Hearing your name

I have been away on a leave of absence, during which I found myself asking: Who am I? What is it I am supposed to be doing – with my life? within my work? Which are great questions to ask…when one is in their 20s. It’s significantly more disconcerting to (still) be asking those questions as I see 64 around the corner.

How is it I can still be asking those questions?? Well, for one, I have learned that “life is a series of phases”. I remember saying that — to my mother decades ago when she was trying to dissuade me from making a particular purchase, which she thought frivolous, by saying “You don’t need that…You’re just going through a phase!” And it is still true.

Phases. Like the moon. Like the seasons. Life is about letting go of one phase and moving into the next. That constant sense of change, and the grief that often comes with it, keeps most of us feeling we are on shifting ground. Do I have to change…AGAIN?

Yes.

Because as living beings, we need to change, or we stagnate and die. The change can be exhiliarating and it can be scary; those are not opposites. The change can make us apprehensive; do we know what the change will bring? How do we endure the fear that inevitably happens when we face a new thing?

We are not alone. Jesus had a similar experience.

In today’s story, Jesus goes to hear John the Baptiser preach, and in response to what he is hearing Jesus accepts baptism. And he has a vision. One that changes him and changes the course of his life.

In Judaism, one is baptised as a symbol of ending one life and starting another.

In Jewish tradition baptism (or trip to the mikveh) has two functions. First immersing in flowing water washes away the accumulated dreck of living.  From a symbolic point of view the water washes away what has been.  Secondly, as one comes out of the water, one is clean and fresh, a symbol of being birthed into a new life. (a)  This ritual of baptism is a public way of saying “what’s past is past, I want to live a new way”.  We turn away from what was – we re-pent – and turn towards something new, unencumbered by guilt or dashed dreams. We experience “forgiveness”, a letting go. Once fresh and new, we can be filled with possibilities.

So, if Jesus has come to John to be baptised, I wonder he felt he would need to have washed away? Was he tired moving, as an itinerent worker? Was he bereaved of a family member and needed a new direction? Was he antsy, or frustrated, wondering when G*d was going to break into history and fix the oppression of the Jewish people at the hands of the Roman occupation? We don’t know. But clearly he was looking to leave something behind and to start something new.

As he was under the water, does he have an inkling about what life he is going to be birthed into?   Does he have a sense of the possibilities of who he will become?

Mark’s good news about Jesus doesn’t begin with to whom he was born, where or how . The good news Mark shares about Jesus as Christ begins with Jesus’ baptism by John. For Mark’s community, when Jesus begins to become who he is when he comes up out of the water, as he is being re-birthed (or reborn). He has a vision: he sees the Spirit of God coming towards him, as if making a nest on his head, and hears a voice: you are my child, whom I love; with you I am well pleased”. 

That’s a key piece to understanding who Jesus is; but what does it mean to be called “child of God”? What does it mean for God to say “with you I am well-pleased”?

Jesus hasn’t done anything yet; he won’t start his public ministry until John gets imprisoned by the local governor. But as Jesus leaves behind what was, as he turns towards the ‘kingdom of heaven’ that John is preaching, he comes to realize that his God, the god of his hopes for a new world dawning, is well pleased with him.  Not for doing anything; only for being himself.

The rest of Jesus’ ministry, how he lives, what he teaches and says and does, are all rooted in this affirmation: You are my child, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.  He has no idea what that vision means, so he flees into the desert.  He has no idea what new life is he bound for, so he goes to a place with few distractions, a place where nothing is tame, on a quest to understand the vision.  What does it mean to be called “child of God”?  What does it mean that God is well-pleased with me?

This is not an idle question. We are invited into the same journey.  What might that mean to you  if you were completely rooted in that same experience: the Divine, the Source of all Love, saying to you: You are my child. Whom I love. With you I am well pleased.  How might it affect how you see yourself?  How might it change what you see in the world around you, and how you respond to that?

David Sparks, a well-known UC minister, prayer-writer and bible commentator, suggest that this story invites us to ask us “what stands between you and doing the will of God?”

That feels like a big leap to me – that G*d would be expecting me to be able to do anything — so I ask that question differently: What stands between me and my abilility to accept this grace that I am beloved, and with me God is well pleased? 

Maybe you ask the same question. What stands between me and my abilility to accept this grace that I am beloved, and with me God is well pleased?

Is that not good news?

Mark’s gospel, good news about Jesus as Christ, invites us to believe and trust, that we can ask ourselves “what name does God use to call to my heart?” To allow a life-changing, transformative, moment to happen to us as we hear our name being called.

