "This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased." Let us pray.

Holy Father, we've gathered here to place our lives in front of your word. No mere mortal words will do. So we ask that you would be gracious to our seeking of that holy word, a word inspired by holy scriptures, that only your Holy Spirit can speak to us. Trusting this in the name of the word made flesh, Jesus Christ, amen.

Earlier in Matthew's third chapter and in the other gospels of the New Testament, we're given a little description about John the Baptist. This is probably not the kind of guy you'd spend a lot of time hanging around with. He was a rather extreme person. We're told that he wore camel hair coats with a large leather belt around it. He stayed out in the desert where he ate wild honey and locusts. Really, John? Locusts? He had a habit of offending most of the people he talked to. He loved to offend the religious leaders. His favorite title for them was "Bruid of Vipers." And that doesn't really catch on with religious leaders.

He would come periodically out of one of the caves in the desert where he stayed, and he would speak to a congregation of people that would gather around him, and he would say to them, "Repent." To repent actually just means to turn around. The word in the Greek is metanoia. It means if you were walking this way and you realized you were going the wrong direction, you would repent, turn around. That's a metanoia experience. You would turn and walk in the right direction. John was trying to tell people, "You're headed in the wrong direction. Repent. Get your life right." And then he would start to warn them, because I'm telling you what, the Messiah is coming.

And when he comes, he is going to drag down unquenchable fire from the heavens. He's going to have a winnowing fork in his hand. I don't even know what that is, but I don't think it's good. He's going to use that fork to separate the chaff from the wheat. He's going to take the chaff. He's going to throw it into all of that fire. And those of you who've been heading in the wrong direction whose life is not right, you're going to get nailed. Actually, you're going to get burned. So you better get life right. I don't think John got a lot of dinner invitations. It's not the kind of person you just want to chat with.

He had really one message, and it was your basic turn or burn kind of preaching. At the seminary where I teach, we call this bad dog preaching. Where a preacher stands up in front of the congregation, shakes his finger and says, "You bad, bad dogs. Bad dog. Look what you did, bad dog. Don't do that in here. Take that outside. Bad dog." Now, the fascinating thing to me as a person who's been a pastor for 30 years now is how many people really like the bad dog sermon. They sit out there like a congregation of golden retrievers. Got these big droopy eyes. Their heads a little down. They say, "You're right. I did it again. I'm a bad dog." It's really relatively popular.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago, my professors there were just fascinated by this popularity of the bad dog preaching. They just couldn't really figure it out. It's always been popular. In fact, we're told that it was popular even when John the Baptist was doing it. The third chapter of Matthew tells us that the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going to him. All Judea. That doesn't leave out a lot. It's always been popular preaching to hear this judgmental warning, "Bad, bad dogs." These professors I had in graduate school just couldn't figure this out. Why do people want to be judged?

They were concerned not only by judgmental preaching in Christianity, but there's also a stream of this in Judaism. In those days, we were just paying attention to this angry fundamentalist rise in Islam. These professors did what scholars will often do when they're confused. They put together a panel discussion. A highly esteemed psychologist was the first one to speak on this panel. She said that she was relatively convinced that people will flock to a church that's going to wag their finger at them and give them judgment and talk about fire coming from the skies because they're all convinced that the preacher is talking about somebody they don't like. In the end, that guy's going to get nailed. That makes him feel better.

The next person to speak was a Marxist historian, which is an unfortunate thing to be these days. He had a discredited theory, but he went ahead and took a shot at it anyway. He said that the people who like hearing all about all this judgment and destruction are what he called the proletariat, the underclass of society, people for whom the economic system is not working. They just soon have God go ahead and blow a little fire on the whole thing. We could start over. Thank you. Next.

The theologian spoke next, and I think he was probably the person who was most confused of all. He said he just couldn't believe that on this side of the 18th and early 19th century enlightenment that people would still believe any of this stuff, much less religion itself. This is a theologian. He thought that the rise of judgmental religion was simply illustration of a kind of mass pathology. What? I went ahead and took notes on all this stuff because it could be on the test. I don't know. But I'd been a pastor for a few years before going back to graduate school, and I had an idea of my own.

