Friday, July 19, 2013

Part 4 -- Discipleship Arm Dance: He Heard the Voice of God, "You Are My Beloved Son, with Whom I Am Well Pleased"



8 Pentecost 2013
Father Adam Trambley
July 14, 2013, St. John’s Sharon
The Discipleship Arm Dance – Part 4: “You are my beloved”

This week we are going to continue working through the Discipleship Arm Dance.   

Jesus was baptized by John.
He came up out of the water.
He received the Holy Spirit.
He heard the voice of God, “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
He went into the wilderness.
He defeated the devil.
He came out of the wilderness.
He announced his purpose.
He chose four others.
He taught them everything they needed to know.
He sent them out.

Two weeks ago, we talked about Jesus was baptized by John, noting his total commitment to God and God’s purposes in the context of a local family of faith.  Then last week we looked at He came up out of the water, as describing Jesus’ assent to continue with the new life God had in store with the support of that local community of faith.  We also discussed He received the Holy Spirit, noting how the Holy Spirit’s fire causes the warmth and heat that move us into the next few steps.  This morning, we are going to talk about He heard the voice of God, “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

As the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus as a dove, the heavens open up and Jesus hears the voice of God.  Now we might not be surprised that God calls Jesus his beloved Son or that God is pleased with him.  The centerpiece of our faith is that Jesus is the Son of God.  Certainly “beloved, Son and pleased” fully apply to Jesus in every sense.  But just because we expect God to say this to Jesus doesn’t make the sentiments any less real.  Jesus is God’s beloved child, and God is pleased that he has just committed himself to God and his purposes.

Now to transfer this divine voice from Jesus to us could seem like a stretch.  Most of us were not products of a miraculous virgin birth.  Most of us figure we’ve done things that have not pleased God.  And most of us don’t feel beloved by anybody way too much of the time. 
                                                             
But scripture assures us that we all are children of God and that he does love us.  And he is pleased with us, especially as the Spirit is filling us and we begin that life of commitment to him and his purpose which is good for us and what we really need.  God is like any parent that gets pleased when their children actually allow themselves to receive that incredible parental love.  Unfortunately most people most of the time don’t hear God’s voice telling us that we are his beloved children. God is saying it, but we refuse to hear it.  And the things we are doing that are getting in the way of hearing God generally don’t make the Almighty too pleased, either.

Our basic problem is that we have too many places in our lives where we try to hide from God.  Maybe we don’t trust God; maybe we don’t trust ourselves; maybe our life experience has taught us not to trust period.  When we actually surrender ourselves fully to God and his purpose, the Holy Spirit can fully fill us.  We’ll feel that divine warmth throughout our entire being that assures us that we are God’s beloved children in whom he is well pleased.  But if we don’t want to give parts of ourselves over to God, then we can only hear God speaking in the pretty areas we’ve shown him.  And we know how insecure we feel in love that hasn’t actually embraced the parts of ourselves we aren’t comfortable with.  We’ll never really hear God’s voice saying just how beloved we are when we only share the parts of ourselves that we like with him.  But God really does love all of us, at least all of the real us that is beneath all the barriers we set up to keep him and others out.  

These walls we set up between us and God take any number of forms and come from any number of causes, but I think they mostly resemble badly behaved toddlers in the sandbox.  Sometimes we throw sand at Grandma when she is trying to come give us a hug when we’ve scraped our knee.  Sometimes we decide to eat the pie we’ve made out of mud when Mom and Dad have a picnic table full of vegetables and a freezer full of ice cream for dessert.  Sometimes we try to push all the other kids out of our sandbox.  And sometimes we dig a hole and try to hide when the fire and roasted marshmallows are about to begin.  All that the grown-ups want to do is demonstrate their love for us, and all we do is find ways to keep that from happening.   Too often we act the same way towards God.

What do these walls that we hide part of ourselves behind look like from our perspective?  They take a number of forms. 

Sometimes our walls are sins that we aren’t willing to even want to give up.   The most famous example is St. Augustine’s sort-of-prayer, “give me chastity, but not yet.”  Maybe we say, “You can have all of me God, but not my smoking breaks” or “not my chocolate” or “not my gossiping,” or “not my yelling at my family members (or not my passive-aggressive behavior) when they don’t do what I want them to.”   Sinning, though, isn’t the issue.  God knows we aren’t perfect.  The issue is not opening our habitual sins up to God’s light.  If we do, we’ll hear him tell us that we are his beloved children anyway, and then he’ll offer opportunities as appropriate to change.  But if we decide our sins keep us from God and choose to hide behind them instead of asking for forgiveness, we are like the children screaming and kicking sand while God waits for us to let him get a loving word in edgewise.

