The Beauty of God's Beloved – Epiphany 1
By Charles Rush
January 13, 2002
Matthew 3: 13-17
m a big fan of country music, at least on those days out of the year when I'm driving in a pickup truck across West Texas. Some one recently sent me a list of the top 25 Country Classics- Titles you couldn't make up if you wanted to.
#23 How can I Miss You if You Won't
Go Away
#19 I Liked You Better Before I Knew
You So Well
#15 I'm So Miserable Without You,
It's Like Having You Here
#4 If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll
Know It's Me Not Calling
#3 I Hope to Live to Be as Old as I
Look
#2 She's Looking Better Every Beer
#1 I Haven't Gone to Bed With Any
Ugly Women But I've Sure Woke Up With a Few
They are
cute, but man they are mean. Like the Blues, a whole genre of Country Music is
written by people that are hurt, mad, and don't feel good about themselves. A
broken heart will bring that out in most of us at least for a season and what
would Country Music be without a broken heart
I would
contrast that this morning with that wonderful line we read in scripture, “This
is my beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.” These are words of acceptance.
They are the antidote to mean, hurt mad. They have a transcendent power to heal
low self-esteem and unworthiness. Blessing is powerful like that.
I had an
occasion once to speak with a man at a fundraiser I'd been asked to give an
invocation. He was a man of considerable achievement. Someone introduced us and
said to me that he had recently lost his wife of many, many years. I started a conversation by commenting on
his achievements and his reputation, how interesting it must have been to have
lived his life.
He said
to me, “I'm not actually all that interesting.” “To tell you the truth”, he
said, “when I lay down at night, these days, I remember back to when I was in
college. I was just another engineering nerd at M.I.T.. I didn't have any
confidence in myself. I couldn't carry on a conversation, particularly not with
girls. I had no goals, no plans for my life. In comparison with my brothers, I
wasn't athletic at all. My father always treated me like the son he had to
tolerate so that he could enjoy the other two. My secret game plan was to avoid scrutiny at all costs. I was most
content just flying under the radar, escaping everyone's notice.”
“Then
one day I met this girl at a party. I was standing there doing nothing except
holding up the wall. She walked over to me and said, ‘I bet you're the most
interesting person here and you don't even know it.'”
“It was
awful. I couldn't think of anything to say. I talked about the dumbest stuff.
There was this insufferably long silence. I just couldn't think. I'll never
forget at the end of it, looking up at her smile. She was just smiling at me.”
And he
was too shy to ask her name or walk her home. They parted in some stilted way.
He beat himself up for days, replayed the scene over and over in his mind.
Finally, one day, he saw her in Cambridge.
“It was
the boldest thing I had ever done. I asked her if we could go for coffee. It
was the same long silence. Again, that smile. What a smile.” She went. Way led
to way, and a not so elegant romance developed.
She
helped him with a lot of little things that he really needed. She helped him
dress. She told him once, ‘You crying chaos at us with that outfit.' He let her
dress him.
She
helped him develop friends. She got him to speak more clearly in public. She
got him to speak up in class and to introduce himself to his professors. She
believed in him and he started to bloom. She gave him confidence in himself.
She loved him into being. And when they went home together at the end of the
semester to meet his parents, his mother had that incredulous look that a
miracle had taken place and her son was suddenly a stock worth investing in.
She couldn't believe it.
He went
to graduate school, became successful in his first career, cashed it in and
developed another business, became extraordinarily successful, developed a
number of ventures from there, raised a solid family. He said, “In all honesty,
everything I've ever done in my life that was worth recognition, I only did
because she inspired me to become who I am.”
What a
tribute. She loved him into being. Great marriages are like that. What you hope
is that you can bloom someone else through love. None of us realizes our higher
selves without being loved. It literally brings us to life.
Think of
the wonderful movie Cocoon. It was about a group of retirees living down
in Florida. Their days were spent idly, going through a routine of medicines,
unfulfilling group activities, checking on various ailments that the neighbors
had, dealing with each other's crankiness and irritability at the prospect of
growing old.
One day
a group of three couples happen upon this large pod, looks like a huge clam
shell. Inside was an alien, incubating. The interesting thing about these pods
were that they were filled with the radiant life-giving power of the universe.