This was my idea. Could it be that judgmental religion is popular because we think we deserve to be judged? That's my theory. Judgment is what we know best. We are judged from the moment we leave the womb. A while back, I went to visit one of our new mothers in the hospital right after she had given birth. And when I got to the room, I noticed that she was crying. And I just assumed she was just crying from exhaustion or maybe from the delight of this healthy baby boy that she had just given birth to. No. She was crying because they had just tested her baby boy with the standardized test they use for all babies called the Apcar.

Thank you. The Apcar test. It's a test in which they evaluate the baby from a one to 10 scale, and her little boy had some twisty toe or something. He didn't get a 10. He's a healthy baby, but he didn't get a 10 on the test. She said he's only been alive one day. He's already got his first B minus. And so it will go for every other day for the rest of his life. There is always somebody taking a judgment upon you. You will constantly be judged by your friends, by your teachers, the coaches, your college, your spouse, your employer, dating. Anybody out there dating? You know a lot about being judged.

We were judged by our parents when we were children. We are judged by our children when we become parents. And we are judged most of all and most severely of all by that person who just keeps showing up in the bathroom mirror. And the judgment is almost never good enough. So sure, we'll join all of Judea and stand with them on the banks of the Jordan River. And we'll hear John's bad dog sermons not good enough and we will say, "Amen, you preach it John." So the people would not only come and hear these severe sermons, but they would also be baptized, which is why we call them John the Baptist.

Now John the Baptist's baptism was different than Christian baptism. The people would come and they would say, "I'm going to do better." Basically what they're saying when they hear John's sermon is, "You're right. I'm going to repent. I'm going to turn life around. I'm going to get things right." And to symbolize that, they would go down into the Jordan and John would pour water on them as a symbolic way of saying he's going to wash away their sins, as if we could ever do that through our own effort. The problem is that the next week people would go back to Jerusalem and all Judea and they would keep sinning. And they would go, "Aye, aye, aye." So they would go back to the Jordan the next week, confess their sins once again, get all washed up and cleaned up again.

And the futility of this just kept going on and on and on again, thinking that the next time they'll get it right. You see, John's religion was not complicated. He claimed it's up to you to fix your life. And if you do, when the judgment comes, you'll be spared. I think we like John's message, or at least we understand it because frankly, it's the same religion we face at school and at work and tragically often at home. It's a religion that says it's up to you to work harder. And if things aren't right, it's because you haven't tried hard enough.

The reason we like that message is that it appeals to something heroic in us. We think if we just try a little bit harder, the next time we'll get it right. And when things aren't going well, that's when we get all freaky with control. We try not only to control our own life, but their lives and people around us, thinking that if we just took control, we can make things right for everybody. Is that working for anyone in the room, by the way? Of course not. Who thinks they have life just right?

Sometimes we keep trying different ways to get life right, but it doesn't matter what your agenda is, you're never going to make life right on your own. A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, fascinating articles written by therapists and some psychologists, noting a significant change in what they're finding in their therapeutic sessions with those who are in their 20s. And the theory of the psychologists and the therapists is that those who are in their 20s were raised by baby boomers. And their baby boomer parents thought that they could make their lives right if they just worked hard enough to become a success.

And they did work hard, and many of them did become a success, but they still didn't feel like their life was right. So when they started having children, they decided they were going to raise their children differently. And these parents said, "I just want my kid to be happy." And so for 20 years, these children were raised in homes where their parents did everything to ensure their children's happiness and to try to make sure they didn't hurt, they weren't in want, and whatever the kids wanted or needed, they wanted to make sure they got that because they just wanted happy kids.

But that has created its own set of problems now, therapeutically, for the kids who were raised in that environment. They gave a wonderful case study of a young woman who came to see her therapist and said, "You know, I'm just not happy." So the therapist kind of kicked into all of the things he would normally then do when someone says that. He started to talk about her parents. He says, "Well, describe your father to me." Expecting her father to be very distracted with business and didn't give her much time. But she said, "No, my father hovered around me all the time. He was very compassionate, very caring. He was always at home. He was a great dad. I love him like crazy."

Okay. Well, tell me about your mom. I bet she was overly critical. No, my mom was completely accepting. We'd stay at nights late talking and tell you the truth, she's my best friend. Really? Oh, yeah. Well, tell me about the rest of your life. Turns out that she's now in her own apartment, which she loves. She's in a job that she thinks is just perfect for her. She has really good and supportive friends who are around her all the time. She drives a totally cool car. The therapist says, "Now, let's go over this again. Why are you here?" She says, "Well, of course, I am happy, but I think I could be happier."

