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Karen Hollis | Jan 11, 2026 Baptism of Jesus
Matthew 3:13-17 Then Jesus went from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. But John tried to talk him out of it. “I am the one who needs to be baptized by you,” he said, “so why are you coming to me?”
But Jesus said, “It should be done, for we must carry out all that God requires.” So John agreed to baptize him.
After his baptism, as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and settling on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.”
Before I begin, I want to let you know that one of the stories includes mention of sexual harm. I encourage you to take care of yourself as needed.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be reflections of your word to us today, in Christ’s name we pray. Amen
Jesus comes up from the water and God proclaims, this is my dearly loved Son . . . this is my beloved. The waters of baptism lift the veil between us and God, so that Jesus or anyone else can hear . . . beloved.
“Beloved. Is there any other word [that] needs saying, any other blessing [that] could compare with this name, this knowing?” Jan Richardson’s words wash over me and I soak in beloved.
“Beloved,” she writes, “comes like a mercy to the ear that has never heard it. Comes like a river to the body that has never seen such grace. Beloved . . . comes holy to the heart aching to be new. Comes healing to the soul wanting to begin again.”1
In the late ‘90’s Janet Wolf, who served as the pastor of Hobson United Methodist Church in Nashville, wrote down and published a story about a woman in her congregation named Fayette. As Janet has described it, Hobson UMC is a wildly diverse congregation that includes, “…people with power and PhDs and folks who have never gone past the third grade; folks with two houses and folks living on the streets; and, as one person who struggles with mental health declared, ‘those of us who are crazy and those who think they’re not.’”
When Fayette walked though the doors of Hobson UMC, she lived with mental illness and lupus and without a home. When she joined the new member class, the conversation about baptism really grabbed Fayette’s attention. Janet described baptism as: “this holy moment when we are named by God’s grace with such power it won’t come undone.” For the remainder of the class, Fayette would ask again and again, “And when I’m baptized, I am…?” “The class,” Janet writes, “learned to respond, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she’d say, and then we could go back to our discussion.”
Hobson UMC practices baptism by immersion, so on the day of her baptism Fayette was invited into the font. She went down under the water; in Janet’s words, “[she] came up spluttering, and cried, ‘And now I am…?’ And we all sang, ‘Beloved, precious child of God, and beautiful to behold.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ she shouted as she danced all around the fellowship hall.”
A couple of months later Janet received a phone call and describes it in this way: “Fayette had been beaten and raped and was at the county hospital. So I went. I could see her from a distance, pacing back and forth. When I got to the door, I heard, ‘I am beloved….’ She turned, saw me, and said, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and….’ Catching sight of herself in the mirror—hair sticking up, blood and tears streaking her face, dress torn, dirty, and rebuttoned askew, she started again, ‘I am beloved, precious child of God, and…’ She looked in the mirror again and declared, ‘…and God is still working on me. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll be so beautiful I’ll take your breath away!’”2
How many times did Fayette remind herself of her belovedness? How many times did she declare that truth to herself? It’s like one of those thoughts that hovers somewhere above us or around us, just out of reach. Like Fayette, we might reach for it, like a butterfly on a summer day, trying to make it real for us without losing it or crushing it. We might ask our companions to remind us – what was that thing again? We write it down, recite it over and over again as a mantra, telling every thought, every criticism, every scenario, every memory, every intention, over and over again until we can feel the truth of it in our bones.
Theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests that if love didn’t exist somehow in our cells or even in our molecules, it would be physically impossible for love to appear in the other ways we experience.3 And when we open to the fullness of its presence, love can illuminate our lives.
In this way, I wonder if baptism reveals our belovedness more than anything else.
Baptism is an outward sign of an inward truth that we are loved beyond our wildest imagination and nothing can separate us from that love. Knowing our belovedness can change everything.
A few months ago I watched a film called Sing Sing, which tells the story of an actual rehabilitation program at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. The Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (or RTA) was started in 1996 with the following mission: “RTA helps people in prison develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment.”
According to their website, “RTA produces compelling theatrical performances within prison walls and in addition to acting, participants may write, direct, stage manage, create sets, and more.” They have produced “over a dozen original plays and more well-known, published plays such as 12 Angry Men, Macbeth . . . and Of Mice and Men.”4
In the film, Sing Sing, a man known as Divine Eye is new to the program. He appears hardened by life and greets a long-time member, known as Divine G, with a word I’m not going to repeat here, as it is commonly known as one of the most offensive and dehumanizing words in history. Divine Eye uses it as if to say, “hey, man.” Without missing a beat, Divine G says, “we don’t use that word here. We use beloved.” (breathe) We use beloved . . . Divine Eye has stepped into another world, one that invites him, embraces him, and it’s a world that, through the RTA program, he can and does choose to remain in. Throughout the rest of the film, we witness Divine Eye soften and open; he stands differently, moves differently, and he shifts the way he interacts with people.
Whatever we bring, no matter how dark or painful or messy, beloved lives with us. Beloved understands pain and brokenness, beloved stands with suffering, beloved absorbs our critical self-talk, beloved knows the road of healing, beloved illumines us from within. It’s not magic . . . it’s a process of coming to sense it within us and believing the truth of it. If I am dearly loved by God, how do I relate to myself and others? With whom do I surround myself? How do I spend my time? What do I create around me?
In conclusion to her poem, Jan Richardson writes:
Beloved. Keep saying it, and though it may sound strange at first, watch how it becomes part of you, how it becomes you, as if you never could have known yourself [as] anything else, as if you could ever have been other than this: Beloved.
Within us and all around us, God breathes beloved . . . may we listen for it every day and live.
1 Jan Richardson. Beloved. https://paintedprayerbook.com/2015/01/06/baptism-of-jesus-beginning-with-beloved/
2 Janet Wolf’s story is from The Upper Room Disciplines 1999 (Nashville: The Upper Room), referenced by Jan Richardson https://paintedprayerbook.com/2010/01/03/epiphany-1-baptized-and-beloved/
3 Teilhard. The Human Phenomenon. p. 188
4 https://rta-arts.org/blog/sing-sing-film/