Sometimes it feels like my life is a movie. Do you ever feel like that? Alfred Hitchcock, the maker of so many incredible suspense movies, once said, movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.”[1] I like that, because I don’t know about you, but sometimes I wish I could push the fast forward button to go past all the boring bits to the next exciting thing. In her book, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life, Tish Warren explains that one of the reasons we have the “boring” bits, is that God works through them too, and maybe—if we are paying attention—God wants to use every moment to help us, speak to us, and lift us up. Today, we start, like we do every morning, with the very ordinary act of waking up.
Do you wake up fast or slow? I know some people who open their eyes and they are totally awake, and I know others who wake up suuuuper slow. How about you?
[Take responses from congregation.] I have to confess that I am a serious zombie when I first wake up.
Tish Warren writes, “Whether we’re children or heads of state, we sit in our pajamas for a moment, yawning, with messy hair and bad breath, unproductive, groping toward the day. Soon we’ll get buttoned up into our identities: mothers, businesspeople, students, friends, citizens. We’ll spend our day conservative or liberal, rich or poor, earnest or cynical, fun-loving or serious. But as we first emerge from sleep, we are nothing but human, unimpressive, vulnerable, newly born into the day, blinking as our pupils adjust to light and our brains emerge into consciousness.”[2] I really, really like that! And it occurred to me as I was reading, I wonder did Jesus wake up like that? When He would wake up in the morning and roll out of bed, did He have wild hair and a nasty taste in His mouth?
For Jesus, there was another kind of beginning in His life. We read about it this morning. Before Jesus started His ministry, He was baptized. Jesus was Jewish, and so was John the Baptist. John’s big thing was getting people to turn their lives around—the church word for that is “repent”—to change their minds from being self-focused to being God-focused. John would baptize people in the Jordan River as a way to make public, the new reality in their hearts. After John baptized Jesus, Matthew tells us that “the skies opened up and he saw God’s Spirit—it looked like a dove—descending and landing on him. And along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.’” So I like the special effects of skies opening up and a Spirit like a dove coming down—it must have been pretty cool!—but the thing that’s really amazing is what God says to Jesus—"marked by my love, delight of my life.” What’s amazing is not that God loves His Son, it’s that God is saying this now—before Jesus has done any miracles, before He teaches or heals, preaches or helps, or even dies on a Cross. And that idea can change everything for us!
First, before we do anything, God loves us! I remember when Cynthia and I were getting ready to have our first kiddo, we got the nursery ready, talked about names, and arranged for a mid-wife. Then at 1 a.m., it was time! And we rushed to the hospital and Cynthia endured hours of excruciating labor, and then Morgan was there! And she was wonderful—how do I know? She hadn’t done anything, but everything she did was exciting! Oh look at that! She made bubbles. She smiled. Isn’t that great? You know, God feels like that for each of us. “You are chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.”
Second, we don’t have to earn God’s love. Did you ever know someone who was really incredible? With lots of achievements to their name? My dad’s dad was Henry David Gray, and he was one of those people. He pastored churches for 50 years, on the cutting edge of youth ministry and including the arts in worship. He took different groups of teen-agers around the world four or five times—and they would meet people like King Hussein of Jordan and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Istanbul. He built one church from the ground up and another from the inside out, and helped plan the urban center of Hartford, Connecticut, before moving out to California and planning another city out there. Oh and did I mention that he set a 100-yard dash record in high school that stood for 30 years, that he founded our denomination, wrote 25 books and edited an academic journal for 20 years…after he retired? He was a serious try-hard. I grew up in his long shadow, but in his last days, at the age of 86, Grandpa kept having one more thing that had to get done. First, it was giving his library away. Then, he had boxes of his books, and each book had to be mailed out to someone on his 650-person mailing list. Nothing was ever enough. I realized that he didn’t know grace, that he was still trying to impress his heavenly Father. In the end, he finally relaxed into God’s arms and received the grace that had been there all along. Many of us can be try-hards too—trying to earn our way into heaven, to impress our heavenly Father with how good we are, or how hard we are working? Are you white-knuckling your way through your life, worried that someone will find out you’re not as good as you wish you were? I want you to hear what God says to you today, “You are chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.”
Finally, we are perfectly situated to make a difference with the love we are given. When you were in high school, did you ever wish you could be like someone else? Did you ever think to yourself, “Oh I wish I were popular like so and so” or “I wish I could play sports like this person” or “I wish I could sing like that person”? Anybody else? Yeah me too! I thought I could really be amazing if I could just be that person, but what I was missing was that God had made me who I was and put me where I was for a reason. Tish Warren writes, “Christ didn’t redeem my life theoretically or abstractly—the life I dreamed of living or the life I ideally should be living. He knew I’d be in today as it is, in my home where it stands, in my relationships with their specific beauty and brokenness, in my particular sins and struggles. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard reminds us that where ‘transformation is actually carried out is in our real life, where we dwell with God and our neighbors….God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.’”[3] God says to you (and me), in this moment, as you are, “You are chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.”
At the beginning of our day, we lie there, our senses open for just a moment—perhaps to listen for the pitter patter of little feet, perhaps to sniff for the smell of coffee brewing. And in that moment, with our days still ahead of us, we can take a moment to remind ourselves that we are loved. Whatever headaches are ahead, whatever smiles and challenges, knowing that we are loved means everything! Because whatever anyone else thinks of us, whatever complaints we hear, whatever accolades we receive or don’t, God made us, God loves us, and God is with us. The question then is not whether we are loved, or have we done enough, but how the love of God will flow through us to those who woke up just like us, but not know they are loved.
Moment for Reflection
Please pray with me.
Oh Lord, how humbled we are that You love us that much before we are accomplished or competent, whether we do anything at all, we can rest in Your love. May Your grace be evident in how we treat everyone. May Your peace flow through us, as we live into the rest of our day, and the rest of our days. Thank You, Lord, for loving us for who we are, and walking with us in all things! Amen!
[1]Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Donald Spoto, Alfred Hitchock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures (NY: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 41. Tish Harrison Warren quotes this in Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life (Downer’s Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2016), p. 21.
[2]Ibid, pp. 15–16.
[3]Ibid, p. 21.