So then the psychologists and the therapist began to theorize. And these men and women in this article who are making these theories give no evidence of any spiritual commitment, but they make a profound spiritual insight. They said, "Happiness is fine when it comes along the way, but if you make it the goal of your life, you're going to inevitably dismantle the blessings that you have been given." They said, "Happiness cannot make you right." Well, there it is. That's the point today.

Just as success cannot make your life right, even if you get all the circumstances of your life arranged just perfectly and you should be happy, that's not going to make you right either. The one thing that will make you right is what we find in our text today, the day when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Messiah, the one who saves, showed up at the banks of the Jordan River, where people were trying so hard to get their life just right. He could have just as easily have showed up at the next job interview or the next date or at a wedding reception or at a retirement party or whatever other next thing you think is going to make your life right, which is all actually just as futile as going into the water and trying to wash away sin.

When Jesus does show up at the water, John the Baptist sees him. He points to him. He says, "Whoa, this is the guy I've been warning you about. This is the Messiah." But to John's dismay, Jesus does not pull fire down out of the sky. He didn't even bring his winnowing fork. Instead he comes up to John and he says, "Well, actually, I'm here to apply for baptism." John says, "What? I can't baptize you. I'm not even worthy to untie your thongs. You should baptize me. You're the guy we're all worried about. You're the standard we're trying to meet." They argue about this a little while. Jesus wins the argument, as is his nature.

And he wins the argument with this line, "This baptism is necessary to fulfill all righteousness. This is what will make all people right if a Savior comes to them and identifies with them." So, Jesus, this one who is completely without sin, identifies with the futility of the human condition. The baptism of Jesus is much like his incarnation when he was born. It's one coming to be with us among us. That changes everything. This is now how we're made right. Not by trying harder, but we're made right by a God who's come to find us.

That's what makes us right, being with God. It's an act of total grace. It's all about what God does, not what we do. When Jesus then submits to John's baptism for sinners, this one who is completely without sin, the Son of God, when he identifies and takes his place among all humanity. The Heavenly Father is so excited that he rips back the skies and he says, "This is my son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased." This is God's idea of saving our lives. Not that if you just try harder, you will eventually become good enough.

Nowhere in the Bible are we ever told that God is ever impressed with any human being trying hard. Now what pleases God, why God is so pleased with Jesus, is that he found us. I think it's very significant that Jesus does not receive the designation of being the beloved Son of God, the beloved, until his baptism. That term, the beloved, doesn't even show up in the infancy narratives or when Jesus was born in the Virgin Marriott. It shows up at his baptism at a time when Jesus identifies with us in an identification that is so total and so complete that when the Heavenly Father says, "This is my son, the beloved," he's saying that about you too because at that point you've been identified with Jesus, which means you are the beloved with whom the Father is so pleased.

Do you remember how much you always wanted to hear those words from your dad? Maybe it was at school or in athletics or some other goal. You gave it your best effort. You tried as hard as you could, but again the judgment was not really good enough. You would have given anything if your dad would have just come up and put his armor on your shoulders and said, "Hey, it's okay. I love you. I am so pleased with you." Some of you had fathers who were great at that. Others had fathers who were too broken to ever say that.

This text proclaims this is exactly what the Heavenly Father proclaims to you, that he loves you. He could not be more pleased with you, not because of what you've done or not done. Frankly, he's pleased with you because of what Jesus has done, found you, and he brought you home. That's what makes you right, being at home with the Father. Some of you can try to protest and say, "You know, I may not be a saint, but I'm not the worst person I know. I haven't done everything right, but I've done some things right. I can think of one or two." You can say, "Look, I've worked hard through my whole life. I really have. I've worked hard. I've worked much from God. I just want what I deserve." Really?

I'm sometimes amazed as a pastor when someone in the church will say, "You know, our group isn't getting enough of the budget, and we do a lot around here. And Pastor, we just want what we deserve." I always start to smile when I hear that phrase, and I said, "No. Trust me, that's not what you want." When it comes to God, the last thing you want is what you deserve. What you want is what you need, and what you need is grace, God giving you Himself in Jesus Christ.

