Finding our Identity in God’s Love

First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Sermon for January 11, 2026

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Today is a special day, a special weekend… it is the last Sunday I get to wear gold for a while, until Easter; it is the Sunday we celebrate baptism and “the Baptism of our Lord;” but, perhaps most importantly, this is the weekend we begin the NFL playoffs. (Big ha.) I’m sure some of you stayed up last night to watch the Packers and the Bears game? I did not, I had a sermon to write and, well, this to do this morning. I also know that most of you don’t share my affinity for sports, and that’s okay, maybe someone in your life does and they can relate. But for the longest time, probably until seminary even, just a few years ago, the sports calendar superseded the church calendar for me. I think I’ve shared with you that when picking a wedding date with Abbey during our engagement, we sat at a coffee shop, and I wrote down all the major sporting events I wanted us to avoid. As it turns out, thanks to an extended NFL playoff, our anniversary now occasionally falls on Super Bowl Sunday, so I really messed that up.

I’m starting this morning’s sermon with sports, because there are some far more difficult and important issues we’re facing as Americans right now; don’t think I’m avoiding this. What I think we need to discuss this morning is our identity, and I’m going to do so with something superficial first in hope you can relate; if you are not a sports fan, try to think about what you might strongly identify with instead of sports. I’ll come back to this in a minute. I had several conversations this week around identity, and this really does matter.

Back to sports. Yesterday, my family watched the Rams-Panthers football game, the first of six NFL playoff games this weekend. Jane always asks, “Who’s our team, dad?” when I’m watching sports, and then lets me know if we’re winning or losing. We spent ten years in Charlotte before moving to Michigan, so I told her we were cheering for the Carolina Panthers, who eventually lost a great game in the last two minutes. But I grew up outside St. Louis, Missouri, in Cardinals baseball, Blues hockey, and what was then Rams football territory. I watched the Rams win a Super Bowl in 1999, I had Rams posters on my wall as a kid… so I still kind of love them? I was torn. I liked both teams.

See in St. Louis, sports allegiance became part of my identity. I had the posters, I wore the shirts. People there get obsessed: whenever I was asked to draw something or write something in school, it was always about those sports teams. But then, I left St. Louis for Seattle when I was 23, and things got complicated. I was still from St. Louis, but I wanted to connect with my new home; I wanted to find a way to add the Mariners, Seahawks, Sounders, and SuperSonics to my “identity.” They fit okay, no real rivalries, but then the Sonics moved to Oklahoma, and now, I had to hate them? Then I met and married a Buckeye from Ohio – we first flirted over the outcome of the big game in November because my dad had loosely raised me on Michigan football – so I think I need to hate her maybe? Basing my identity on sports didn’t work. My St. Louis-Seattle-Ohio-Michigan-Carolina self has struggled with sports allegiance and identity ever since that first decision to move, to leave the location where I based my identity, to leave it behind.

Now again, I realize that for many of you, much of this sounds pretty silly; sports do not give you your primary identification. I am curious what does, and I hope you are curious this morning too. I hope you can take a minute today, maybe this afternoon, to think about how you define yourself, really. If you found my example relatable, you might be thinking of your university right now, or even your high school, where you grew up. You might base your identity on your profession, your career, something you did for years or are still doing today. If you are skeptical of this whole line of thought, I wonder if your primary identification comes through your relationships, which might feel healthier, more mature… spouse, mother/father, daughter/son, grandmother/grandfather, neighbor, friend. How do you introduce yourself to others? What makes you “you”? Think about it.

This issue of identity came up for me in a few different contexts this week, in really good conversations about career, family, children. But multiple times, it came up in the context of national identity, of patriotism, of structures and ideals in which we once found pride and security, structures and ideals that are now rapidly falling apart, to our sorrow, our frustration, our dismay. We feel helpless, we feel angry. A friend told me he was interviewing for jobs in Canada; another said he took down his American flag this week and put it away. A fellow priest told me she was not going to be able to watch the Olympics and cheer for the USA anymore. I really want the new US soccer jersey for this year’s World Cup, but that’s… complicated now. ……Where do you find your identity?

