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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