We Belong; We’re Beloved

With Jesus we belong.

I recently came across this quote on social media.

This quote has been attributed to several authors and speakers.

In seeking who said it or where the quote came from I found this article and now have a new favorite website which I’m sure will be a great distraction from what I really should be doing. How did I not know this site before?! Anyhoo … let me refill my coffee and we’ll get back to our discussion on belonging and seeing…

I can remember conversations with my son when he was a teenager about the video games he wanted because all his friends were playing them and he needed them so he could participate. Some of us parents had stricter policies about violent games than others and I tried to say all the right cautionary parental things about exposing ourselves to too much violence … and it all seemed to fall on deaf ears because my son saw the situation differently than I did. He was seeing it from a teen’s perspective and a need to be accepted by his peer group. I was seeing it from a parent’s perspective with the knowledge that comes with having survived the adolescent years relatively unscathed and with an adult understanding of belonging.

My son wasn’t yet wise enough to realize that his vision toward the violence in the games was clouded by his need to belong. He could justify the activity because he was a part of something. This is normal developmental behavior for teens. But as we grow and mature, experience teaches us that the activities/actions/teachings of a group do matter and they matter more than our need to belong because we understand the formative nature of groups.

We are human. We see others and the world around us from our perspective, as we are. It takes intentional effort to learn to ask, “what am I choosing not to see?” so that we can better see things as they are. And as we try to teach our kids: it does matter who we choose to join up with.

Jesus tells us that he is the light and that when we follow him we will have the light of life1. We will have the vision to see as Jesus sees: through the lens of love and compassion and grace. With this light we will be better equipped to see things as they are because we are living as we are created to live, in the light of God’s Love.

1 See The Gospel according to John, chapter 8, specifically verse 12, but the whole chapter is illuminating.

With Jesus

Happy Thursday, Y’all! I’ve asked some heavy questions this week about belonging and I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I’m against joining or claiming membership with any group. I’m not. It’s important to belong and be a part of social groups for our wellbeing.

But … yep, there’s a but … we need to see the groups we identify with through the lens of God’s Kingdom. We need to be willing to ask ourselves the heavy questions to keep our eyes properly focused.

We need to be willing to let our vision be healed with the words of Jesus.

We need to be willing to let our attitude and behavior toward others be shaped by the actions of Jesus.

We need to be willing to let our hearts be transformed by the Love of Jesus.

And we need to hear Jesus say, “don’t be afraid” when we choose to be loyal to the Way of Jesus over and above any other group to which we belong. With Jesus, we are never alone. With Jesus, we always belong. With Jesus, we are loved.

In writing the good news story of Jesus, John gives us the words of Jesus as he prayed for all who choose to follow Jesus:

“I pray they will be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. I pray that they also will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. … I’ve made your name known to them and will continue to make it known so that your love for me will be in them, and I myself will be in them.” 1

With Jesus, we belong because of who we already are: beloved children of God. With Jesus, we know that God will always be faithful and ready to welcome us even if we’ve lost our way for a while. With Jesus, our belonging is everlasting because it is at our very core, the Image of God from which we are created, and nothing or no one can take this away from us.

With Jesus we belong.

1 The Gospel according to John, Chapter 17, verses 21 & 26

Belonging from Within

Were you able to ponder your own sense of belonging yesterday? If someone were to ask you to describe yourself, what group or groups would you link yourself with? Your hometown, your political party, your employer, your school, your church, your club or hobby group?

In what ways do these groups evoke a sense of belonging for you? Is it because you agree with their ideologies? Is it because you feel loved and accepted by them, you feel safe with them? Is it because they provide you with a sense of power or prestige? Is it because they empower you to be who you are and at the same time continue to grow mentally, emotionally, intellectually, and/or spiritually? Is it because they enable you to remain in your comfort zone letting others decide what you should think or believe?

Growing up, I found my sense of belonging in the church my family attended. As a child, I loved going to Sunday School and vacation Bible school and in my teens I let the youth group and leaders shape my world. The church denomination I grew up in is not the denomination through which I express and live out my faith today. It’s a long story which I won’t get into here but the elevator version is that as a young adult I felt a real dissonance between who I was at the core of my being and who this church allowed me to be. It was a crisis that took me years to work through because I was not taught to evaluate why I belonged, I was just told I needed to.

