Cambridge Korean Presbyterian Church Anniversary

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22  Baptism of Jesus

Startle us, O God, with your truth. Open our hearts and minds to your word
and to the very good news that you love us, and call us by name,
and that we belong to you forever in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Thank you brothers and sister in Christ for inviting me and members of Saint Paul to be with you as you celebrate 20 years here in this place.  We celebrate that too and have prayed for God’s blessing on you on this occasion. 

You may not know that St. Paul started out as a Swedish immigrant church in Somerville in 1923 and after many years moved out to Arlington after about 20 years.  Don’t take that the wrong way because after 20 years here, we would love for you to stay and share this building with us.  

I’d like to begin my sermon today with part of a poem by Raymond Carver written at the very end of his life.   And it goes like this:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

After I had read the poem years ago I thought it  uttered a universally human wish, something we’d all like to say when our life comes to an end—that we have been beloved, that our lives have been defined by receiving and giving love.

“Beloved” is the word that Jesus heard in our gospel today as he began his ministry.  As Luke tells it, after Jesus has been baptized and was praying, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."

Belovedness—that is the core message of the Christian faith, the simplest, and in many ways wildest assertion of all:  That for reasons we can’t begin to understand, every one of us is beloved by God.  Many Christians grew up hearing that the deepest truth of our lives is our original sin, our rebellion and rejection of God.  But even before original sin, was original blessing, a world that God creates in gladness and calls beloved.

Luke tells the story briefly yet vividly—with Jesus at prayer, heaven opened, the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove, and then that voice speaking from heaven—all of it language to describe a reality beyond words—that Jesus experienced himself as delighted in, believed in, held by the one he called his Father.   And that awareness was so overwhelming that Jesus spent the rest of his short life trying to get others to discover it for themselves.

Belovedness.  My guess is that most of us spend a good deal of our lives searching for a sense of belovedness.  I bet most psychotherapists would say that the search for belovedness is at the bottom of most of our human struggles.  We believe that God took on a human face in Jesus of Nazareth, and the face we see in him bears the look of compassion and delight.  So how painful it is that religions themselves have so often failed to communicate this core reality.  In fact, you hear more and more these days the notion that religion is one of the great perpetrators of division and hate in the world, and is actually a big part of the world’s problem, not part of the answer.

Consider the conflicts between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East.  The Historic conflict between Catholics and Protestants.  And the conflicts that occur within smaller groups, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists. 

Now I am sure there is much about our lives as human beings that saddens and even angers God—our selfishness and greed, and our lack of compassion for the suffering of the world.  But the God we see in Jesus is nevertheless not a God of bitterness and rejection, but of relentless compassion and eagerness to forgive and start again.

If belovedness is what Christian faith is all about, how did this faith lose its bearings? Over the centuries Christianity has often become a matter of believing the right set of things.  Agreeing to correct doctrines.  It began to emphasize that the whole point of faith is not what we do in this life but what will happen in the next—are we going to be saved or not?  And so Christian life often became a set of requirements and rules to get our ticket punched for heaven.  As you may know the great reformer Martin Luther was very concerned about this form of Christianity. 

But Christianity was and is about a relationship with God in Jesus Christ, about living in Jesus’ way, knowing God in our lives, and about our growing deeper, wiser, and more open-hearted in how we live.

Jesus’ whole ministry is shaped by the experience recorded in our gospel today.  “You are my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased.”  And he seems to have spent the rest of his ministry after that moment living out of a consciousness, a way of seeing the world, shaped by this moment.  Because he knows his own belovedness, everyone and everything he saw was also beloved.

And so when Jesus saw the heart-broken, the deathly ill, the hungry and the poor, he saw them all as beloved.  It is as if God kept whispering in his ear that same blessing all along—“You are my beloved, my child, in you I am well-pleased.” And because he felt that so intensely himself, he couldn’t keep from seeing everyone else the same way.

There’s a contemporary Buddhist parable that opens to us what this is really all about.  One day the Buddha, badly overweight, sat under a tree, and a handsome young soldier came along, looked at him and said, “You look like a pig!” The Buddha replied, “Well, you look like God!” “Why would you say that?” asked the surprised young soldier.  “Well,” said the Buddha, “we see what’s inside us.  I think about God all day and when I look out that’s what I see.  You, obviously, must think about other things.” (The Holy Longing, Rolheiser.)

What we see outside us is profoundly shaped by what is inside us.  Because Jesus had lived moment by moment with a deep sense of God’s love, when he looked at the world around him, everyone was radiant with God’s light.  The whole world was beloved.

The monk and writer Thomas Merton first entered a Catholic monastery in 1948, and for the first decade or more he devoted himself to leaving behind the world and seeking to know God’s belovedness for himself.  But some years later he had his own Jordan River experience on a day he had left the monastery to run some errands in nearby Louisville, Kentucky.  This is how he describes it in his journal:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.  It was like waking from a dream of separateness…to take your place as a member of the human race…I have the immense joy of being…a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate…If only everybody could realize this!…There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

It was belovedness Merton experienced, just as Jesus had at the Jordan River.  Merton, like Jesus, was able to see the holiness of every creature, of the earth itself, all of it shining like the sun.

The importance of the baptism of Jesus is not that it happened once for him two thousand years ago, but that it is meant to happen for us too.  This is a revolutionary insight, this belovedness.  If we could know our own belovedness moment by moment and could look at the world through those eyes, wouldn’t that change the angry, conflicted world we’re in?

If we really knew our belovedness, what would happen to the ways we live with each other in our church, at work and at home?

Knowing our own belovedness can help us slow down the rat race we live in, honor the goodness of the day in front of us, love those near to us, serve those who need us.

The author Anne Lamott returned to Christian faith and the church, a little Presbyterian congregation, after a very difficult and troubled life.  She tells the story of her conversion in the book I mentioned earlier, Traveling Mercies.  Lamott is both shockingly irreverent at times and marvelously honest and articulate about the Christian faith, making her a bit of an anomaly to both liberals and evangelicals, which makes her compelling to everyone.  She was interviewed recently in an evangelical magazine about her conversion.  She said,

I try to share my resurrection story with people in the hopes that some of them who have left churches or who have been kicked out because of their beliefs or sexual orientation will find something in my words or humor that makes church safe for them again.  .  .  .

I never said I am a good Christian.  I just know that Jesus adores me and is only as far away as his name.  I say, “Hi, Lord,” and he says, “Hello, Darling.”  He loves me so much he keeps a photo of me in his wallet.  If I were the only person on earth, he still would have died for me.

Belovedness is the gift buried in us all that the church is here to help us uncover.  Has belovedness ever broken through to the center of your life?  There is no more subversive message to all the powers that would shrink and control human life.  Belovedness healed broken marriages and unlocked the prisons of addiction.  It has brought down dictators, has spread a faith around the globe, and has carried people in crisis through the darkest times.  And today I am happy to be here with you to share the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.  That is what we have in common and whey our congregations gather here on Sundays to worship and celebrate.   

Our congregations are God’s beloved communities and part of the great beloved church of Jesus Christ.  Long ago the earliest churches began with a handful of people who came to know this belovedness for themselves.  I pray that we might discover it anew, as we continue to love and serve God.  When we get a glimpse of this belovedness, we will begin to see everyone shining like the sun.