The problem was not with the intelligence. They just didn’t connect the dots.

How many times did we hear that this past fortnight since the Nigerian-born would-be terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to blow up a plane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit. We knew he had been undergoing a change in his sense of identity from the son of a wealthy and privileged mainstream Muslim family to that of a servant of jihad associated with al Qaeda. We knew he had found a new sense of vocation as a suicide bomber, inspired and trained by the same Yemeni-based cleric who radicalized the shooter at Fort Hood. We knew he paid in cash for his plane ticket. We knew plenty. We could have read the signs, but we didn’t connect the dots.

Abdulmutallab himself made the wrong connections. He was trying to figure out who he was and what he was meant to do with his life that would give it divine and enduring purpose. But he listened to the wrong people and believed he was hearing the voice of God conferring upon him an identity and mission that would lead to the ruin of his own life and the death of many.

Who you are, and what will you do with your “one wild and precious life,” as the poet Mary Oliver puts it, are two of life’s most important questions. The world is full of dots—clues and hints that you must use your intelligence to connect. But will you know the right dots to connect and arrive at an answer that sets you under true divine favor and enlists you in service of the God who is at work in the world to bring healing and hope? Spiritual intelligence is more than collecting dots of data; it’s connecting those dots in a way that gives you a pattern that makes sense of things.

Jesus had an epiphany in the moment of his baptism, a flash of insight that confirmed everything that he had been sensing his whole life long. It gave him a clear picture of who he was and what he was to do with his life.

Luke tells us that as soon as Jesus was baptized, heaven was opened and a dove descended upon him. Now, why didn’t he just say that a dove appeared? We know doves fly in the sky. Why use the word heaven and speak of it opening? Because Jesus sensed in this that the veil between heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible realms, was dissolved. What previously was closed was now opened. The dove represented the peace of God that brings all things together. Jesus saw this as a sign that whatever his life was meant to mean, he was to stand at the intersection of every division. He would be the door, the gatekeeper, the mediator of God’s peace.

Next a voice from heaven speaks. You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Now, before we jump to the conclusion too quickly that this was an obvious thing that God the Father would be telling the eternal Son who was the second person of the Trinity, let’s remember that Jesus had to come to understand who he was in the same way any of us does. He didn’t come with a special kit of knowledge that the rest of us lack, which allowed him to figure things out we can’t because we’re only human. When the church says that that Jesus was the God-man, fully God and fully man, we don’t mean that he was some sort of weird half and half: 50 percent of each. We don’t mean that he seemed like us on the outside but was really God on the inside. We don’t even mean that he was human in every way, but that he had a little something extra that made him the Son of God, too. We mean that he was like us in every way, which includes that he was limited in his knowledge and perception and had to learn even as we do both who he was and what he would do with his life.

When God became human in Jesus Christ, God didn’t meet us halfway. God went all the way, committing the Son to a complete human life without superpowers. The fact that God would powerfully use Jesus to heal and to do miracles only meant that Jesus stood as the connecting person between God and the world. The dove shows us that. Jesus is the end of the old creation and the beginning of the new. So in him we are able to see the way the world God is bringing about will be.

When the voice speaks these words of blessing upon him, they are words of Scripture: You are my Son is from Psalm 2. It was part of a litany the people would say on behalf of God at the coronation of their next king. This one would stand in for Israel before God. With you I am well pleased comes from Isaiah, one chapter before our text for today. It speaks of God’s deep love for Israel. These words continue from chapter 43 with phrases like these: I have called you by name, you are mine … I will be with you … you are precious in my sight … I love you … do not fear, for I am with you.

One of my favorite duties as pastor is the annual gift of Bibles to first-graders. In one of the classes, directed by the Jernbergs, when the children receive their Bibles, they are told to open it to about the middle, where they will find a verse highlighted in Isaiah. This verse is from chapter 43: I have called you by name, you are mine. The teachers want the children to know that the Bible communicates God’s love for them and knowledge of them personally, and never to doubt it. They are helping them to make the connection that Jesus made between God’s love for Israel and God’s love for them personally and individually.

