Becoming Beloved
Sometimes, I have John the Baptist living in my head which can make my brain a very uncomfortable place to be. The Gospel of Matthew describes John like this in Matthew 3:
4 Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.
If you’re going to have someone residing in your brain, I encourage you to choose someone not clothed in camel’s hair, it’s quite itchy. I also suggest someone who doesn’t eat bugs, and someone who doesn’t yell. John yells a lot.
5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to (John)… 7 when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?… 10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
I heard John a lot as a child. For example, I remember when I stole some gum from a grocery store. When my mother found out, she told me that she was disappointed in me. What I heard was, “You’re a disappointment.” John’s voice in my mother’s mouth.
My father didn’t have to tell me, I could just tell. I was the youngest of four children. My older brother was the athlete. It meant a lot for my father for me to play football like my brother. I wasn’t quick enough, fast enough, or strong enough. Instead, I was signed up for baseball where it was not the lack of speed, strength, or skill that got me in trouble; it was the lack of attention. Let’s see, what was I talking about… Oh, yes, I remember being in the outfield watching a bird flying over the field and the parents on the bleachers. I always wondered where and when a bird would poop and if they just let it fly when they felt like it or aimed it at cars and people. Then I would hear my name called out, “David!” When my name was yelled like that, it meant a ball was coming.
Since attention was a big problem for me in the outfield, the coach repositioned me to first base. Do you know why first base was a guarantee that I would focus more on the game? Because in the outfield, the ball might be hit every so often in your general direction, but at first base, several times an inning, a ball was likely thrown at you, about head height. You had to pay attention.
Late in a game, I was going up to bat when my coach said, “David, we can win this one. We really need you to get a hit and get on base.” I wanted to please my coach and do what he said, only instead of “We need you to get a hit,” I heard, “We need you to get hit.” So, I did. I leaned in my left shoulder and the ball hit me high on my back. “Take your base!” the umpire yelled. I took one for the team. I found that getting hit was a lot easier to accomplish than getting a hit, after all, my back was larger than any bat. The only problem was, as I got older, the pitches came harder, faster, and were a lot more difficult to keep from hitting my head, so my on base percentage dropped significantly.
Though he never said it, I could tell my father was disappointed that I was not the athlete he wanted me to be. No father sits in the stands and yells, “Come on, Son! Get hit! That’s my boy!” With John the Baptist in my head, I heard that not only was my father disappointed, but also I was a disappointment.
At school, I found that math was like a second language to me. If there were 100 questions, I would get 99 of them right. I was quite the math whiz. The problem was, that even though I could get 99 out of 100 questions correct, 9 times out of 10, I would forget to put my name on my paper. The teacher would return our quizzes, paper by paper, and child by child, calling each by name. Then she would say, “This last one doesn’t have a name on it.” Everyone would look around the room. There was one child left without a paper, me. As she handed me my quiz, she would lean over to me as I was sliding deep in my seat, “I don’t know what kind of boy can do so well at math but not put his name on his paper.”
I knew what kind of boy could. A disappointment. John the Baptist was at it again.
Throughout my years growing up in the church culture of South Carolina, I often went with friends to Christian concerts or revivals. The message may have varied but the question was usually the same, “If you die tonight, do you know where you will spend eternity?” A common image was added as the question was restated, “What if you leave here and get hit by a bus?” I grew afraid of God and public transportation.
I attended a Presbyterian Church, rooted in the theology of John Calvin(1536) who described humanity as totally depraved, and The Westminster Confession (1646) which said that human nature is utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, and from it do proceed all actual transgressions. As a reminder of just who and how we are to God, in most Presbyterian worship services is a Prayer of Confession. They can be a wonderful and liberating opportunity to let go of whatever guilt and shame you bring with you, or it can be just another message from John the Baptist.
I grew older. In my early twenties, I was working as a minister in a church and given the opportunity to go to Taiwan as part of a Rotary Group exchange. For five weeks, we moved throughout the country, staying in a different town and different home every three to four days. Far different from South Carolina where everyone is Christian in affiliation and knows the general premise of, humanity is a great disappointment to God.
“So, you’re a pastor?” they would ask wanting to know more. “Tell us about church.”
Though John the Baptist is a precursor to Jesus, I couldn’t get past him and his message. I wondered how these hosts of mine in Taiwan didn’t know. With John the Baptist in my head, the starting point was not God, grace or love, but humanity’s disappointing, sinful, and evil nature. I wasn’t sure what to say, John the Baptist was in my head.
Go on, he said. Tell them.
I had a resisted the temptation to go on a rant, “You are a totally depraved, brood of viper, sinful, always doing evil, bad to the bone and rotten to the core, and if you step outside and get hit by a motor scooter, God will likely send you to hell, and that’s the good news of the gospel, thanks be to God.”
