You Are My Son... Now Go Act Like It!

It's been a while since I posted my sermons, and for that I apologize. With the new year, I'll pick it back up, and (hopefully) post them sometime before midnight local time each night. This, of course, remains to be seen... but eight pm on Saturday night seems a good way to start, doesn't it?

There are so many wonderful directions to take the Scripture passages this Sunday. What is the "unquenchable fire?" Is it Hell, as so many people believe, or is it a cleansing, Holy Spirit fire, burning off that chaff within us that is not good seed? That's just one of the directions I wanted to go... but did not. Perhaps next year, eh?

The story of the Princeton Professor comes from Lindy Black of Lindy's Nuggets, by the way. It's one of my go-to locations for insight and often-awesome one-liners.

Please feel free to offer insights and constructive criticisms.

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Acts 8:14-17

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Our reading from the Book of Acts takes place very early on in the life of the Church. This passage follows the stoning of Stephen, when there is great persecution against the group of believers in Jerusalem.

Up until this point, amazing things had been happening, and the Church had been growing by leaps and bounds, but it had been confined to that one city. Even within the conflicts that church leaders had with the Jewish authorities, there was a common knowledge and experience. With this new outbreak of persecution, though, most Christians leave the city, and in fleeing the persecution spread the message of new life in Jesus Christ all across the region.

Even in, of all places, Samaria.

The person who first preached the Good News to Samaria had to either be the bravest person in Judea, or someone with such a poor sense of direction that they had no idea where they were when they evangelized.

After all, no self-respecting Jewish person would so much as speak to a Samaritan; much less spend enough time in their corner of the province to preach a message! They were… different, after all. Ethnically, Jewish people considered the Samaritans to be mutts: though the Samaritans claimed to be purely descendents of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh and Levi, Jewish tradition held that they were a mixture of the bottom-of-the-heap Jews and the foreigners that the Assyrian king, Sargon II, brought in to repopulate the area. This was after the more gifted and powerful had been taken when the Assyrians defeated the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC.

And make no mistake; the Samaritans despised their Jewish counterparts just as much. Quite aside from the open xenophobia, where the very idea of a Jewish person’s foot touching the dirt of a Samaritan town made them unclean, there was the very real (and often violent) dispute over what books of Scripture were truly holy, and where the center of worship should be. For the Jews, of course, this was Jerusalem, on the mount known either as Moriah or Zion, depending on the Biblical scholar. But for the Samaritans, the place where God had chosen to establish God’s name was Mount Gerizim. Further, the Samaritans recognized only the Torah, or the first five books of our Old Testament, as being authoritative and holy.

So as much as we might think that the Jews and Samaritans were related by blood and tradition, and called upon the name of the same God, the revulsion each group felt for the other was an insurmountable obstacle.

Until the apostle Philip walked in to that one Samaritan village and told whoever would listen that God, in Jesus Christ, loved them… and the people who heard the Good News believed. By the way, Philip has no problem with his sense of direction. We meet him very soon after this passage, preaching the Gospel to an Ethiopian eunuch. Perhaps unique among the Apostles at that point in history, Philip truly sees no limitations on the love of God. When Jesus told him to go into to all the world and preach the Gospel, Philip took him literally.

I really wish that the writer of the Book of Acts had given us a little more detail about the moment when the Apostles heard about how the Samaritans had come to believe in Jesus. All we are told is that when they heard it they sent Peter and John to them, and that’s what counts, of course. But given the history of animosity between Jews and Samaritans, could it have been that simple?

Well, yes, given the fact that the apostles were so sensitive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it certainly could have been. But I like to imagine a scene where Philip walks in to the Apostle’s room – in my head it’s the Main Office, and the apostles are sitting at a big first-century conference table doing apostle-y things. Philip is sweaty and out of breath from his hurried journey, covered in dust from the road. Everyone is happy to see him of course, until he blurts out: “Guys! Guys! The Samaritans believe!”

Ten mouths hang open in shock, everyone staring at Philip. The stunned silence goes on forever. Of course, in my imagination, the first person to speak is Thomas, and you know he has to say, “I doubt that,” right?