In Christian baptism, just as Jesus identified with our futility, in Christian baptism, we identify with Jesus' love for us. We identify with this God who came not only to find us, but who went to the cross, dying for our sins, for everything that was never right enough, taking on the judgment for us, dying to love us. So when we're baptized, we accept that, we take it on. We receive this extraordinary gift of love, and that changes all of the rest of your days.

If you pay attention to this voice from heaven saying, "I'm so pleased with you." Every Father's Day, I think about my dad. My dad was also a pastor. My uncle was a pastor. I have a brother who's a pastor. I'm a pastor. This is kind of our family business, which scares our guys quite a bit, actually. This is just what we seem to do. My dad was very big on verse memorization, and every Sunday, we would receive a little white card that had a verse typed out on it. We had to have that scripture verse memorized by the following Saturday at dinner.

Because at dinner, my dad would point to one of us on Saturday night, and he would say whatever that verse was, the reference. Romans 8:28. "If you didn't start chirping away, all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose, my dad would excuse you from the dinner table, and you'd have to go to your room until you memorized the verse, then you could come back and finish dinner." Now, I totally, as a kid, did not get any of this. The whole concept baffled me, memorizing the verses. I kept saying, "Dad, they're all written down right here." My father was very worried about the godless communist coming to steal our Bibles like they did in China. This was a while ago, as you can tell. I didn't think that was going to happen.

But I went ahead and memorized my verses because I was not leaving that dinner table on Saturday night. In other words, I took all these verses inside me without ever really paying attention to them. I memorized them because I really had to. In addition to my brother Gary, we had an older adopted brother, Roger, who was killed in Vietnam. My parents internalized their grief. Neither of them did a very good job with it. As a result of that, the grief became a source of separation in their marriage, along with some other pressures in their marriage. They just kept drifting further and further apart.

When I was 16 years old, my mom left my dad. We were raised on Long Island in New York. My mom had family in Dallas, Texas. She flew to Dallas, Texas. She told my dad she wasn't coming home. Then she had a bit of a breakdown and spent a lot of time in and out of treatment in Dallas. In those days, churches didn't really know what to do when the pastor went through a divorce. The church asked my dad just to leave quietly, which is what he did. My father was kind of a John the Baptist kind of preacher himself. He was so shamed by the failure of his marriage, he was so shamed that he couldn't live up to his own sense of try harder message.

He was so shamed that he lost the church that he had actually planted and started himself. He knew little about the grace of God. My dad, with all this shame and no sense of God's grace or forgiveness, one day got in the car and just drove away. My brother and I never saw him again. I was 16 years old. All this happened in the course of one summer. My mom is gone and is not coming back. My father got in a car one day and just left. I knew it was going to happen. Blessedly, my older brother, who was at Cornell University at the time, chose to drop out of school and he came back to the island and got a job working construction just so that he could support me until I could finish high school. He's always been my hero figure.

The end of that summer, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do and what our future would be. Things were made more complicated when the church came to us and said, "We're really sorry about what happened to your parents, but we're trying to move on from all of this." We think it'd probably be better if you guys found another church. That's the point, of course, we had to move out of the parsonage where we were living. We got a cheap apartment that my brother paid for with this bottom of the line construction job where he was carrying cinder blocks for masons while I went to high school.

We didn't talk about it too much through the fall, which you may find difficult to believe unless you've had teenage boys, which in case you know, they're not great with sharing their feelings and we didn't care to do that with each other. We just kept our heads down and kept moving until they got to Christmas. We decided that we should go see our mom because she was feeling better and she thought she could see us by then. Again, she was in Dallas. We were on Long Island in New York. We didn't have money to fly down there. My brother's old beat-up pickup wasn't about to make it that far. We didn't even have money for a bus ticket. We did what boys will sometimes do when they're not thinking clearly. We hitch-hiked.

On that first day, we got about as far as the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. We were on Interstate 81 and when it started to get dark, which wasn't bad. That was a good haul if you're traveling on your thumb in one day. But it was getting dark and then to our dismay, it started snowing. Now imagine that you're driving down a snowy interstate and it's dark and you see two guys with backpacks on the side hitch-hiking. You're not going to pick them up. Don't. You should not pick them up. As it started snowing harder and harder and harder, the cars kept going by. Everyone had listened to this advice and they were going past us. Then there were fewer and fewer cars. Then there was a long, long period where there were no headlights at all.

