“Beloved”
Baptism of the Lord
January 12, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?
Today, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the distinction between knowledge and knowing. I’ve been reading At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine recently, and he does a great job of explaining the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge, he says, consists of isolated bits and pieces of information and data. We can acquire knowledge through study and experimentation which raises more questions for us to seek out answers to through more study and experimentation and so on and so forth.
Knowing on the other hand, he says, is more primal. There’s an embodied, nearly involuntarily so, element to knowing. The example he gives of knowing is “getting” a joke. You hear a joke and what do you do when you get it? Assuming it’s funny, you laugh. Like this:
I recently won a pumpkin carving competition. It was a hollow victory.
It’s one thing, Hine says, to have knowledge. It’s another thing altogether to know. Knowing something, really knowing something, changes you. It changes your behavior. It changes your outlook. It transforms your life.
Let me explain further. I’ve prepared some clips from some movies to show you, and I want you to really pay attention to what you’re hearing in the music behind the clips.
And since we just wrapped up the holiday season, I think that this first one is timely. We’re all familiar with the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life, right? So I don’t know that this one needs all that much in the way of introduction.
We know this scene, right? George’s outlook on life has undergone a complete reversal—he no longer wishes that he had never been born but fears that the wish he made at the start of the movie is going to have permanent consequences. But did you all hear that motif playing in the orchestra behind him?
Keep that tune in your ear, because the next clip comes from a pivotal scene in Star Wars.
Got to give credit to George Lucas’ screenwriting, his best-written scenes have no dialogue in them.
So here we have Luke Skywalker rushing back to his aunt and uncle’s house in the very first movie only to find that they’ve evidently been killed by the only group of Stormtroopers who know how to aim a blaster. We hear that famous John Williams Jedi theme, but did you hear that motif that came right after it?
Sound familiar? Ok, this next one is for my Disney fans. And, just in case you’re worried, no, this isn’t Mufasa’s death.
It’s what happens right after Mufasa’s death. Right as the hyenas start to chase Simba, we hear that same melody.
And if I were to show you the scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf the Grey stops Bilbo Baggins from leaving the Shire with the One Ring, the one where the camera focuses on the ring in Bilbo’s hand right before he drops it while some ominous music plays?
There it is again. We hear this little motif pop up all over in music informed by the Western tradition.
And look, it’s no secret that music of different qualities can convey different moods or emotions. We know that music in a major key is happy, happy, happy and that music in a minor key is sad, sad, sad. But whenever a composer wants to convey to their listeners that something isn’t quite right—that something dark and terrible is happening—chances are that they’ll write in this motif or a variation of it.
Check out this excerpt from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique
Symphonie Fantastique, movement five, also known as “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”.
Spooky.
This motif is known as the Dies Irae, a one thousand year old Gregorian chant that was sung during masses for the dead.
The day of wrath, that awful day, shall reduce the world to ashes, as David and the Sibyl prophesied. How great will be the terror when the judge shall come to examine all things rigorously!
Real rosy stuff right there.
It’s this association with death and the day of judgment that has kept musical composers coming back to this tune over the centuries to the point where the notes themselves subliminally communicate to us, “hey, something bad is happening”.
When we hear the Dies Irae, death isn’t too far behind.
It’s why I can sing “And who are you,” the young lord said, “that I must bow so low?” and any Game of Thrones fans in the room instantly get anxious.
Now, look. Do we need to know that these eight notes heard in this particular order come from a Latin chant from a thousand years ago that was sung during funeral masses and talks about a wrathful day of judgement when Christ sits on his judgment throne and separates the righteous from the unrighteous for that motif to communicate bad vibes? No, I don’t think so. Is it a cool piece of trivia? I like to think so, but then again, I was a music major who really enjoyed his harmonic form and analysis course so I might be biased.
But this knowledge likely doesn’t change your outlook on life. It’s probably not going to change the way you live your life in any meaningful way—though, maybe you’ll pay more attention to the scores of films that you’re watching.
The fact that this motif is the Dies Irae is abstract knowledge.
But that gut reaction that you get when you hear the melody? The part deep down in your bones that tells you “something’s not right”? That’s knowing.
Because it transcends any words or lyrics that go along with the music. Check this out. You might hear someone sing I can’t help falling in love with you [sung to the tune made famous by Elvis Presley] and you’ve probably got a bunch of emotional responses ranging from “aww that’s so lovely” to “how romantic!” or floods of nostalgia and memories of hearing Elvis sing that song on the radio.
But if you hear someone sing I can’t help falling in love with you [sung to the tune of the Dies Irae].
