Beloved

Beloved - Yes! The Dover Church
January 12, 2013 – Baptism of Christ Isaiah 42:1-9, Matthew 3:13-17

Before the days of GPS, mariners in the northern hemisphere relied upon one star to figure out where they were in the vastness of the ocean. That star, Polaris, the North Star, is not the brightest star, but the entire northern sky wheels around it. It is always in the same place.
Christianity is about following Jesus. What was Jesus of Nazareth's North Star? The fixed point in his universe that gave him his bearings? If your first thought was God, the problem with the word God is like an indefinite pronoun, substituting for an even more indefinitely huge concept that means so many different things to different people. The word God evokes the entire night sky, rather than a fixed point.
Jesus' North Star was who and how he was with God. In a word: beloved. I am grateful to the late Henri Nouwen for this insight, as the adjective beloved cuts through so much that is peripheral, inconsequential, or worse, downright contradictory to living the Christian life. In Jesus, beloved is God's noun.
Beloved. Be-loved...by God. This morning we meet Jesus as an adult at the moment of his baptism, his moment of commitment to his true self:
"And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Matthew 3:16-17

An embodied peak experience moment, not an intellectual exercise but a sensory, lived experience just like our peak moments. Jesus was a man, after all, and his humanity is essential to our following, living our spirituality through our five senses and not just in the thoughts of our minds.
A spatial meeting of heaven and earth, not holding fast to our childhood ideas about heaven above and earth below or good above and bad below, but rather the moment of reaching out from both sides and touching, across the chasm which separates whatever you may think of heaven in your secret heart and whatever you know of earth from your lived experience.
You - first person singular. Intimate, not formal. A personal, direct address. My beloved child. Something any of us who are parents have uttered, sung or exclaimed. I am personally very pleased with you, my child. Pure affirmation. No conditions. No expectations.
We have to suspend so many preconceived notions about space, time, reality, and human being as purely physical and God as purely not. Here's this person, just like any of us, reaching up out of the waters of new birth, out of a second amniotic fluid if you will, reaching out in a movement towards, in an embodiment of  and commitment to the divine, and the divine reaches out from the distance most of us imagine the divine confining itself to, from the heights of the skies...could there be anything more distant? And God completely affirms this person in his individuality. My beloved child. I am personally, utterly pleased with you. You delight me. The apple of my eye. Not only is the movement toward reciprocated, it is warm, personal and affirmative.
Any of us who are parents have known at least once this moment of affirmation and intra-identification. Mine. My beloved. My child. Me in you and you in me. My pleasure in you just because you are.
And that is the North Star of Christian spirituality, following a person who knew himself to be God's beloved in whom God delighted. We follow because we want to be-loved by God in the same way. That's a pretty radical orientation compared with how most people define themselves for themselves or through the evaluation of others. To be defined as whole, beautiful, be-loved in the eyes of the central force and energy of the entire universe.
The Bible has any number of epiphanies, moments when God showed up: in the garden with Adam and Eve, outside the tents of Noah and Abraham, wrestling with Jacob, on a mountain with Moses and then on another mountain with Elijah, with Isaiah and Jeremiah in the temple and Ezekiel by a river in Babylon, Paul on the Damascus Road, Peter on a rooftop in Caesarea, and John on the island of Patmos. The difference between those epiphanies and Jesus’ baptism, is that everyone else was an observer while Jesus was a participant, everyone else was terrified or at least uneasy, while Jesus was caressed; they saw while he was.
Our way of life is quite simple. In our relationship with Jesus, we stop being observers and become participants. We stop being afraid or running away and allow ourselves to fall into God’s embrace.
Yet, for many if not all of us, this is just too unbelievable. We have been so beaten up by life that we beat ourselves up. We have been told that we are not worthy so we have bought wholeheartedly into the idea that we are only as good as our resume, that our inner worth depends upon our outer achievements, that we just can’t allow ourselves to fall into the embrace because we think we’re on our own, that no one will be there to catch us, that we’ll just end up falling on our faces.
So if that is where we are, what are we to do? We can either reject the whole thing, take your ball and go home. We can be like a kid staring through the candy shop window without a coin in our pocket. Or we can give it a try anyways, doubts, suspicions, life experience aside.
Give it a try? How can we give being God’s beloved a try? Isn’t that something we either feel or we don’t? Well, yes, but we can put ourselves in situations where we are most likely to feel the love and hear the voice. As Wayne Gretzky, the most prolific goal scorer in NHL history, once said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” When your hormones told you that you wanted to fall in love, you had to get up and go to school dances, local hangouts, wherever you needed to be to meet someone. You have to go jump in a lake before you can emerge from the water.
So how do we take the shot? Show up for the dance? Jump in a lake? Choose your own metaphor…how do we position ourselves for living what we are told we already are?
Jesus himself took as his mission statement the passage from Isaiah we heard this morning. I’m sure he heard these words as a boy in synagogue and thought, “I want to feel that love, I want to feel the spirit, I want to be the delight.” And that’s what he lived into. Contrary to most expectations of what’s going to help us find the love, Jesus’ Isaiah model is not forceful, ego-centered, achievement based, self glorifying. No, the qualities are outward focused patience, compassion, tenderness, non-violence, self offering to and for others. And they are all done for others, to bring justice, to open the eyes of those who cannot see the light of God, to bring out those imprisoned in darkness by life, either spiritually or physically, to be a light to those in darkness.
That’s it? How can that be the way to live into God’s love? We will live into our identity as beloved by God, by how much we pour ourselves out for others? That is just so counter intuitive. No one is selling that these days as a recipe for happiness or success.
Why? How? It’s simple. If we believe that we are beloved sons and daughters of God, in whom God delights, not because of anything we have done but just because God is our loving parent…just because…, well then so is everybody else, no exceptions. If one is in, all are in. The Jesus way is about living into that by giving yourself away to those who need the gift that is you.
Not to be overblown with quotes this morning, but Pablo Picasso once said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” I have a feeling that Pablo was thinking too small. Finding your gift is not discovering if you’re a great painter, but that you are the gift. You are God’s gift of love to the world. And then, because you are beloved, you help everyone else to know that they are beloved too by loving them. We work for a world of justice where everyone is treated as if they were beloved children of God, where everyone's life has the opportunity to reflect the divine reality. Everyone.
You have to give it a try to know the way Jesus knew. Reaching out to someone in darkness and showing them that in your eyes they are a beloved child of God will do three things. First, you will discover that it's true, which may come as a shock. Second, you may well discover the darkness in you that keeps you from feeling beloved, which will be a first step towards coming out into the light yourself. And finally, you will find yourself being seen by the other as a beloved child of God, see God's eyes looking out at you through this other face.
Henri Nouwen writes, "The unfathomable mystery of God is that God is a Lover who wants to be loved. The one who created us is waiting for our response to the love that gave us our being. God not only says: "You are my Beloved." God also asks, "Do you love me?" and offers us countless chances to say "Yes." That is the spiritual life: the chance to say "Yes" to our inner truth." And then saying yes to everyone else’s inner truth.