The rest of Jesus’ ministry is firmly rooted in this affirmation, that he is God’s beloved child and God is well-pleased with his life.  Jesus’ sense of connection with the divine is deep.

How might you live if you had a similar deep sense of connection with the Divine? This is also called having a deep spirituality.

What if we, both as individuals and collectively as this United Church, could cultivate that deep spirituality?   How might we live differently if we were to allow ourselves to let all the fear and uncertainty we carry be washed away? Fear of not having enough, not being enough, fear that we are insignificant, fear of being called “Holy Rollers”, fear of letting God ‘take the reins’. Imagine that being washed away….

And as we, fresh and clean, come out of that water, emerging into a new life.   Imagine who we could be, and what we could do, if rooted in that deep spirituality, in that relationship with the Holy Wholly Beyond Us , we could accept that the Divine is well-pleased with us?

That is what we, as a denomination, are being ask to do in this triennium to 2025…to be a people of deep spirituality, to walk with faith (to trust) that we are the very Offspring of Eternal Holiness and that our God of transformative hope is well pleased with us…even as we travel through the phases of our life.

Image credit: Jesus’ Baptism is by Daniel Bonnell, and is used under license from bonnellart.com

NOte: (a) In modern Judaism, of all variations, going to the mikveh is the penultimate step in the conversion process. One leaves behind whatever religion has carried us to this point and, emerging from the waters of mikveh, is rebirthed a Jew. It is also a practice used by observant Jewish men after sex to wash away “the little death” and begin life anew, and by observant Jewish women after their menses is complete to mark emerging into a new cycle of the potential of bearing new life.

Belonging Matters

Out loud, describe yourself.

What are the adjectives you use?  Is there an order in which you use them?

I read once – unfortunately I can’t remember where- that the adjective closest to the end is our base identity, and the rest are qualifiers.  For example I am a woman.  I am a white woman. I am a Canadian white woman.  I am a Christian Canadian white woman.  I am a progressive Christian Canadian white woman.  I am a bisexual progressive Christian Canadian white woman.  I am a middle-class bisexual progressive Christian Canadian white woman. …… I could also add: middle-aged, university educated, rural-living, single, and so one.   Each adjective adds a qualifier to the (my) basic identity.  And those qualifiers matter; they describe something that is essential about who I am, how I view the world, how I move through and act in the world; each qualifier affects the choices I make in life.  Each of those adjectives help me know what my place is in the world, where and how and to whom I belong.

Sociologists talk about the divisions in our world, in our country, in our province (in our community?) being about a need to belong.  In a world where we are increasingly alienated from the land, from our work, from each other, we struggle to retain our sense of personal identity; it becomes a matter of urgency to know to what “tribe” we belong. Even if we don’t agree with everything our “tribe” is doing or saying, we will stick with our tribe if the only alternative that we see is being adrift, or alone in the world.

Belonging matters.  Whether it is to a family, a church or organization, to a group idea (as in political party, or identifiable class), where we have a sense of “belonging” roots us in our world.   The question becomes: Where do You Belong?

More importantly, how do you know when “you belong”?   Have you ever had the experience of “not belonging” somewhere?  What are some differences?   Which would you rather feel?

Our sacred story for today is about belonging, what it means and why it matters. 

John’s ritual of baptizing is about belonging, and about starting over in a new life, with a new identity.   He is using an ancient tradition in Judaism called “making mikveh”, a rebirthing. The mikveh, as I learned from  Rabbi Marcia Praeger in particular,  is where you go, what you do, when you are leaving something behind and starting something new.  When you marry, when you divorce, when you have a child, when you become a widow/er, when you start a new job.  It requires an extremely thorough cleaning¹ so that when you come up from the waters you come into the world as if you were a newborn.

Most contemporary New Testament scholars tell us that John was was part of a movement that was expecting God to begin a New Order on Earth, which was immanent, due “any minute”.²    He wanted people to be ready for it, so he was using the “stick” method of teaching; time was of the essence.   John’s ritual was an invitation to strip off their old ways, to enter into the waters of the mikveh, and to be reborn into a new life.  Shed your old ways, repent, and live in a new way in order to be ready for the New Order’s beginning.

John’s baptism was a revitalization of one’s identity as a follower of God’s torah.  Over time in the new Christian movement, it also came to be associated with “washing off sin”, which is why people wondered why did Jesus have to be baptized. But at the time that John’s movement was baptizing out in the wilderness it didn’t mean that. It meant being re-born into a new identity, into a new family.

So we can still ask why does Jesus have to be baptized?  Is it because although he belongs to the Jewish people, there is something about the way that was being lived in his time and place made it feel like he “didn’t belong”?   What happened at the river?