For the first time, my brother and I started to talk about what had happened to us. Gary was the one who said, "I can't figure out what we did wrong here. It just feels like a harsh judgment on us." He even said, "It just feels like we're disposable if everybody, even your parents, can kind of get by without you." That was about as far as we could go with the conversation. But that was exactly right. This was a dark, dark night, realizing that we were in a dark, dark time of life. About that time, two headlights finally showed up and thankfully slowed down and rolled up in front of us. Then we realized it was a Virginia State trooper.

Blessingly, it was a very gracious, kind trooper who got out of the car, came up to us and said, "Boys, I don't know how to tell you this, but we closed this interstate two hours ago." For two hours, we've been hitchhiking on a closed interstate. Now, in addition to feeling disposable, we feel stupid. Then the trooper said, "I'll tell you what. I have an accident. I got to get to further up the road. Let me take care of that. Then I'll swing back around if I can get back here and I'll pick you up and I'll take you to a diner where you can spend the night." That's exactly what eventually happened. It took him a long time to get back. But he did come back and he took us to a diner.

The next day, we got a ride with a trucker who took us almost all the way to Dallas and we did have a reunion with our mom. During that long, long period of time while we were waiting for the trooper to come back, we were just stuck on this exit ramp of an interstate all by ourselves in the snow with nothing to do but trying to get through the dark night, not really able to talk too much about what had happened to us. We had to do something. We tried quizzing each other on sports statistics but eventually you run out of even that stuff. So then it was quiet for a while. Then my brother looked at me. He even used my father's voice and he said, "Roman's 828."

So we spent the rest of that night quoting these verses of scripture that we had memorized but had never heard. But that night, I was ready to hear them. And when I got to Isaiah 43, I became overwhelmed. Fear not for I redeemed you. I've called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. The rivers will not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned and the flame will not consume you because you are precious and honored in my sight and I love you. And I knew on that darkest night that I had the love of a heavenly father who would never, ever leave me.

I would never be abandoned by this love. And I knew that as bad off as things seemed at that point, I could take on anything because my dad loved me. And he would always be with me and always loved me. My heavenly father was pleased with me. When you know that, you are made strengthened to take on whatever happens in life. You are made fearless because that's what perfect love does. It casts out fear. So that every Father's Day, I remember that what Christians are really celebrating is the love of a heavenly father who's the only one who can love you with perfect love that casts out all fear.

You see, as flawed and broken as my parents were, at least they gave me this. They gave me something stronger than they were so that when they could not be there for me, I knew the heavenly father was. And frankly, for all of you who are moms and dads, this may be your greatest calling, to instill into your children's heart something stronger than you are. Because someday they're going to need a love stronger than the one you have for them. They're going to need the love of a heavenly father. It's the only perfect love there is and the only one that can cast out fear.

Those who have found this perfect love of God in the low places, they just enjoy the rest of the ride. The whole roller coaster of ups and downs in life, it's not so much scary as much as it's adventure to them because they know they're not going to get anywhere where they're below the love of God. If you found the love of God in the low places, you can enjoy the ups and the downs. It's all a way of experiencing more love, but you're never going to go lower than the love of God. You cannot.

Which is why those who have said yes to this grace of God, this father in heaven who says, "I'm so pleased with you," they take all kinds of adventure and risk. I've been through so many risky things in my life. Not because I expect to succeed. I want to be clear about that. And frequently, I have not succeeded. I take risk because I don't care if I fail. How bad is it going to be? Once you've just found the love of God in the low places, you can't fail below the love of God.

So no matter how badly the risk or the adventure or the passionate effort goes, no matter how bad the judgment is, I still get the love of God, that perfect love that cast out all fear. So how bad can it be? Am I going to be broke? I've been broke. Am I going to be unemployed? I've been unemployed. Am I going to be all alone? I've been all alone. I've been all alone again since that night when I was 16. Am I going to do something embarrassing or stupid? I've already hitched Ike on a closed interstate. And the love of God was still there, this perfect love that cast out all fear.

The people who believe that the Father is pleased with them are the freest people I know. They are not slaves to anyone else's judgment. They will not be judged not by their parents, not by their children, not by their spouse, not by their ex-spouse, not by their boss, not by themselves. They will not be slaves to low self-esteem. They will not be slaves to the mistakes and the failures and the sins of the past. They will not be slaves to some illusion that the next idea will surely make their lives right because they have been set free by a Father who loves them.