But it was true, and from that point on the Gospel spread like wildfire, from the Samaritans to that eunuch I mentioned, to the Gentiles, and on and on and on. No one was off limits. No one was unreachable.

And, in this regard, let me be clear: nothing has changed: today, right now, no one is off limits to the love of God. No one is unreachable to the grace and forgiveness found in Jesus Christ.

This is the day in the liturgical calendar when the Church commemorates the baptism of Jesus. It is a familiar account to most of us: when Jesus is baptized, the heavens are opened and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, and a voice from heaven says “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

The story is told of a New Testament professor from Princeton Seminary who visited a high school youth group one evening. After the professor finished speaking about the significance of Christ's baptism as a revelation of God's presence in Jesus, one high schooler said, without looking up, "That ain't what it means."

Now, as someone who did youth work for a long time, I can tell you that it’s a good sign when a student disagrees. It means they’re listening. Luckily, this professor understood that. So the professor asked, "What do you think it means?"

The young man still didn’t look up. "The story says that the heavens were opened, right?" "Right." "The heavens were opened and the Spirit of God came down, right?" "That's right."

The boy finally looked up and leaned forward, saying, "It means that God is on the loose in the world. And it is dangerous."

The professor was, of course, not wrong. At the baptism of Jesus, God’s imprint upon and intentions for his Son were made clear. Christ the King was anointed, but in a way unlike any other king before or since.

The idea of anointing someone or something is to set that person or thing apart, make him or her or it – or certainly, recognize him or her or it – as unique, special, honored. It’s usually done with pomp and circumstance, though not always, and it is almost invariably an act performed with oil.

And yes, that happened with the baptism of Jesus. But Jesus was not anointed king with oil. Hear the Word of God from our Gospel reading: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…” You see? Jesus was first anointed not with oil but with water – and in a manner no way unique. He was baptized just like everyone else.

The Holy Spirit which descended upon Jesus as he was praying is also, since the day of Pentecost, available to all who believe… even, as we see in our reading from the Book of Acts, a people so hated, so removed, so unlovable as the Samaritans.

Bishop Desmond Tutu tells of a time when he was a parish priest, and was giving a Bible exam to some young people. One of the questions on the exam was “What did the voice from Heaven say to Jesus when he was baptized?” Most of the kids got the answer right, but one of the “wrong” answers stood out in Bishop Tutu’s memory: “You’re my son. Now go act like it.”

Whether we were sprinkled or dunked, whether we were infants or adults, we share the same baptism with water as Jesus. Through our faith in Christ, we share the same Holy Spirit that descended upon Jesus that day.

And like the student said to the Princeton professor, God’s spirit is loose, and God’s spirit is dangerous. No one can predict or control who God will love, who God will bring in as a fellow citizen of the Kingdom of God next.

Scripture affirms that we are a royal priesthood and joint heirs with Christ, whoever we are, whatever our background or ethnicity or nationality or gender or orientation. That wild, dangerous and unpredictable Spirit of God demonstrated in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts that no one was outside the circle of God’s love, grace, and forgiveness in those first days of the Church – not the Samaritans, not eunuchs, not Gentiles… and that same wild, dangerous, egregiously loving, lavishly forgiving Spirit is still moving, working, and proving no one is outside that circle today.

And as the Spirit worked in and through Philip and Peter and John and the other apostles and believers in those early days of the Church, the Spirit works in and through you and I, joint heirs with Christ, a royal priesthood, today. And what that young person said to Bishop Tutu is what God says to each and every one of us in the here and now: “You are my children. Now go act like it.”

The Heavens Torn Apart

I owe much to the writing of Kathryn Matthews Huey (as usual, it seems) and the Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton in preparing this sermon.

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Genesis 1:1-5

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Acts 19:1-7

While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Then he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answered, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied — altogether there were about twelve of them.