Mine isn’t an unusual or unique story. Most folks by the time they reach middle age have had at least one similar destruction of their sense of belonging.

Peter’s sense of belonging was shaken when Jesus talked about his own death.

When we discover our sense of belonging from the image of God within us, our whole identity isn’t shattered when we let go of our connection (either willingly or forced) to a particular group because we have set our vision on godly things instead of human things. We are God’s beloved children, God’s people, and that can never be destroyed. We have been given the everlasting gift of belonging through Jesus.

When have you lost the sense of belonging with a group? How were you able to recover from the situation?

Second Choice

As human beings we are created with a need to belong because we are created by the ultimate community of God, Three in One, inseparable yet distinct. This sense of belonging is critical to our wellbeing.

Way back when as I was in conversation with my bishop about where I’d go to seminary, I visited two different schools. After the prospective student weekend at one I kept thinking to myself, “I don’t think I belong here” and yet this was supposedly my top choice. It was closer to home. I’d still be with the people with whom I knew I was loved and accepted and challenged to be who God calls me to be. I tried really hard to ignore the feeling that this school wasn’t where I was to go.

As I stepped foot in my second choice school, (the school that was so very far away and I wouldn’t be able to come home but twice a year and depending on internships and chaplaincy training maybe not even then) I was overwhelmed by the emotion of being home. Even before I met other prospective students or the professors, it felt right. And the time I did spend there that weekend only strengthened this feeling.

Following the weekend as I was faced with the deadline for the decision of where to go, I sat in my room, comparing costs and making pro/con lists trying to justify the first choice. Finally, I wadded up my notes, tossed them across the room, and said (perhaps too loudly), “God give me a burning bush to tell me what to do.”

I laugh now when I tell that story because the answer is so very obvious. God had given me the answer. Perhaps not as dramatic as a burning bush but the answer none the less.

In the three years I spent in this wonderful place with people I grew to love dearly, I felt belonging that went so much deeper than school spirit. I learned that underneath our connections to others dependent on shared experiences such as schools, sports teams, hometowns, or even political parties or church denominations, we belong to each other because we belong to God.

It is from this level of belonging that our everlasting identity is formed. And when we learn to see this in ourselves, our vision shifts, we can see beyond ourselves to the “more” we truly belong to.

I invite you to think a bit today about where you look for a sense of belonging and why it is you find it where you do. We’ll talk more tomorrow.

Look and Live

Good Monday, my friends. As we step into this week, what are you hoping for? Is your view of the world coming into focus through the lens of God’s kingdom?

In one of our ancient faith stories (we read this bit of it yesterday in our worship service), God’s people have a snake problem. God has literally freed these folks from slavery and oppression. God gave them food to eat, a community (although mobile, a community none the less) in which to live, and asked them to follow, that God would lead them. And they still complained.

Perhaps their idea of freedom was to live in the palaces of the very people who had oppressed them. Perhaps their idea of freedom involved holding power over others as it had been held over them, using other people for their own gain. Whatever it was, the life God had given them wasn’t enough for them and so they convinced themselves that “going back to normal” was preferable to following God.

By their own poor vision, they put themselves in danger. And so they cried out and asked God to take away the danger and what I find so interesting is that God didn’t remove the danger. God didn’t take the snakes away but God did give them the cure: to face their own egos that convinced them that “God isn’t enough.”

You see, the dangers in this life are the results and consequences of our own doing. Like the ancient Israelites, we look for our life’s purpose as anything other than following God. We see following God as a means to an end, rather than life itself. And then we cry out to God when things go wrong. We complain to God when things aren’t going as we think they should. And God hears us and says, “follow me, my beloved.”

That’s the good news! God remains faithful to us even when we aren’t faithful to God. Jesus says when we follow God we are living and that when we choose our own way that is death. When we are willing to look at those bits of our ego that cause us to think God isn’t enough, God heals us and restores us to the everlasting life we are created for.

I pray this isn’t too much for a Monday morning and that your day is filled with the awareness of the presence of God with you always. I pray for all of us as we continue to have our vision fine tuned by God’s Love. Let me know how you are doing and how specifically I can pray for you.