Being in another culture, and in many ways another world, it made me question the gospel as ‘good’ news, as grace, and love. Love in spite of us.
I really didn’t understand grace or the love of God until March 9th, 1995. That’s when our daughter Cayla was born. We named her, Cayla Joy Jones. Cayla means pure and so her name is Pure Joy.
As I held my new born daughter in my arms, I loved her simply because she was. I loved her simply because of who I was, her parent, her father.
Even as a pastor, I had always had a terror of holding a newborn baby.When visiting parents with their new addition. I had too many memories in the outfield of just letting that ball slip through. I didn’t want tofeel that with a one day old. What a disappointment for a pastor. But as a parent, with Cayla, she fit. I saw her through a father’s eye’s. John the Baptist disappeared, and as the heaven’s parted, I could hear the voice of God.
At the edge of the dry desert, above the waters of the Jordan River, there was another voice which came as quite a surprise to John the Baptist. Apparently, he had his own screaming itchy prophet living in his mind that made Jesus and what happened that day incomprehensible. Here is their encounter in Matthew 3,
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”
Compared to Jesus, John knew he had no right to be washing Jesus clean, but Jesus’ had a different understanding of humanity and baptism. Jesus was about “fulfilling righteousness” or “living fully the righted relationship of God and people” which God reveals at Jesus’ baptism.
16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved,[d] with whom I am well pleased.”
Throughout his life, Jesus shows us how God is and how God feels about humanity which is neither pride nor disappointment, but love. When the writer of 1 John 4 proclaimed, “God is love” he was showing us not that in love we know God, but that in God we know love. God’s love is not, “You are a great disappointment,” but as in the letter of 1 John (from a different John than the Baptizer), 3: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.” This love is from God and rooted in God, not only evident in the voice at Jesus’ baptism but when in his ministry the voice comes. Again, this is Matthew chapter 3 with 25 chapters to go. What has Jesus done so far? Nothing. This is the beginning. Jesus has not healed anyone, not walked on water, not confronted wrong doers, not stood up for the poor, not feed 5,000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish or anything else, and certainly not died on the cross or risen again. He has done nothing. Yet, here, God says, “My child. Beloved. With whom I am well pleased.” Is God pleased because Jesus showed up? No. God is pleased because God is pleased. Jesus is Beloved because God is beloving. God loves because God loves. This is a different sort of love. It is not about meeting parent, teacher, coach, or the world’s expectation, disappointing or otherwise. It is not about setting yourself apart, proving that you are somebody, someone, something special, or even showing the world that you are alive. William Sloane Coffin observed,
Of God’s love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.
When Jesus’ disciples wanted to live like him, they said, “Teach us to pray.” In this prayer is the heart of Jesus’ way in the world, the orientation that centered him to go and be all God intended for him to be.
“Okay,” Jesus responded, “You want to be like me? Then pray like me. Pray, saying, ‘Our Father…” (Matthew 6) or simply, ‘Father,’ (Luke 11).”
At the heart of Jesus’ life was this understanding, God was not a king who required obedience, a maker of the world greatly disappointed in his creation, but first a foremost, a lover, who loved as a parent, a heavenly parent, who before you do anything, claims you as “My child,” and, “Beloved.”
Matthew and Luke have Jesus leaving his baptism and going out into the desert where he was tempted by the devil. The devil prefaces his temptations with, “If you are The Son of God…” or “If you are child of God…” or “If you are beloved…” then the devil tempts him. The challenge to Jesus was to prove his baptism, prove he was the beloved by being something other than human, by being superior, extraordinary.
The temptation is, if we are beloved of God, then we have to show the world, the John the Baptist voice in our heads, or others that we are valuable, loveable, or loved.
Jesus told the devil and his challenge to go back to the hell he came from. It takes faith, and a belief in what God believes about us, that we are beloved, to overcome such temptation. William Sloane Coffin pointed out the depth of God’s love as liberation from those temptations and empowerment to live the lives God has before us. He said,
Because our value is a gift, we don’t have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves, and what a world of difference there is between proving ourselves and expressing ourselves.
The role of Christ-like ones is to live contrary to the voice inside the heads of many, John the Baptist type voices telling us how disappointing we are to others and ultimately, to God. Our job in this world is to be living proof not that we are lovable, but instead that God is loving and offers a love that cannot be earned.
Etta captured the spirit of that good news gospel in a song she wrote with Jon Coleman, You Don’t Have to Impress Jesus.
You don’t have to impress Jesus
with diamonds or a Cadillac car
You don’t have to impress Jesus
He loves you just the way you are
No, he don’t care what you wear
All that matters is in your heart
Yes to him
is all you gotta say
and its never too late to start
So come on down to the river
Down to the river and pray.
Walk on into the water child
And let him wash your sins away
You don’t have to impress Jesus
He ain’t looking for a movie star
You don’t have to impress Jesus
He loves you just the way you are