But we have to qualify all of this slightly. Jesus was able to make this connection in his baptism. That is, he was able to perceive who he was and what he would do with his life when he obediently accepted his solidarity with Israel and its mission to the world. And this is true for us, too.

When we baptize people here at Wilshire, you can look up and see in the tapestry the icon of a dove descending. Being in that water in league with Jesus means that you are making your connection to him in his connection to Israel, Israel’s God, and Israel’s mission. You are binding yourself to all of that, saying that you take the meaning of your life from the meaning of his life. Which means you may rightfully hear the voice from heaven speaking to you just as it did to Jesus. You are God’s beloved son or daughter. God knows you, loves you, and calls you by name.

But you have to get something more out of all this that has to do with what else is entailed in this. When God spoke those words through Isaiah, the Israelites were still captive in Babylon. They were going nowhere as a people. They felt cut off from their homeland. They were discouraged and saw no connection between their present situation, which seemed hopeless, and a future in which God might use them again. They must have wondered whether they had any meaningful vocation as a people.

God’s words of love and promises of presence with Israel and with Jesus come, in other words, at bleak moments in their lives. Baptism symbolizes the acceptance of a way of life that involves servanthood and humility. It’s not a booster shot for success, not a launching pad to a victorious life. It’s a commitment to follow God’s call to make your life available to whatever God wants of you. For Israel and for Jesus, that would mean suffering and sacrifice, and it should mean nothing more or less for us.

When Richard Stearns had reached the pinnacle of his business career as the successful CEO of Lenox fine china, after being CEO of Parker Bros. games, after an Ivy League education at Cornell and then an MBA at Wharton, a recruiter called him and asked if he would consider leading the missions organization World Vision. He hem-hawed around, not wanting even to consider it, but then the recruiter asked if he was really willing to consider God’s will for his life. At that moment, Rich realized that being a Christian was not enough. The point of his rise from poverty to wealth was not so that he could live on Easy Street. He realized that behind the question of God’s will were two other questions: would he be willing to give up his ten-bedroom house, the Jaguar the company gave him to drive, and the likelihood of retirement to Boca at 55; and would he be willing to walk into the barrios and brothels of the world for the sake of the Lord’s work? He said he actually had to think about it. Sell fine china to wealthy people or serve the poor? You know what he did.

But this is the point. Sometimes we get to thinking that the gospel is all about loving God and getting God’s blessing, which will make us more prosperous because we commit our hearts to Jesus. We read Christian books and we go to church and we try our best not to sin. And that’s about the size of our gospel. But Rich Stearns teaches us if that’s true for us, then we have a hole in our gospel because we don’t really believe the whole gospel. The whole gospel calls us to join God’s work in the world, to do something positive in Jesus’ name, not just to avoid something negative.

Now, for some of you young people, I would tell you that making that connection might mean shifting from a career path before it gets started. You may join your faith and your work in a way that puts you full time in some service of the kingdom, whether as a minister or missionary or a teacher or social worker—something, in other words that ties your call and your work fairly directly. For some of you it might mean turning what you are already doing toward God’s service in some way. Medical missions, say, or using your business knowledge to help small business owners in the Dominican Republic or creating a ministry or your own that God puts into you.

Your true vocation as a Christian will never be how you make a living; it will always be how you live for the Lord. For some of us those two things may come together, but for others it may be indirect. For example, you may be in a job that makes it hard for you to see the connection to your spiritual vocation. You may be a mortgage broker or a insurance salesperson or a tool and dye manufacturer. Nothing wrong with any of that, because every job can become an altar in the world on which to make true sacrifices to God. But your closest vocational connection may be more closely tied to what you do after hours, so to speak: coaching kids’ football, mentoring at-risk children, going on mission trips, teaching a Sunday school class, being a foster parent, or using the money you make in your job to serve the Lord in major ways by your giving.

Some of the best Christians I know are in this church. They have discovered how to make the connection between what they’re good at and what the world needs. Some of them have changed vocational course, and others have learned to see their off-time work as their true vocation.

Wherever you are now in your life, you can step toward God in baptism or renew your baptism—whether it was as an infant or as a child or as an adult. You can trust the Lord with your life and answer whatever God’s call is to you. And remember God’s word as you do: Do not fear, for I am with you.