Who am I?Am I really a vital part of family?Do I have any gifts that are valuable?Where do I belong?Am I really deserving of love?Have you ever asked yourself these questions? ·Perhaps as a clumsy teenager who felt as though you were all arms and legs as you walked into the gym to play ball.Did you would if you be the first called to be part of the team, or did you wonder if you lacked what it took to be a valuable member and so expected to be one of the last chosen. ·Do you know someone who all of a sudden found herself in a house alone – abandoned by her husband, her children grown and gone and left to wonder what might have happened if she had been prettier, or less dependent or bossy, maybe more worthy of love? ·Can you imagine a man who has others depending on his salary, coming home having been laid off, and wondering if he had any right to expect his family to continue to love him even though he no longer could give them the things he had before. I suspect that each one of us has wondered these questions and a hundred more like them at one point or another in our lives.They are not dependent on age, sex, or marital status.Instead they are common to us because at our very core we desire, we yearn to be accepted and loved.We struggle to find our identity and our value as individuals and as a community most days of our lives.Sometimes the struggle seems to overwhelm us.We have a sense that things are falling apart around us, we fear isolation or rejection, but we try to handle things on our own. As individuals we read books on self-help, we look for ways to improve ourselves – just think about all those new year’s resolutions that were made and by now probably discarded.Often we depend on other people in our lives to affirm us as persons, to validate our existence. When our attempts to make our lives worthy in the eyes of the world fail us, when we give up on that final resolution, when the love of our life says that they no longer love us – then we are tempted to look for ways to assuage our sorrow, to heal our wounds, to dissolve our shortcomings in the comfort of over-work, alcohol, food, drugs – legal and illegal, but I can tell you from experience, in the end, none of these things will fill the huge hole in our heart, where pain, sorrow, and despair reside. During Advent our Bible study group spent several weeks studying the prophet Isaiah.Isaiah is really two maybe three prophetic strings.On the one hand the prophet speaks of God’s displeasure with the faithlessness of the Israelites because they turned to political alliances with foreign kings and to their own military strength to protect them from their enemies.God saw how the people had mistreated the poor and the stranger and Isaiah says that God had judged them for those sins and the isolation and pain of the Exile were the result.But there is this other string of prophetic announcement that assures the Israelites that God has not abandoned them even in the face of their faithlessness.Today we hear of God’s redemption.God who created them, who formed them as individuals and as a community of faith, calls them by name, claims them as children, declares that whatever trials and tribulations they endure God will be present in their midst. Central to the prophet Isaiah and others as well is that God, Yahweh, is the one god of all people and nations.Kings and nations outside of Israel are to become agents of God’s redemption in the restoration of the people and the land so far away.God is the one; God creates, forms, and names Israel. One of the great things about the Hebrew scripture is the beauty of poetry.Like a sonnet by Shakespeare this poetry uses tools to emphasize the point the author wants to make.Within this reading today there are a couple of poetic devices that Isaiah uses to first emphasize and then to expand the nature of God.The first is the use of an “inclusio” and the second is that these verses have a chiastic structure.Great you say.Just what I needed to put me to sleep.So OK just try not to snore. ·Verse 1 says “I have called you by name, you are mine.” And verse 7 says that everyone who is called by my name will be gathered.Naming is a creative, redemptive action of God. ·Between those two verses Isaiah draws together the past and the present, giving it what is called a chiastic structure, one that juxtaposes two thoughts and sort of meets them in the middle..The people have passed through the waters of the Exodus and God was with them.Likewise now they have not been abandoned by God, their “offspring will be brought back from the east”. What these two devices do is firmly root Israel’s redemption in God, rather than through their own devices.When we read scripture it is important to let it speak to us in our present lives and Isaiah does this as God addresses them directly as “you” - “you are precious in my sight… and I love you.What was and is and is to come is God’s presence and love for those whom God calls by name.As difficult as it was for the Israelites to believe, God who created and named them as children in the past will also recreate them, redeeming them from their faithlessness and sending them into the world to be a witness to all the nations. At the heart of God’s creative and redemptive act is a deep love and compassion for his people. He seeks to comfort the ones he loves. This passage from Isaiah is tied today to our readings from Acts and from Luke.Today is the day that we remember and celebrate the Baptism of Christ.Today the Paschal Candle burns brightly as a reminder to us of the Light of Christ given at our own baptism.We are marked at our baptism by passing through the waters, the washing away of our sin and by our being named as a child of God.It is through the unifying act of baptism that we become one with God through Jesus. This idea of inclusion, being named as a child of God is important because it tells us something about those questions we ask ourselves that I talked about in the beginning.For us as Christians it is at our baptism that we answer those questions:who am I, who is my family, am I worthy to be included, on what is my worth determined. Jesus’ baptism is recounted in all three synoptic gospels, but I like this one especially because of its simplicity.Two things draw me into this story and give me a gospel message to proclaim.The first is that there is no involved description of Jesus being singled out by John.When the time comes for Jesus to begin his ministry, Luke tells us that he came forward in the midst of the masses.And the second powerful moment for me is that this whole encounter with God is set in the power of prayer.“Now when all the people had been baptized … and Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…”Then and only then Luke tells us the Spirit of God filled him and God named him as beloved son.This is our naming too; this is our inclusion as precious, beloved children of God. This baptism that Jesus received was less about John’s message of repentance and more about rooting the whole thing in the will and intention of God.In the midst of community and through prayer Jesus is named by God the Father as beloved son.In the same way, the church recognizes that baptism is less about washing away our sin and more about naming us as Christ’s own.In the midst of community at our own baptism we are named as beloved children of God, we are marked in unity with Christ forever.This Gospel message is the kind of affirmation that we need to be reminded of day in and day out because it is through this affirmation that we are strengthened to do God’s work in the world both individually and as a community. Here at Trinity we live out our baptism each and every day.We live it out through Joyful Ladle with the nourishment of food, fellowship, and kindness that we offer.We do it through Joyful Noise with the companionship, the joy of shared music, and the offering of a hand to negotiate the troubled waters of growing up.We do it through our prayer, through the help we offer each other in times of need, and through our advocacy for justice.We do it through our stewardship of the environment and our willingness to share our abundance with others.We do it by opening our doors in gracious hospitality to all comers and seekers. And we live out our baptism when we gather as a community and share God’s gift to us of bread and wine, of body and blood. These lessons talk to us about the universality of God’s love.They talk to us about God’s redeeming love reaching through time and through the barriers that separate us.They speak of the source of life in God and the futility of our foolishness in seeking solace through our own devices.These lessons tell us about the faithfulness of God to us even in the face of our faithlessness. They tell us about the importance and the power of prayer to draw us together and to God, - the power of prayer to infuse us with the Spirit of God.And they tell us that because God loves us that gaping hole in our hearts where all of our anxiety, our doubt, our fear, our despair rumbles about does not have to overwhelm us because God’s love for each and every one of us is enough to fill it up.Thanks be to God.Amen