Even to go near them, just to touch them, filled these retirees with a shot of
élan vital- the life force. It made them recover energy, youth, desire. The
energy is infectious.
The men
become like boys, plotting an adventure with this pod, and sneaking out of
group activity like High School kids cutting class. They devise surprise
parties for their wives. Their wives court them with dancing. Life is fun and
they all have this infectious, deep happiness about living that just won't go
away. They can't contain it. Real gracious love is like that and real gracious
love is the spiritual force that courses through the heart of the universe. It
is the life force. It is the Spirit.
Traditionally,
this text is lifted up for us to show the uniqueness of Jesus. Jesus is called
out for special duty. Jesus is spoken to from the heavens. Jesus is blessed as
special in a way that the rest of us should recognize. He is God's anointed in
a way that you and I are not.
Yet, that should certainly not be
the only way we look at this story. There has been a tendency in the history of
the Church to so emphasize the uniqueness of Jesus that he almost loses his
humanity. What a tragedy that would be because this story is also the story of
what God wants for each and every one of us. God wants us to feel beloved and
fundamentally affirmed. God wants us to spiritually bloom. As the poet William Blake declared "Jesus
Christ is the Child of God, and So Are You and So Am I." Have you been
loved like that? Have you had that feeling that you were accepted in a way that
was quite in spite of who you are or what you have achieved, but just because…?
That is the way that God loves you. That is what Jesus came to tell us about
God and about the spiritual life.
And there is an interior
dimension to it, an internal congruence. My daughter described for me her
experience of being awake early in the morning on the Serengeti plain in
Africa, watching the herds of animals migrating and foraging to start the
morning. Looking out over the sheer vastness of the plain, the sheer scope and
size of the big game in Africa and having a transcendent feeling of her place
in the big scheme of things, being part of this much bigger world, and having a
place in it. That feeling of convergence, the interior sense that you are part
of the universe, that you have a place that matters in the midst of the
vastness- that is part of the transcendent power of being accepted by God. It
fills us with wonder, with meaning, with hope and promise… with humility and
perspective too.
That is so important spiritually.
It is an antidote to many other powerful forces that surround us. If you spend
any time listening to our children speaking honestly about their lives, they
come back to this underlying anxiety that they have, a nagging anxiety. They
are surrounded by so many people that are so successful, so smart, so gifted
musically, so athletic, whose families have so many resources that they don't
feel that they can compete. They don't feel adequate. They don't feel worthy.
They don't feel good enough. And I am always surprised at the people who give
voice to this anxiety. Because they are kids with considerable talent, with
considerable brains, considerable family resources.
I'm always surprised how many of
our daughters are secretly worried that they are not loveable because they are
not beautiful enough. They have interiorized this very narrow image of feminine
sexiness that comes straight out of MTV, Hollywood- a Heroin chic, waif-like
thinness- only size 4 and under need apply. What have we done with all of that?
These very powerful images tell them they have to be sexy to be loved when in
truth it is loving and being loved that makes us all sensual and keeps us
sensual in our post-MTV years.
They are interiorizing the competitive world we adults
have chosen for ourselves. Our kids are simply saying what we only think to
ourselves, what we let slip out of our mouths to our spouses when we don't
think the kids are listening. We are living out of the other forces that
surround us, one's where we are not acceptable, certainly not accepted. We are
living out of a world of values where we only matter if we have these assets,
if we have achieved these vocational goals, if we are of this cool factor.
God didn't want for Jesus alone
to live as a beloved child of God. God wants for all of us to have that sense
of acceptance too. This is, perhaps, the fundamental starting point for the
spiritual life that Jesus came to teach us about. The spiritual quest is not
about becoming holy in pure in the face of an angry, judgmental God whose wrath
we should principally fear. The spiritual quest is not about renouncing the
ephemeral world around us and finding inner peace through internal meditation.
The spiritual quest is about letting God bless us through love into living out
of our higher selves, which realize the values of the realm of God- love, compassion,
kindness, forgiveness, understanding, justice, and peace.
And Baptism. My colleague Grant
Gallup has pointed out that in the long history of the Church baptism has too
often reinforced the notion that it is a ritual that we have to go through in
order to be acceptable to God and part of the community of faith.
