"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Tuesday, 06 January 2009 | |||
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Pleasing God | |||
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For the first Sunday in Epiphany, the lectionary cycle in
Mark's gospel doubles back on itself. We read Mark 1:1-8 on the second
Sunday in Advent, focused on John the Baptist's message of preparation
for Jesus. Now for this coming Sunday we read
Mark 1:4-11, repeating the description of John and his ministry in
verses 4-6 and his prophecy of Jesus in verses 7 and 8. But then we press
on to the actual arrival of Jesus on the scene in Mark's extremely terse
account of Jesus' baptism in verse 9-11. Yet Mark includes the two essential elements of the scene found in Matthew and Luke. After the baptism the Holy Spirit descends as a dove and God's voice from heaven declares Jesus, "my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased." Focus for a moment on the humanity of Jesus. This is much of the point of His baptism. Though without sin of His own, Jesus identifies with us in a ritual of forgiveness and cleansing. Now imagine Jesus in His humanity in the days and months following that heavenly expression of God's pleasure in Him. What would it be like to have both the blessing and the pressure of living up to that kind of declaration about oneself? One of the things that keeps me more or less (maybe too often less) on the straight and narrow is the thought that others love and are pleased with me. My wife, my daughters, my mother when she was alive, all feel or felt I was someone special to them, and told me so. It makes me want to live in a way that will continue to bring them pleasure. I want to be the sort of person that pleases them. Feelings like that must have motivated Jesus to an even greater degree as He set about carrying out His Father's plan for Him. Perhaps the baptism of Jesus is a time for us to consider your own baptism and the fact that in those moments God must have been pleased with you, either delighting in a newly born infant or in a newly born believer. So part of remembering your own baptism is to seek live in such a way and to be such a person as will continue to please God, to give Him joy and pleasure in you as His child. As the new year unfolds, I hope that each of us might know the feeling of God's pleasure and be moved to want to experience that feeling more. | |||
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Profile |
I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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