Life and Love

The readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent: http://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Lent/BLent4_RCL.htmlhttp://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Lent/BLent4_RCL.html

I love it when in the Lectionary the appointed New Testament reading is Paul preaching for me! Not so much because it makes my job easy but because it reminds me that this struggle of what it means to be God’s beloved and follow Jesus isn’t new. Everyone who has come before – even those who witnessed Jesus’ ministry directly – had the same struggles. The struggle is real.

It seems so simple to say God loves us and Jesus shows us how to reveal that love to everyone! Living it isn’t so easy. Our egos telling us either we aren’t good enough or that we can do better than God’s plan are formidable obstacles to walking in God’s love. We are inundated with thousands of messages a day that tell us if we just bought the right car, wear the right closes, use the right gym or the right wrinkle cream, had new furniture and the latest gadget, we’d be living. We intentionally keep ourselves over-busy because we want to show we are successful. We live as if we had something to prove.

And with all this noise, noise, noise, noise we can’t hear God saying “that’s not the life I created you to live. You don’t have to try so hard to live. You are my accomplishment. Let go of the struggling. Live the life of love I created you for and you will do good things so that others see me in you. Let it be enough. It is enough. You are enough as you are.”

God loves us all so very much, beyond measure, without measure, and came to us as Jesus to show us the abundance of life we are made for, to show us that this thing we call death isn’t something we should live in fear of because it isn’t the main point of the story. Jesus came to show us that love is the most powerful force in God’s creation. Love, as God loves, is the only thing that can change the world. This love is the source of life, the bread of life that Jesus gives us. This love is what we are created from and for.

God loves. No caveats, no conditions, no exceptions. And when this good news grabs hold of our hearts we live for no other reason than to reveal that love to others. The cars and clothes and gadgets and wrinkle creams are put in their rightful place as things we enjoy because we know they aren’t the source of life. We stop needing to prove ourselves because we know that we are God’s beloved. We learn to recognize the struggle and can step away from it.

God loves. It is a simple message. We are the ones who complicate it. Humans have been complicating it since the beginning of creation. Let God love you as you are, where you are. Imagine you received the letter from Paul in the mail and let it speak directly to you.

God loves. Live.

Bigger than Ourselves

Yesterday we talked about the purpose of our faith practices is to enable us to remember, to be reminded of who God is and who we are as God’s beloved children. To remember is to be re-membered, re-connected with who and what has come before us so that we never forget that we are a part of something so much bigger than ourselves.

In the faith tradition I journey in, we talk about scripture, tradition, and reason as the tools necessary for us to both remember and discover in our ongoing journey of following Jesus in God’s kingdom.

The Holy Scriptures are the writings that have been handed down to us in the form that we refer to as the Bible, inspired by God and penned and compiled by godly people to instruct and inform others in their relationship with God as they’ve directly witnessed God’s revelation on earth.

By Tradition we mean the history of God’s beloved children as each generation through time (including our own) has sought to love God, their neighbors, and themselves in the circumstances in which they found themselves and have recorded their experiences and wisdom for our edification.

Reason is our God-given ability to work out, in conjunction with our Holy Scriptures and the Traditions of our faith, what it is to follow Jesus, loving God and our neighbor in our day and time.

The stories of our faith ancestors aren’t intended to confine us or restrict us to “the way we’ve always done it” but are gifts we use to expand our thinking and our vision as we grow into who God created us to be. When we settle into the idea that we’ve got things all figured out, we’ve lost our way.

As we continue our Lenten journey toward Holy Week, let’s talk more about how we see the world around us as we seek to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves in our time and place.

And, on this lovely Saturday morning, I pray that you are able to witness God’s glory and express your gratefulness in community worship this weekend either in-person if it is safe to do so or through the wonderful technologies that keep us together while we are apart. God’s peace be with you, my friends.