Suddenly, we’re a lot more concerned about whoever it is this person is suiting. By just changing eight notes, we’ve gone from a happy-go-lucky rom com to terribly disturbing psychological thriller.
No thanks, I’ll pass.
We know. We have been shaped and formed and steeped in our culture in such a way that we just intrinsically know that this motif means bad news, and it changes our experience of taking in whatever it is we’re taking in when we hear it. The abstract knowledge that it’s the Dies Irae doesn’t really change that.
How often do we take in abstract knowledge without having that embodied sense of knowing?
How often do we receive new information that supplants old knowledge but still let that previous knowledge inform the way we know and understand the world around us? How often do we let that previous knowledge inform the way we know and understand ourselves?
You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?
Luke does something kind of odd right after we hear these words come from the heavens. He gives us a chronicle of Jesus’ ancestry. One of those “so and so begat so and so who begat so and so” pieces that we all just tend to glaze over. Except this one goes back. All the way back. Back to the very beginning.
Luke tells us that Jesus was the son of Joseph, who was the son of Heli, who was the son of Matthat, and so on and so forth all the way back to Enos, who was the son of Seth, who was the son of Adam…
…who was the son of God.
This genealogy is unique in our scriptural witness because, through calling Adam the son of God, all of humanity becomes inheritors of that same blessing given to Jesus.
Luke is clear that God gives Jesus this blessing before his ministry really begins. It’s a blessing that’s not earned by any works or deeds but is an essential truth about the person and character of Jesus. And, through his subsequent genealogy, he tells his reader that this very same thing that is true of Jesus is also true of you.
You are a child of God.
You are beloved.
God is well pleased with you.
And there is absolutely nothing and no one that can ever, ever take that away from you.
This is what the waters of our baptism symbolize. They proclaim that nothing we do or don’t do changes the fact that we are worthy of loving and being loved. That it doesn’t matter what happened before or what happens after because, though the waters of baptism wash everything else away, one indelible fact remains.
You are worthy of loving and being loved. Full stop.
And yet, the question remains. Is this is an abstract, isolated piece of knowledge, or something that we deeply and truly know? Is this just a piece of knowledge that we can take or leave without any consequence or are we going to orient our lives in such a way as to show that this knowledge is enfleshed? That this knowledge is embodied? That our very lives become holy and living sacrifices that bear witness to our belovedness and the belovedness of our neighbors?
Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?
That’s the question August Spangenberg posed to John Wesley during his mission in Georgia. Those who know about the life of John Wesley know that this mission in Georgia didn’t quite go the way he had planned it (and those who really know about the life of John Wesley know that that’s putting it very mildly).
John was, understandably, despondent, and he went to Spangenberg for counsel. Spangenberg was a German Moravian, a group of whom John was startled by during a terrible storm on the voyage over to Georgia. While everyone else on the boat was cowering for their lives, the Moravians were sitting up on the deck, calmly singing hymns and psalms of praise.
So, John goes up to Spangenberg for counsel, and Spangenberg posed that question to him: Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God? Do you know Jesus Christ?
That is to say, Hey John, don’t you know that you’re a child of God? Don’t you know Jesus Christ?
To which, John replied, I know he is the Savior of the world.
A good piece of abstract knowledge to regurgitate for a man who spent his life up until that point steeped in the academy.
So, Spangenberg pressed John: this is true, but do you know he has saved you?
To which, John replied, I hope he has died to save me.
But do you know yourself? Spangenberg asked.
And, if John was being honest, he feared that the answer to that question was no.
John possessed the knowledge. John could spout off the right words about how Jesus saved the world and about how all of us are children of God. But, at the end of the day, John didn’t know it to be true. Not for him anyways.
John wasn’t unique in that struggle. Lord knows that it’s something I struggle with myself.
That’s why it’s so important that I come back to the waters of my baptism. It’s why it’s so important that I dip my hands in and touch the waters and feel them flow through my fingers. This very tactile experience helps me move that abstract piece of knowledge towards a knowing embodiment of it.
And my fervent hope and prayer is that it does the same for you. That you and I can all come to more fully know this to be true.
Does this blessing also come with a responsibility? Yes. Yes it does.
Because, friends, there are plenty of folks out there who our social order does not look on as beloved. Folks who our social order has turned its back on—detritus that ought to be washed away. But the waters of baptism ring true for them as much as it does for us.
All of us, each and every one of us, are children of God.
And so, if you’re not feeling it for yourself this this morning, then feel it for them. Remember that our baptism symbolizes our universal inheritance.
We are children of God.
We are beloved.
With us God is well pleased.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues.
Amen.
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