For those of us who grew up in
the Catholic tradition, this is worked out through the theology of Original Sin
from St. Augustine. In Augustine's thought, we are born into a state of Sin from
the Fall of Adam. It is a given part of our nature. The sacrament of baptism,
cleanses us of this unrighteousness, and is principally understood as washing,
a kind of spiritual prophylaxis or inoculation against evil. There is that bold
question that the Priest puts to the parents and the Godparents before they
baptize the child, “Do you renounce Satan and all of his ways?” I would use
that question at Christ Church but too many of you would say, “Well, what do
you mean by renounce- give me a list of what we are talking about here.” It is
a guilt tradition in the Church, which is not to say that there is not a place
for it. My only lament is that it became the dominant approach, drowning out
all other meanings of baptism.
Or there is the evangelical Protestant
understanding of baptism that it is a regeneration of the soul after we have
repented of our sin as adults and given ourselves over to following Jesus.
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with this either, as many of us know in our
own lives. Tom and I do a simple worship service every month at a Alcohol and
Drug treatment center and religion is still in the business of dealing with
people that need to make an abrupt change, surrender themselves to God, and
turn around.
Again, I am only sorry that this
understanding of baptism has come to dominate because it, too, is essentially
guilt based.
But if you look at the Baptism of
Jesus, we have another model that flows from being blessed and begins us on a
commission. Jesus is baptized in order to go an do something. It is the start
of something blessed and wonderful. As Rev. Gallup points out, we scrub up for
lots of reasons, not all of them bad. Bride and Bridegroom scrub up before a
wedding, out of joy, out of hope, out of love. Scrubbing up is a getting ready
for a great celebration, for living in the fulfilled time, the kairos
time, as the Bible calls it. It is a time when things are rich with blessing,
with the wonder of life, rich with meaning.
Baptism could be that as well.
John called the people out of Jerusalem, back over the river Jordan. He was
calling them out of the Promised Land because the bible says that the
Israelites, when they left Egypt, after they wandered for 40 years in the
desert, crossed over the Jordan into the Promised Land. John was calling them
out of the Promised Land, in essence to renounce all of their former
allegiances, all of their inherited identities, and to be washed in the river
to take on some new values and new identities, to start off on a new mission as
Kingdom people.
There is no question that the
Romans and the Priests in the Temple understood this as a threat to their
authority and their traditions. The Romans had John the Baptist killed for
inciting an insurrection. They got it that a bunch of people, filled with a
sense that they were children of God, wouldn't be content to be vassals of the
Roman Empire.
How true that proved to be. In
the two thousand years since that baptism, think of how many movements have
been started by people who laid claim to their new identities as children of
God rather than any identities they had been given by others.
From Susan B. Anthony to Fannie
Lou Hammer, so many of those women in our country that stood for women's
rights, did so in large part, because they read their bibles and believed it
that that they were as important to God as anyone. Believing the good news,
they set out on a great mission.
Rosa Parks, who had that
wonderful combination of believing she was a child of God and just being plain
tired. It was later said of her that when one woman sat down, the whole world
stood up. And stand up they did. Some reporter once asked Dr. Martin Luther
King about why people were marching for their rights in Alabama. Dr. King said
that there was nothing more dignified than people willing to walk, their heads
held high, for the respect and dignity that was due them. And he was right.
Believing the good news, they set out on a great mission.
It remains to this day, that
there are no more elevated words in political history than those penned by the
framers of the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self evident. That all
men and women are created equal. That we are endowed with certain unalienable
rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Regardless
of whether those gathered for that first Continental Congress were Deists or
Episcopalians, they understood and believe the teaching of Jesus that they were
all children of God. Believing the good news, they set out on a great mission.
Baptism should also be understood
like this.
We hold in our grasp, a great
spiritual power of blessing. We have the ability to anoint others on behalf of
God. We can tell them, “You are God's child, with whom God is well pleased.” It
is more honest than indulging them. It is more empowering than entitling them
with your assets and power. It will fill them with a real identity and esteem
that nothing else can do. Find ways to bless those around you. And watch,
watch, for they will do great things.
Amen.
© 2002 .
All rights reserved