I wonder if Jesus was attracted by the stories he’d heard of John in the wilderness; while he is there Jesus is convinced by John to shed his old life and old ways to become ready for New Order.  But then, as he is making this commitment, and is emerging from the water he has a mystical experience, an experience of direct connection with the Holy.

In my research I looked up several translations, one of which was the Hebrew equivalent of “baptize”, what it means outside of Christian context: to make whelmed (fully wet), stain, dye .  So I wonder if when Jesus goes under the water, intending to start this new way of living, he discovers that he is, in fact, “stained” by God, dyed-in-the-flesh with the Holy, coloured inextricably with G*d, inseparable from G*d.  Where you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins – which was clearly the experience of Jesus’ followers: they couldn’t tell where the human Jesus ended and the Divine begins.

This passage has often been interpreted as the naming Jesus as G*d’s son.  For Luke and Matthew it is a proof of what has come before, and for Mark (the earliest gospel) it is where and how Jesus begins.  It is at his baptism where and how Jesus comes to know in every fibre of his being that he is not, cannot be, separate/d from G*d.

In this experience Jesus finds his identity being remade.  Rather than a follower of a particular religion, he realizes that he G*d’s beloved son, with whom the Holy is well pleased.³  It is the first word to describe his identity to whom he belongs.

In our faith, we assert that all things were created by G*d ‘in heaven and on earth’; rather than being a statement of biology it is a statement of Truth: we all belong to the one who created us. We all belong to G*d.  The trees, the water, the rocks, the land, the sky. You.   You belong to G*d.  It is our faith that in our baptism that identity is confirmed, just as it was for Jesus.

What would it mean for you if that was your primary identity?   To hear that you belong, inextricably, to the Holy?  That You are pleasing to G*d?  That in Your live G*d takes delight? That it is You who is wanted, chosen, by the Holy?

We sometimes will say “know who you are and Whose you are”, “know who you are at your very core, and to whom you belong”.  What might that do to how you see yourself in life?  how you live your life?  Knowing that nothing – not angels or demons, or princes or governments, nor anything that is created in heaven and earth – could ever separate you from G*d?  You, in your flesh and bones and heart and mind and soul, are dyed with G*d’s tincture. That is where you belong.  That the first way of identifying yourself is as belonging to the Holy, in old-fashioned words you are G*d’s own “child” with whom the Holy is well-pleased.

It’s one thing for me (or others) to say this – even with great and deep conviction; but it isn’t until you know it that it changes your self-identity. It is the purpose of your spirituality, through your spiritual life and practice(s), that you come to know where you truly belong.

Believe me, it is really is a balm for the soul to know that you belong to and in G*d.  Knowing that is a path to healing those parts that are broken, bruised, cut and scratched from everyday living.

(Fair warning: this knowing isn’t a one-off thing.   My experience is that my False Self, the Adversary of the Holy, makes me question this identity all the time.  That is the “sin”, this forgetting to Whom we belong.   So all the time I need to return to my spiritual practise to be reminded: This is who I am: G*d’s beloved, in whom G*d is well-pleased.  I encourage you to find a practice (or 3) that rebirths you, every day, into that truth.)

A Prayer for Remembering Our Call:

The Light comes to the world:

our eyes, long used to darkness, fatigued from long searching

blink and twitch.  We pull away and cover them.

The Light comes to touch our bodies:

we shudder with the warmth, but draw back into isolation.

The Light comes to infiltrate our spirit, and our minds:

We turn away preferring crouching in the shadow of dying leaves and ice-covered branches.

And yet the Light still comes, shining, caressing, inviting

may we learn to love the Light

to open our eyes, our limbs, our mind, our spirit,

to hear the Voice within the Light

call our name.

Call My Name.

And hearing it, respond to Grace,

and dance in the Light

with the Holy Mystery in my life. So May it Be.

 

NOTES:  Thanks to Kimbourne Park United Church for the Feature Image.

1. Rabbi Praeger said the ritual of immersing oneself in the mikveh traditionally has been associated with “purity law”. It involves a very thorough physical cleansing –  scraping off dead skin and trapped dirt, and stripping oneself of old clothes and putting on new ones afterward – so that you step into the mikveh leaving behind all traces of the everyday world in order to be rebirthed.  It also is a cleaning ritual for anything that is reminiscent of death (spilled semen, menses blood).  And it is a cleansing ritual for the spirit which means removing from oneself the traces of the everyday world (the profane world where compromising principles is required) in order to emerge in the sacred world (where one follows G*d’s law alone).  So the mikveh is an important ritual in the Jewish practice of religion – then and now.