Mark 1:4-11

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

For many of us, our Gospel reading calls to mind a quiet, pastoral scene; one we’ve seen in the movies: John the Baptist is standing waist-deep in the water – you know it’s John the Baptist because he has the biggest beard, and he’s dressed like a caveman – and along comes Jesus, who looks a lot like Jeffrey Hunter, wading into the water as the violins swell in the background. John and Jeffery – I mean, Jesus – say their lines (with proper British accents, of course, because everyone knows people in first-century Palestine spoke in British accents), and John pushes Jesus down into the water (that makes the Baptists happy), then pours water from his cupped hands over Jesus’ head as he comes up (that makes the rest of us happy), and a spotlight comes on, a deep voice speaks, and a shiny white dove flies down.

It’s one of those cases where, at least for me, the story is so familiar that when I read it in the Bible my eyes kind of drift over it, not really seeing the words anymore. So it’s easy to miss the fact that there is some real excitement, even violence, going on here.

For starters, John the Baptist wasn’t just some guy who liked dunking people. He was calling people into repentance, offering baptism for the forgiveness of sins. These were the actions of a radical, a revolutionary. John was bringing people far away from the temple courts, out into the wilderness, out into the dirt and mud… but as far as the established order was concerned, this fringe-element prophet had no business forgiving sins! The temple folks had that all under control, thank you very much.

But the people came to him, because the people were thirsty – not for the muddy waters of the Jordan, but thirsty for God. Longing, anxious and eager to experience a new day, that day long promised to Israel.

For more than five hundred years the Jewish people had been reading all of the prophecies all across Scripture which promised a Messiah, which foretold of a day when the Kingdom of God would burst forth upon the earth, restoring all things to God.

And now, here was someone shouting at the top of his lungs that this day had come. Of course they would leave the temple, leave the city, journey into the wilderness to the Jordan!

And what about this repentance John spoke of, this return to God? We most often associate repentance with Lenten observance, and with our guilt, especially our personal, private sins, and that’s accurate, in and of itself. But the word that means "being sorry, remorseful, or penitent" had additional meanings in Jesus’ Judaism: According to Marcus Borg, “It was associated with return from exile; to repent is to return, to follow ‘the way of the Lord’ that leads from exile to the promised land. The Greek roots of the word suggest an additional meaning; to repent is to ‘go beyond the mind that you have’ – to go beyond conventional understandings of what life with God is about.”

“Come to the water,” John was saying. “Come change your direction. Come see things differently. Come and follow ‘the way of the Lord.’”

And Jesus came. And Jesus was baptized. And  when Jesus came up out of that water, the heavens were torn open!

Half a millennium before, the prophet Isaiah had seen the ruins of the Temple, had seen the best and brightest of Judea taken far away into exile, and had cried out to God, “Oh, that you would rip open the heavens and descend, make the mountains shudder at your presence—As when a forest catches fire, as when fire makes a pot to boil—To shock your enemies into facing you, make the nations shake in their boots! … Your holy cities are all ghost towns: Zion's a ghost town, Jerusalem's a field of weeds. Our holy and beautiful Temple, which our ancestors filled with your praises, was burned down by fire, all our lovely parks and gardens in ruins.
In the face of all this, are you going to sit there unmoved, God? Aren't you going to say something? Haven't you made us miserable long enough?”

And it was this moment that God chose to invade the sinful world with torn-apart skies and a dive-bombing dove – not to wreak havoc upon the enemies of Israel, though.

There’s a tendency to read into this account in Mark’s Gospel what’s known as an “adoptionist” theology – the idea that Jesus didn’t actually become God until John baptized him. I contend that, in this action of the heavens being torn open, and the Holy Spirit flying down upon Jesus, God is saying, “The gloves are off. It’s time to make things happen.”

The people were thirsting for God. They had looked in the Temple; they had followed this and that person, claiming to be the Messiah, only to see one after the other destroyed and his followers scattered. They prayed, they sacrificed, they searched, but it was hard to find God when they were hungry. It was hard to find God when their religious leaders were more interested in political power than in guiding the people. It was hard to find God when Caesar had you under his boot.

They couldn’t reach God.