Asking Why

I love to tell the story of the young father who was teaching his kids how to prepare Great Grandma’s Famous Family Pot Roast. He proudly and with great ceremony retrieved the roasting pan from the cupboard and the roast from the fridge. Using the largest knife, he carefully cut a slice from the end of the roast, wrapped it and returned it the the fridge. “Why did you do that?” his middle son asks. With the most puzzled of looks, the dad responds, “I don’t know, I guess because that’s how I was taught to do it.” The oldest daughter picks up the phone and calls her grandmother whose own response is the same, “I don’t know, it’s what my mother always did.” Undeterred, the girl thanks her grandmother and dials again, “GG, why do we cut the end off the roast before cooking it?” After a moment of silence, GG says, “I don’t know why you do it but your great grandpa always bought a roast bigger than we needed so there’d be extra for his famous beef tips and mashed potatoes the next day. They all look at each other in disbelief as she politely thanked GG and said good bye. Finally, the youngest says, “Daddy, can we have beef tips tonight and roast tomorrow?”

So many of our routines and habits are often just on autopilot. And while this may serve us well in some instances (I mean who really needs to think about brushing their teeth or washing dishes), at other times it can cause us to miss out on something really good.

In the stories of our most ancient faith ancestors, God instructs them to conduct festivals and feasts so that they and their children and their children’s children will remember certain things: remember who God is, remember who they are, remember all that God has done for them. When Jesus instructs the disciples during the last meal he eats with them, he says to do what he’s shown them in order to remember.

Remembering isn’t being stuck in the past, but letting what has come before inform and shape us as we continuously grow. As we acknowledge and celebrate the feasts and festivals of our faith, we let ourselves be reminded of who God is and who we are in relationship with God.

What faith practices are you less than intentional with? When was the last time you asked with curiosity and courage “Why do we do that?”

Contained

Before we get into today’s reflection, let’s just check in for a bit: How are you doing on this Lenten journey? How are these reflections speaking into the circumstances in which you find yourself?

Do you recall this post from last week about the cross displayed in a box? As I continued to ponder why someone would leave a holding cross neatly contained in the original gift box, I was reminded of another containment scene I came across in a church lobby (or narthex or foyer depending on your tradition – you know that space you enter before entering the main worship space where you are greeted and handed a worship bulletin). On the wall, beside the big double doors to the worship space hung a small clear acrylic box containing a heavily tarnished silver plate and chalice. There is no sign or placard or information of any kind to inform what these items are, where they came from, or their significance to explain why they’d been encased and hung up.

I supposed when I saw them that they were the items used in Holy Communion at some point in the history of this particular worship community and I’m sure someone in the community knew the story but I wondered what visitors who didn’t know any history of this place or the Church in general thought when they noticed the display.

In the Post Communion Prayer – what we pray together as a worshiping community after we have all received Communion together – from the Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to send us, nourished with the spiritual food of the sacrament, “into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart.” All that we do in our form of worship is to equip us to be God’s people and reveal God’s love to the world.

In what ways do you experience the benefits of the sacrament in the ordinary moments of your day?

Do you ever find yourself feeling like you left the benefits of the sacrament contained in a box at the church door?

Toward Normal

Why do we say “back to normal”? Can’t normal be in front of us?

Over the past year as just about everything I thought I knew about anything changed, I’ve been training myself to use typical or regular instead of normal. The word normal seems stuck in time, immoveable, riveted in place. Perhaps it is the phrase ‘back to normal’ that has brought about this static connotation.

Or perhaps it’s that so many of us believe that normal is actually something that can be defined and achieved and that anything outside of our defined and carefully crafted normal is defined as bad or wrong (don’t we only use the word abnormal to mean bad rather than just atypical?). If normal never changed, we’d all still be living as our original ancestors did. If normal never changed we wouldn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing or clean water or cars or planes or the internet.

I think what most folks mean when they say “back to normal” is “back to my comfort zone”. This past year has disrupted everything and we are desperately seeking comfort. We remember what being comforted feels like so we think it must be somewhere in our past.

For Jesus’ Followers I do think that normal is always in front of us. Life isn’t static. The life Jesus calls us to is one of continued growth and formation. Normal in God’s kingdom is following Jesus as we learn each day how to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves on earth as it is in heaven.

In his letter to the church in the city of Philippi, Paul says “I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back.”

Do you hear God’s voice beckoning you to find comfort and peace and hope in following Jesus?