A Word from Joel - January 14, 2026

“And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from the heavens said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” Matthew 3:16-17

Christianity at its heart is a story, and all of us must decide what kind of story we think it is. Is it a story primarily about our obedience or our freedom? This year we will be primarily in Matthew’s Gospel, and Matthew wants us to understand Jesus as the new Moses, come to lead his people to freedom. It all starts on the banks of the Jordan River, where Jesus’ cousin John has been baptizing people to prepare them for the coming of God. For John, God is coming soon, and when God comes, he believes there will be hell to pay. He sounds an awful lot like those mothers who used to threaten their children, “Wait till your father gets home.” Many people think that’s who God is, the ultimate authority to be feared and obeyed.

When Jesus is baptized by John, we would expect that if God were to show up, it would be a revelation of judgment. That’s certainly what John preached would happen. Yet when Jesus comes out of the water he hears the best words that can be spoken or heard: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The baptism of Jesus reveals a God who is more gracious than we have ever dared imagine, one who comes not to burn us up, but to surround us with loving embrace. I’ve said it before and will say it again: the entire Christian life is coming to trust that what God says about Jesus in his baptism, God says over each one of us. It’s all that simple, and it’s all that hard. 

It’s difficult to imagine that God delights in us not because of how good we are but because of how good God is. In our world, commendations come because of our hard work and accomplishments. For God, divine commendation comes built in. It’s the software we are born with. It’s our pre-existing condition to be marked by the divine as cherished and beloved. Such indiscriminate grace is not only foreign to us, it offends us. The cultural story we are immersed in tells us that we get what we deserve, for both good and bad. But God gives us grace whether we are good or bad. The waters of baptism free us from the rat race of this world. They allow us to rest in our belovedness, and from that place of total security to live for the freedom of all people. That’s exactly what Jesus did, and at its best, that’s what the church does as well. All of us are invited to the waters of baptism to receive God’s blessing and then spend the rest of our lives spreading that message of love, freedom, and inclusion to everyone we meet, especially those our culture deems undeserving. 


Rev. Joel Esala