2.. For an easy-to-read piece of contemporary scholarship on John and Jesus, may I recommend Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, by John Dominic Crossan.    John is targeting a return to the importan torah values.  What is John trying to remove from people? Their ways of getting by in the world by cutting corners on the torah? Maybe not using the correct measures, or skimming land/crops from your neighbour, being a little arrogant in your prayer/ritual practise or in your bloodline

4. (other translations chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life – MSG; in whom I delight – Am. Amplified; my dearly-loved son; my son the beloved –NRSV; my beloved son whom I wanted OJB)

4.The Prayer is by: Wheadon Ill. UMC Worship Team in Flames of the Spirit, Ruth C. Duck & Miren C. Tirabassi, 2003:Nashville Pilgrim Press.

 

 

 

 

When the apple doesn’t fall far…

We’ve been talking in this Season of Epiphany about how God is being revealed in the person of Jesus, pulling back the cover inch by inch.  At the time of his parents celebrating his birth at 6 weeks, Jesus is revealed (by Simeon) as someone who brings light to Gentiles and glory to his people, the Jews.  God is the light, and Jesus is the one who carries it.  This story is the next level of God being revealed.   And it’s short:

Luke 3: 21f.  Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had 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. (New Revised Standard edition, accessed from biblegateway.com) 

You know the expression “he is his father’s son” or “she is her mother’s daughter”; you know the implication is “you” are “just like” the person who raised you – you walk the same, you speak the same, you think the same way and hold the same values. Sometimes when referring to a child’s behaviour which is so reminiscent of their parent we say “apples don’t fall far from the tree”.

You see in this story Luke is inviting us to find The Sacred among us by seeing Jesus in a new way. In Judaism baptism (or immersion, or the action of the mikveh) is the ritual way that one starts life over.  John’s baptism in particular, say the scholars, was initiation into the new community of God, starting over Being Born Again into a new way of living.¹  We are no longer living in the old way, we are living in the new way.  John’s invitation to baptism, to starting over, is to live by offering for free what used to be paid for, not take more than you need, by sharing.²

So by being baptized, Jesus is starting his life over, presumably by committing to the way of life in God that John has been preaching, and now Jesus is at prayer.  Is he asking for strength to live up to that commitment? Is he praising God for the opportunity to live this way?

While he is at prayer, he hears a voice: you are my son, my beloved and in you I delight.”  I wonder if Luke is saying that while Jesus is at prayer, he realized something: made in God’s image, he “is his father’s son” – he thinks like God, he has the same values as God, he is “just like” God.   In this passage Luke is telling us that Jesus is more than what Simeon thought; Jesus is more than bringing the light (to Gentiles), he is the light walking among us.  Luke is saying if you want to know what God is like we can, and no need to look further: God is revealed in the life and work of Jesus.  This isn’t a story about biology, it’s a story about what it means to be God’s child.

But what is really important about this story is that it isn’t just about Jesus.  In this story (and throughout Luke’s gospel), what is truly  life-giving (and Be Warned: Life Changing) is that if we also have been baptized, we (as in each of us) – having also been made in the image of God – are also beloved sons and beloved daughters, in whom God delights; therefore we also can grow into thinking like God, hold the same values as God, bring the light of God – even Be the Light – to our neighbours just as Jesus was.²

This story calls us to remember that by our baptism we are in the family of God and we are to be like those apples who have not fallen far from the tree.  We are called re-member, re-embody,  our baptism and to pray to God, who loves us like a parent: what does it mean to be born into this new way of living?  What does it mean to be part of the family of God? And in prayer, if we listen, we will hear “you are my child, my beloved, and in you I delight”.  You.

How do you make space to listen in prayer?  What do you hear?

That is what “spirituality”, or “being spiritual is”.  It’s creating ways for our heart to know the tree from which we are nourished, and then finally to really hear the truth of this phrase “you are my child, my beloved, and in you I delight”.   And when we do, we will receive healing, and then, empowered by the Holy Spirit within us, we live into this way of life.  We will live as a beloved of God, whose behaviour will reveal God into the world, because each are an apple that doesn’t fall to far from the tree.

Some notes: photo credit: contemplative.org/at-her-eucharist;  Specific references and further reading: ¹ Ronald J. Allan, workingpreacher.org accessed by textweek.com Jan 23/19;  ² https://rethinkredochurch.com/2019/01/07/shall-we-gather-at-the-river-but-not-just-any-river/  ³  http://www.davidlose.net/2019/01/the-baptism-of-our-lord-c-forgiveness-and-so-much-more/