You might know where your priest is hoping to take this, but I share all of that this morning in light of this morning’s gospel, in light of the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. Today we have a short five verses, but they’re important for us, for me. Matthew gives us a slightly different story than the other gospel writers, with John the Baptist preventing and then consenting to baptize Jesus, “in order to fulfill all righteousness.” We could dive in deeply there, or we could dive into baptism itself, as we did last year, where baptism marks the start of something wonderful and new; for Jesus, this was the start of his ministry, the theophany from heaven, the Spirit descending like a dove, our epiphany that Jesus is more than we can imagine, the very Son of God.

But instead, I want to land on the final twelve words, what Matthew records the voice from heaven saying aloud for all to hear: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” This phrase echoes from heaven at the Transfiguration later on in our gospel story too; it is clear marker for first-century people as to Jesus Christ’s identity. This was not another prophet, nor another very good teacher; this was not the warrior king they expected the Messiah to be either. This was something mind-blowing, difficult to understand; Jesus was the Son of God. The very heavens opened up to let us know.

Jesus then, sure in his identity as announced from heaven and seen in light like a dove, Jesus goes out from this moment and begins his ministry. He calls disciples out of their busy lives to follow him. He teaches, he goes about doing good, as it says in Acts, he heals all who were “oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” Jesus finds his way to Jerusalem and challenges the established orders, both religious and political, and knowing he is beloved by God, he makes his way to the cross. We’ll get to all of that story in the next few months; Easter and the resurrection come in early April this year.

But what it begins with, soon after Christmas on this First Sunday after the Epiphany, what it all begins with is this baptism, this dove, this pronouncement of Jesus’s identity as the beloved, the Son of God, with whom God is well pleased. All of our gospel story begins with Jesus’s full knowledge that he is loved, that God is pleased… and then, Jesus goes out and lives in that love, loving to the very end.

Friends, this morning, I have some suggestions for where we can first go to find our identity, and it is not in sports teams nor in political affiliations, nor in our own civic or national identities, as important as those have been to us in the past. If you need someone to tell you this out loud, I cannot do it from the clouds but I can do it from the pulpit: You are loved by God. You are beloved, just as you are, wherever you are on your journey of life and faith. “For God so loved the world” that God sent us Jesus, the Son of God. You are loved. A lesser-known passage, 1 John 3 says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are... Beloved, we are God’s children.” We are loved, and we are children of God. That is our foundation; as Jesus followers, we know that is where we must all begin. We must not use our identity as beloved as an adjective for a different noun; beloved is the noun, everything else is description. We may be Democrats or Republicans, Americans, we may be Lions fans or Bears fans or Packers fans or even Rams fans, but we are beloved, children of God, first

And with that as our primary identification, we follow Jesus, the very Son of God, baptized by John in the Jordan River. We follow his example of love, even when others tell us to hate, even when our rational side, our instinct is to call others evil. We call out the evil they may do, yes, absolutely, more than ever, and we fight against it in every way we can, but we still love everyone with all the grace God has shown us. And, we “preach to the people and testify that Jesus is the Son of God,” as it says in our Acts reading, we tell others about this love, we show them this love with our lives, we tell them about this community where we find love. We are children of God first, and here, we are people of the Epiphany, people who fully realize that the love of Jesus Christ changes the world.

Our story last week, of King Herod and the Magi, of their contrasting murderous fear and overwhelming joy, that story felt applicable for me still this week, as much as it did last week. We have a choice between those two roads. Bishop Craig Loya, of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota, he put out a statement this week that said, in part, “As people of the Epiphany, in the midst of a world where cruelty tries to pose as power, we continue to rejoice in the assurance that absolute and final power resides in poor and crucified Jesus, who alone is the true king… we wait, we watch, we follow where love leads, knowing that only God’s action in the world can finally and fully heal all that the lust for power has broken down.” I would like to add briefly to his statement this morning, if you’ll let me. As people of the Epiphany, at the Baptism of our Lord, we follow the one who was named Beloved from heaven, the one who is love… because we too find our identity in that love… and that love calls us to love God and love others, without limit or end.

May we all find our identity this morning and in this new year in nothing less than the love of God, and may we live out from that identity, that foundation, without fear, confident that love is more powerful than hate, more powerful than violence, more powerful than anything else we may encounter.

Amen.