So God tore open the heavens, and came to them. God came to them not to destroy the earth, or at least the perceived enemies of God – make no mistake, Jesus Christ turned the world on its head, utterly upset the apple cart, completely destroyed the status quo, but not through violence or retribution. No, God-with-us, Emmanuel, came to bring peace, to bring restoration, to declare the time of Jubilee, when the debt is paid, the captive freed, and that which has been lost is at last restored!

I don’t have to tell you that this is a message which our own world needs desperately to hear. Perhaps we don’t live under the heel of Caesar’s boot, but there’s plenty of oppression, quite enough poverty, and loads of worry and uncertainty in this world. And we who follow Christ, who are part of the Divine presence in this world, are called as ambassadors of the Kingdom of God to be the messengers of this great Good News – God is with us! God has not forgotten us, but has come, in Christ, with healing, with hope, with salvation!

You know how some people think that Christianity is boring? You know, go to church, sing the hymns, hear the sermons, do the rituals, lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, I want to suggest to you that, to a world which is thirsty for God, in a world which, whether it knows it or not, is looking for hope and reconciliation with its Creator with every breath, every heartbeat, Christianity is boring – but I use the word in a different meaning – boring like the steady, incessant spinning of a drill bit is boring, cutting holes through the jaded crust of privilege and excess, of politics and reality television, of consumerism and jealousy, reaching to the core of life.

It begins, of course, with our own lives, as day by day, week by week, the Christian message and life in community bores ever deeper into our souls, until, we begin to realize the truth – that we are a beloved child of God, we are marked with the cross of Christ forever, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are called to follow Christ, we are to love one another unconditionally, we are forgiven and called to forgive others, we are ambassadors for Christ.

This boring life of faith is begun at baptism, and is not completed until the day we die. Each day, we grow in realization that God is not done with us yet – that it is a fact that God loves us with a love so deep, so wide, so complete that nothing, ever, can separate us from that love.

And when that fact hits home, we will at last loose our tongues to sing God’s praises and free our hands to do God’s works in a world desperately thirsty to come up out of the water, to see the skies torn open, to see God descend in love.

Al Fadr and the Baptism of Jesus

I'm posting this in the hours after a horrific shooting in Arizona, where a nine-year-old girl was murdered for no reason at all.

Perhaps we're in the twilight before dawn, but it still seems far too dark sometimes.

Isaiah 42:1-9
Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the LORD, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.

Acts 10:34-43
Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ-he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."

Matthew 3:13-17
1Then 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 the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."

This is the Word of the Lord.

One of the things that has confused me all along about the baptism of Jesus is, quite simply, “why?” If, as John the Baptist proclaimed, the baptism he offered was for the remission of sin, then it follows that, for the sinless Messiah, such a thing would be unnecessary. If it was, as some think, merely to serve as an example for us, then what was with the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the voice from heaven? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen anyone else get the dove-and-voice treatment when they got baptized, so I can’t buy into the idea that the baptism of Jesus was just for show. There was more going on there. There are people, called “Adoptionists,‘ who believe that Jesus did not become Christ, the Messiah, God’s only son, until he was baptized, and frankly I cannot agree with that either. Like we discussed last week, Jesus was and is and shall be eternally God. In that light, the idea that it all began there in the Jordan River is nonsensical.

But this week, a conversation with a Muslim helped me see the baptism of Jesus in a different light. This man moved to Alabama from Bagdad. Of course I had a million questions, and he was more than happy to engage me in conversation. Along the way, we talked about our children and such, and he told me that one of his daughters is named “Fajer.” Since I don’t speak Arabic, this name meant nothing to me… until he explained.

Devout Muslims pray five times a day, and the first prayer, offered before dawn, is called al Fajer. What caught my attention is that the prayer is named for when it takes place -- in the twilight before the dawn.

We’ve talked before about how we, as Resurrection people, live in the twilight before dawn. A dark time, yes, but not the kind of dark where the long, cold, featureless night stretches before us, empty and hopeless, but the twilight before the dawn, when we can see the first vague outlines of the coming day, and we know that the darkness is coming to an end. This kind of twilight is the definition of hope. Talking to this man, I finally had a name for that!

