Sunday 13 January 2019

Beloved: Baptism of Christ

Audio version here

“What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!”[1]

Those words, printed out on a scruffy scrap of paper, are stuck above my desk in the vicarage, so that I see them every time I raise my eyes from my laptop. They’re the words of a seventeenth century poet and priest, who was largely unknown until the beginning of the twentieth century. Some of his works were literally rescued from a smouldering rubbish heap by a passer-by looking for spare parts for his car. 

The writer’s name was Thomas Traherne, and he knew what he was talking about in this passionate plea for a world more aware of love. He lived through one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history, the English Civil War. He was born in 1637, and died in 1674. He grew up in the midst of bitter fighting between Royalists and Parliamentarians. Families and communities tore each other apart. Traherne was the son of a shoemaker from Herefordshire, who went on to study at Oxford, and then became vicar of the parish of Credenhill at a time of fervent and often brutal religious dispute. By all accounts, though, he was a gentle and much-loved pastor. The worst criticism anyone seems to have had of him was that he was “so wonderfully transported with the Love of God to Mankind…that those that would converse with him, were forced to endure some discourse upon these subjects, whether they had any sense of Religion, or not” [2]

That rings true from his writings, which are full of love and delight in the world around him.  “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you… till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.” [3]These are the words of someone who has seen what hatred and greed can do, and has come to value their opposites, love and generosity of spirit.

“What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be.”

That word “beloved” came up in our Gospel reading today too. Jesus is baptised in the River Jordan by John. And as he comes up from the waters, the heavens open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and God’s voice is heard. “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased”. “My son, the Beloved.” 

We might say, “but of course! This is Jesus after all! He was a great teacher and healer, a hero with the courage to endure the cross. Of course God thought he was beloved!” But this story comes before all of that, before Jesus has begun to preach, before he has started to heal people, before he has done anything to deserve God’s praise. He’s just a carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

Straight after this story we’re told that he’s about thirty years old, and that is significant. Thirty was the age in the ancient world when men were regarded as fully grown, independent, mature, able to take on the responsibilities of governing and leading. It was the age when Roman men could stand for public elected office. It was the age when Jewish men from priestly families started their work in the Temple. Women, sadly, were never regarded as grown ups, able to run their own lives, but for men thirty was the magic number. Jesus is just beginning, says Luke. God doesn’t call him beloved because of what he has done, or what he will do. He calls him beloved simply  for who he is, because he exists. 

That’s good news for all of us, because it’s clear from the Bible that God doesn’t just feel this way about Jesus. In the Old Testament the prophet Isaiah wrote to the Israelites in exile in Babylon.  They believed that they’d lost the love of God because of the way they have behaved, that the exile was their fault, but God tells them, through Isaiah, that didn’t matter.  “You are precious in my sight and honoured, and I love you”, he says. They are beloved, whatever has happened, whatever they have done.

When families bring children for baptism here I often tell them this story of Jesus’ baptism. Names matter, I tell them.  The names they have chosen for their child matter. There’s usually a reason for the choice they’ve made. It’s a family name, perhaps, or a name with a special meaning or association for them. But whatever they have decided to call their child, I remind them that he or she already has a name, given by God. God names their child “Beloved”, because he names us all “Beloved”. We’re “beloved” when we’re newborn, powerless and dependent, when we’ve done nothing yet to be loved for. We’re beloved when we hit the terrible twos, or the turmoil of adolescence, when we strain our parents’ patience to breaking point.  We’re beloved when we’ve grown up, but don’t feel it, when we’re making a mess of life, or losing our way. And we’re just as beloved when we’re aging, losing our power, maybe going into the blur of dementia. We may look in the mirror and call ourselves useless, or even forget our names completely, but God still knows and names us as “beloved”. There are no ifs, no buts about this, no exclusions in the small print.  Our “belovedness” doesn’t depend on what we’ve done. It can’t be earned or deserved - and that means it can’t be lost either. God loves us because we are here, and we are his – for no other reason than that.

Now, I would quite understand if some of you are thinking at this point “This is all very well, but isn’t it a tiny bit self-indulgent, sort of “new-agey”, warm and fuzzy…? We’re all beloved… yes, but so what?”  And you might be right. But I don’t think the Bible goes to such great lengths to tell us we are beloved simply so we can have a nice, feel-good moment now and then. It tells us we are beloved because when we know that thoroughly, deeply, it can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that can, because when we know that we are beloved, simply because we exist, we have to accept that everyone else is too.  How much suffering could have been prevented in Traherne’s time if the Royalists and Parliamentarians had seen each other not as enemies, but as fellow children of God? How much suffering could be prevented in our own time if we could look at those around us – especially the ones who hurt or humiliate us and see the same? “What a world it would be, were everything beloved as it ought to be” said Traherne. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” said Jesus to his disciples. But we can only love others as God does, for themselves rather than for what they have done, if we have learned that we are loved like that too. If we are still trying to earn our place in God’s heart, if we’re afraid we’ll lose it if we do something wrong, then how can we possibly believe that he could love those who we don’t even like, those we disapprove of, those we think have it in for us? 

“We love because God first loved us”  says the first letter of John,(1 John 4.19) and it’s the truth. It is the knowledge of God’s love which sets us free to love those around us.

Traherne said that we are “as prone to love as the sun to shine”[4], that loving is in our deepest and truest nature, but it’s often a challenge to believe that in the face of so much that undermines it; the brutality and oppression and simple carelessness that poisons our world and seeps into our souls.
Jesus heard a voice from heaven, “You are my Son, the beloved”. We may not have any such obvious reassurance, so it matters that we keep our ears, and our hearts, open for the messages we do hear that tell us of our worth to God; the messages of the Bible, the messages of those around us who carry on loving us whatever we do, the moments of blessing in our lives, the moments when we see God at work – even if they are just moments. It matters that we recognise the ways we drown those messages out too, by putting ourselves down, convincing ourselves that we are unlovely and unloveable. To do that is like pulling the plug out when you’re trying to fill the bath – the love just runs away down the plughole.

Believing in our belovedness, and the belovedness of others, doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take seriously the things that are wrong in our lives or that we don’t need to challenge what is wrong in the world around us – to be truly loving means to do both of those things - but we need to know, and affirm, and trust that nothing we, or anyone else, can do can destroy God’s love, for us or for them.

“What a world would this be, were everything beloved as it ought to be!” 

This season of Epiphany is a season of revelation – that’s what the word “Epiphany” means.  The stories we hear at this time are all about the love of God being revealed in Jesus; revealed to the Magi, revealed to wedding guests at Cana when Jesus turns water into wine, revealed to Simeon and Anna in the Temple in Jerusalem when they see in Jesus the light of the world. But all those stories happened long ago and far away. The most important revelation of God’s love we need in this season of Epiphany is the one we find within ourselves and within each other, the discovery that we, and all the world, are called beloved. That’s what transforms us, and when we are transformed the world around us is transformed too. 

Amen




[1] Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, 2:66-8.
[2 “Happiness and Holiness” by Denise Inge, p 9.
[3] Centuries of Meditation 1.29, 30
[4] Centuries of Meditation 2.65.

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