Others barriers we set up between us and God are sometimes called parts of a false self or inner vows.  These walls resemble a little kid playing a super-hero and refusing to be who he really is.  The false-self barrier is like God saying, “Adam, I love you,” and me saying, “There is no Adam here.  I’m Batman.  Check out my cape?”  Often these false selves come up because we were hurt somehow, usually when we were little, and we decide, in order to protect ourselves, to act in ways so that we don’t get hurt again.  Maybe when we were little when people were unhappy we got scared, or worse, so we decide to be the person who keeps everyone happy, no matter what the cost to us.  Maybe we always felt that things were out of control growing up, so we decide we are the person who is always in control.  Maybe we were taken advantage of, so we decide to be the person who never appears weak or vulnerable.  Maybe we were always criticized, so we decide to be hyper-critical of others before they can judge us.  

Now these false selves are not who God made us to be.  They are always about protecting ourselves and never about loving God or others, or about living into the divine purpose we were made for.  And our false selves aren’t God’s beloved children.  They are kind of our own Frankenstein monster creations to keep the villagers at bay (or if you are under twenty-five, sort of like our own zombie apocalypse avatar that looks strong and powerful, but is only a character we made up to fight zombies and really isn’t us).  As long as we refuse to acknowledge that these roles we are playing aren’t really us, we won’t feel God’s love.  The beloved child of God is the scared little kid behind these masks we wear.  Once we offer our false selves to God and let his strip them off, we can feel how much he really does love who we really are, and how pleased he is when the real us opens up to him.  Then when we slip and put back on the costumes, we know who we really are – beloved children of God – and our protective armor becomes much less important to us.         

One other enormous barrier to believing we are God’s beloved children and that he is pleased with us is shame.  Shame is the debilitating lie that says “I am a bad person.”  When we feel shame, we cannot believe that we could be someone that God would actually love. 

Now shame and guilt are different things.  Guilt is about what we do and shame is about who we are.  Guilt can be an appropriate feeling.  When we’ve done something wrong, guilt is what makes us take responsibility for our actions and seek to make it right.  If we burn a bridge, guilt says, “I burned a bridge, so I have to go and apologize to the people who live on the other side of the chasm and build them a new bridge if I can.  If I can’t, I need to pay someone who can, and if even that is impossible, I need to be forgiven and trust God to make this right somehow and change my behavior so that I don’t play with flamethrowers on wooden trestles anymore.”  All of those feelings are meet and right.  But shame says, “I am a no-good, nasty bridge-burner that deserves to rot in hell.  I’ve separated loved ones across a canyon and I’m no longer worthy to be part of human society.   I am just an evil person that is an embarrassment to my family, my church, my friends, and my employer.  I’ll put on a nice façade going forward, but inside I know I’m total junk.”  I want to tell you that all of these feelings are lies.  We believe them because we have been conditioned to believe them since we were little.  Parents and other authority figures love to use shame to keep people in line, especially if they are dealing with lots of shame themselves.  We hear, we even say, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”  But no one should be ashamed of themselves.  Maybe they should feel guilty.  Maybe they need to take responsibility for their actions.  Maybe if they are children they need to be in a different environment that is more appropriate to their needs.  But no one should feel ashamed of themselves because everyone is a beloved child of God. 

Jesus always lived and taught in ways that lifted up love, not shame, and focused on forgiving the guilt of sin so that the appropriate feelings of guilt didn’t lead to the devastating feelings of shame. 

Shame is hard for us to deal with, especially when we’ve internalized it.  Shame leads to setting up all the barriers we’ve discussed above, as well as many others.  Shame makes us feel like we aren’t worth God’s time, and that we aren’t worth God’s love.  But the answer to shame is to offer ourselves over to God  -- even, or especially, when we believe we are worthless and totally unable to be loved by so wonderful a God as our God.  If we can just take that incredible risk, if we can just open our shame-filled selves up to the light of God, we won’t find that we are worthless.  We won’t find that we are evil.  We won’t find that we are an embarrassment or a disappointment or piece of trash.  We will find that the voice of God, which is powerful truth, tells us “you are my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased,” because nothing is more pleasing to God then his children opening themselves up to receive his love. 

We’ll close with the arm-dance again, but pay special attention after “He heard the voice of God.”  When everyone says “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” try to hear God speaking through all these voices not just to Jesus, but also to you. 

Jesus was baptized by John.
He came up out of the water.
He received the Holy Spirit.
He heard the voice of God, “You are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
He went into the wilderness.
He defeated the devil.
He came out of the wilderness.
He announced his purpose.
He chose four others.
He taught them everything they needed to know.
He sent them out.

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