But there’s another way in which the word “fajer” is used, and this really excited me. It signifies the start of a new life.

This isn’t a foreign concept to Westerners, if you think about it. Baby showers and birth announcements are a kind of fajer. Proms and diplomas are another kind; wedding rings yet another, and the list could go on: items or events which remind us of passages from one point in our life’s journey into another.

Ted Williams of Columbus, Ohio can tell us all about the concept of “fajer,” of breaking out of the long twilight, of starting a new life. Years of drug and alcohol abuse had left Ted homeless, just another panhandler on the side of the road. Despite having overcome his addiction over two years ago, Ted couldn’t drag himself out of the hole.

Now, I have to tell you that Ted had a little something that most of the folks who stand by the roadside with cardboard signs don’t have. Aside from an uncanny resemblance to Jimi Hendrix, Ted had a deep, sonorous radio verse with a pitch-perfect announcer’s delivery. Motorists would stop and give him money simply to hear him introduce an imaginary song or announce a baseball score.

One afternoon a reporter with the local newspaper took a video camera with him to tape Ted; first announcing an upcoming concert in return for a donation, then standing on a sidewalk later, talking about his life and his dreams.

The reporter posted the video on YouTube, and something amazing happened. A few people happened upon it, and shared the webpage link with others. People were fascinated! Ted’s video flooded FaceBook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and other sharing sites. In the terminology of Internet fads, it had “gone viral.” In almost no time at all, millions of people had seen the video of Ted Williams, the Panhandler with the Golden Voice.

Something else happened, though. Ted Williams got job offers. He was given a house to live in and a car. Appearing on ABC’s Morning Show after accepting a job at a major radio station, Ted wept openly at the turn his life had taken… all because someone had taken the time to take an interest in him. A simple video on a website paved the way for Ted Williams’ fajer.

We’ve just celebrated the miracle of Jesus’ birth. This past Thursday was Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child. But following that event, except for a brief glimpse of Christ at twelve years old, we know nothing of Jesus from the time the gold, frankincense, and myrrh is given until the moment he shows up on the banks of the Jordan River.

I imagine John the Baptist busily baptizing person after person, all the while yelling to the crowds gathered on the bank, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” Perhaps he doesn’t even notice his cousin until he’s standing right there in front of him, next in line to receive baptism. John stands there, gape mouthed in shock, for a long moment before he says, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

You see, John knows who Jesus is. John knows that, of all the people standing on the bank now, of all the people he has baptized and of all the people he will ever baptize, the one person who has nothing to repent of is this man – Jesus!

And yes, Jesus says that he wants to be baptized because “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” as odd as that sounds. Though John doesn’t understand it, he proceeds with the baptism… and the most amazing thing happens!

The sky opens up! The Spirit, like a dove, settles on Jesus, and God speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Now, while I am careful to affirm that I do not think that Jesus was baptized merely to mark the beginning of his ministry, nor do I go to the other extreme and claim that he was not God until he was baptized, I think that part of what happened for Jesus at the baptism was his “fajer,” the start of a new life.

Think of it: from this point forward, everything changes for Jesus. No longer will he stand in that carpenter’s shop in Nazareth, breathing in the aroma of the sawdust as he builds a cabinet; no longer will he sit quietly in the synagogue as the scribes read the Torah. This thing he was born to do, this mission that’s been coursing through his veins since he was old enough to understand it, starts now!

For all of us in the Christian faith, whether we practice infant baptism or what is commonly referred to as “”believer’s baptism,” that event serves as a point of reference for our passage into a new life, a fajer.

Because Jesus took this first step in the journey, because he was faithful to “fulfill all righteousness,” because that faithfulness led Jesus to the cross and the Resurrection, we can say with the Apostle Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Whatever events define our past, whatever future once lay before us, all of that is changed. Whoever we were, whatever darkness we were groping around in, now the dawn is coming, our new life has begun! We have become part of the family of God, and the reality for us has become this: in life, in death, in life beyond death, we belong to God!