You Are Beloved, And With You I Am Pleased

This blog is based on a sermon by Pastor Teresa Howell-Smith on January 11, 2026

I want to take you back to Alberon Avenue in the late 1990s. I've shared a story before about Sammy, a veteran of the Vietnam War. Sammy served with honor but he brought the war back home with him. While the war had ended in Vietnam, it continued to rage onward within his mind.

Sammy technically had a roof over his head, but because of his PTSD, he couldn’t stand the silence of the walls. He told me that when the sun came down, the memories of the war got loud. To quiet the noise, Sammy drank. And he walked. He became an ambassador of the unhoused – the one who always knew who was sick, who was hungry, and who was just arriving on the streets.

At my home church of Ebenezer, we served breakfast every Sunday. To some, Sammy was just a man in tattered clothing. But to us, he was family. One night, long before cell phones, a fire broke out in our sanctuary. Someone ran blocks away to find a phone to call for help, but the fire didn’t wait. However, neither did Sammy.

He and five or six others of his friends formed a human chain. In the flickering of the orange lights, you could see these unlikely guardians throwing buckets of water at the stone walls. They didn’t wait to be holy enough to save the sanctuary – they simply stood in the gap. When the firetrucks arrived, they found a group of soot-covered, exhausted men who had already held the line.

The image of the unlikely guardians brings us to the happenings at the Jordan River. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus’ public life doesn’t start with the miracle – it starts in a line. John the Baptist is expecting a king of fire and judgement, but Jesus shows up and he stands in the mud with everyone else.

John is scandalized. he tries to prevent Him – “I need to be baptised by You.” John does what we are all doing sometimes – trying to keep God dignified. We say, “God, don’t look at my mess yet – let me get fixed first.”

But Jesus says, “Let it be so now.”

This is the scandal because Jesus is not interested in being separate from us. Jesus is interested in being immersed in us. Jesus’ baptism was a total immersion in the human experience.

There’s no part of your life devoid of God’s presence. That Jesus immerses himself in our mental health struggles. For anyone who like Sammy has walked the floor at 3 a.m. with a brain that won’t quiet down, know that Jesus is immersed in that restless night alongside you.

Jesus immerses himself in our failures. He dives into the shame of Friday nights – those moments we wish we could strike from the record. He doesn’t stand on the bank pointing fingers, but he is with us in the waters.”

Jesus immerses himself in our grief. He knows the salt taste of your tears because he has immersed himself in the tomb in the darkness of death.

We see the immersion in the global and local today. We see it in Venezuela and we see it on the streets and we see it in the national outcry of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two civilians who were shot and killed in Minneapolis by ICE agents.

When we hear about such violence, the water feels cold and the current feels too strong. But the gospel tells us that God is not a distant observer of injustice. God is immersed in the outcry. God is immersed in the streets of Minneapolis, standing with the marginalized and the targeted because God’s way is always downward. God dives into humanity so that we might be raised up to God’s divinity.

As Nadia Bolz-Weber points out, the radical part of this text and timing is that after Jesus comes out of the water, God says, “This is my beloved Son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased.”

Jesus hasn’t done anything yet – he hasn’t healed a soul or preached a sermon. He was well-pleasing simply because he was God’s own. Our world tells us that belovedness is a performance review – that you're beloved if you’re the right status or behave the right way. But the scene at the Jordan River tells a different story – that before anything else, you are beloved. Before you do the work, before you are legal, before you are fixed – you are beloved. In the waters of your baptism, God looks at you and says, “This one is mine.”

Over the next few days, every time you touch the water – at the sink, in the shower, or in the rain, let it be a physical ping to your soul. Don’t ask yourself, “Am I doing enough?” Don’t ask, “Am I worthy?” Instead, hear the echoes of the Jordan River. Hear God sing out to you that in the middle of the fire, the grief and the outcry of injustice: “You’re mine. You are the beloved, and with you, I am pleased.”

To the veterans like Sammy, to the people in Venezuela, to the families of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and to everyone in the pews of Plymouth Church, be loved. Sit, and be loved because that is exactly who you are already. God says, “With you, my beloved, I am well pleased.”

Hallelujah and amen.