You Are My Beloved
Sermon by the Rev. Lynda Tyson
Matthew 3:13-17
“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” It’s mysterious, this voice from heaven. And these words aren’t just about who Jesus is. In the Gospels there is almost always another story within the story. Besides telling us in no uncertain terms who Jesus is, his baptism story reveals something else. The voice from heaven is an important moment of God’s self-revelation to the created world. The voice from heaven demonstrates that God seeks to be in relationship with God’s created beings.
God has forever been revealing God’s self to humanity, and that revelation didn’t stop when the early Church fathers decided to close the canon of scripture and bind what has come to be called “the Good Book,” sealing it off from continuing accounts of God’s self-revelation – revelation that still goes on in all kinds of ways.
I have a friend who we’ll call James – not his real name – a friend I haven’t seen since the end of last January. The last words I remember saying to him were, “Hey Buddy, let me know how it all turns out.” About ten months earlier, James quietly sought me out one day, and he had kind of a dazed expression on his face. He asked if we could talk. He had just returned from several days out of town, and something had happened on that trip that he said didn’t understand. Would I listen and tell him what I thought?
The story was that James and his dad and brother had rendezvoused in another city for a little get-together. And rather than staying in a hotel, they stayed at a monastery. Many of you probably know you can do that – it’s a nice quiet atmosphere for renewal, with beautiful worship services if you choose to attend, the rooms are clean, the food is usually pretty good – sometimes very good. But, James told me, he and his dad and brother chose to stay at the monastery because the price was right – much more reasonable than a hotel of comparable quality. James also told me he was no stranger to this particular monastery -- where they had stayed before on these family visits. He said he had had mixed feelings about the place over the years, that it didn’t really move him one way or another, it was just a good place to lay their heads.
But something had happened to James on their last day at the monastery – something unsettling. Picture this: James is getting ready to leave to come back home to New York, and he is standing alone with his duffle bag in one of the monastery ante rooms waiting for his father and brother to come downstairs. No one is around. Suddenly, out of nowhere, James hears a voice – a clear, strong voice. The voice says, “I belong here.” James just about jumps out of his skin. He looks around, still nobody there, and he comes to the startling realization that the voice he just heard was his own. “I belong here.” Just like that; out of nowhere. What could this mean?
James leaned heavily on his friends in the following months upon months of sometimes agonizing discernment – spiritual discernment: “Is this God, calling me to become a monk?” And then there were the practical questions: “Could I actually quit my job? Give up my neighborhood and the church community where I’ve been for a dozen years? Wouldn’t I be crazy to give up a rent-controlled apartment that I’ll never have again?” The answers were, “Well, yes, you can quit…yes, you can give up those things”…and “Yes, by social standards, you would probably be considered crazy.” You have to be a little bit so-called “crazy” (don’t you?) to think you hear the voice of God speaking through you, putting words in your mouth?
Theologian Mark McIntosh talks about three phases of our engagement with God. It starts, he says, with “seeing differently…when the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to see the truth taking place in our lives.” McIntosh says Jesus stories create a context that allows us to begin to notice the meaning and truth of our own actions, when we begin to see our stories as pieces of God’s story within us. Think about that – seeing our own stories as bits of God’s story within us. It’s back to that heavenly voice at the Jordan River – we can understand the voice as telling us who Jesus is, but if we look deeper we can also understand the voice as revealing something to us about the One speaking. Not just the words, but the action of God speaking to created beings indicates a God who is in relationship with God’s created. The voice is God, revealing God’s self.
The next level of our engagement with God happens when the loving power or Spirit… inhabits us and transforms our hearts and minds so that we begin to hear and understand what God is saying. And, the third phase of engagement is when, by the Spirit’s power…we are able (not only to hear and understand), but to respond to God’s loving call in our lives.
We move back and forth through these phases of divine engagement. We spend a lot of time in phase one, learning to see the truth of our own actions differently as we take in the Jesus stories. Maybe we get a glimmer of phase two, where we feel we are inhabited by the Spirit and just begin (or almost begin) to understand the message. Getting to that phase three is the tough part, the scary part, when we hear God’s loving call, and allow ourselves to become vulnerable by reaching back to God in loving response.
God said to my friend James, “You are my, beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” James must have been in that third phase of engagement, where he was able to hear, to understand, and to reach out in loving response: “I belong here.” James, by the way, just spent his first Christmas in his new home at the monastery. You and I probably are not being called to monastic life (at least our family members hope not). But each of us is called into some kind of relationship with God, whatever that looks like, a relationship unique to each one of us.
In her book, Called to Question, Joan Chittister says, “It takes a lifetime to really understand that God is in what is standing in front of us. Most of our lives are spent looking, straining to see that God in the cloud, behind the mist, beyond the dark.” She says, “It is when we face God in one another, [here] in creation, in the moment, that the real spiritual journey begins.”
Last Thursday I had the privilege of being with people who had experienced God revealed in each other. I sat in a family room not far from here listening to stories about God speaking through a 15-month-old child who had just died. She had been oxygen-deprived at birth and suffered severe brain damage. The doctors had said she might live a few days, so her funeral at age 15 months was truly a celebration of life, albeit a painful celebration. I listened to dozens of family members’ stories of lessons they had learned from this seemingly helpless child. They said she had united their families. She taught them what is important in life and what doesn’t really matter (like power, and perfection, those seductive icons we chase with all our might). Her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and their friends said she taught them how to love unconditionally – divine lessons from a child declared physically and mentally impaired, yet a room full of people who loved her called her an angel who had changed their lives forever.
Henri Nouwen said “…listening [for God] is creating the space in which you can hear the voice that says, ‘You are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter… All of mine is yours.’” Nouwen says if we are “anxious and nervous and tense and upset [we] don’t listen because we…don’t have the space to listen.”
If we don’t make space we can’t let in God’s voice that “…is saying [to us], ‘You are with me always, and all I have is yours.’”
My friend James had so completely defined himself by his job, and his neighborhood, and his rent-controlled apartment – his familiar world – that he didn’t have enough space to listen for God until he spent several days away from all of that, in an environment that was filled with God’s Spirit and love.
God’s self-revelation story isn’t finished even though the Good Book was bound a long time ago. God is revealed in my friend James’ story of last year. God is revealed through the life, death, and memories of an exceptional child just days ago. God is revealed to and through you and me. Our stories reveal pieces of God’s story within us. Let’s make space. Let’s listen. Let’s see if we can hear God say, “You are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And let’s pray for the courage and grace to say to God in return, “I am yours. I belong to you.”
Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh (Cowley Publications: Boston, 2000).
Called to Question by Joan Chittister (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 193-6.
From Fear To Love: Lenten Reflections by Henri Nouwen, Sue Mosteller, C.S.J. and Mark Neilsen, eds. (Creative Communications for the Parish, date unknown and out of print)
