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Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today…
Where have you heard those words? Probably at a wedding. Maybe a funeral.
Or if you’re a Prince fan, you might recognize the first line of the song “Let’s Go Crazy”:
“Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to get through this thing called life…”
We might dismiss the words “dearly beloved” as being just archaic churchy words that pastors say, though maybe we pay more attention when someone like Prince says them because they seem out of character.
In our scripture reading from Luke 3, these are the words that are said as Jesus comes up out of the water at his baptism. “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
Or as the NLT has it: “You are my dearly loved Son, and you bring me great joy.”
The voice from heaven is God blessing this moment as the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and we tend to, or at least I do, sometimes think of this as just something that applies to Jesus. Of course God loves Jesus dearly and finds joy in Jesus. Jesus is part of the great trio, the trinity, all of whom we see in this scene: God speaks, the Holy Spirit descends like a dove, and Jesus.
But it’s more than just Jesus. We are all God’s dearly loved children. When we baptize our children as babies, we are affirming that long before any of us know about God’s love for us, God already knows us and loves us dearly. When we baptize older children and adults, they are able to also profess their faith in God’s great love for us as shown in Jesus Christ.
Maybe it’s hard to think of ourselves as beloved, and not just because it’s an old-fashioned word. I think it’s kind of awkward for us to use the “L” word. How often do you say, “I love you” and to whom do you say it?
The first time a friend said “I love you” to me, I didn’t know what to do or say back because up until then I’d only heard those words from my parents and my husband. It was weird to me to hear it from a friend. If we only think of love as romantic, that might be why it can be hard to trust that we are loved and that we are God’s beloved. We don’t say it enough, or act on it.
What would we do differently….what decisions would we make differently…if we truly trusted that we are dearly loved?
This image created by Rev. Lauren Wright Pitman is her vision of Jesus being baptized. He wouldn’t have been underwater more than a moment or two, but here that moment is suspended outside of time.
Pitman says, “This image offers a snapshot of Jesus right before he steps into his calling, on the threshold of spectacular affirmation. He is completely suspended, embraced, and upheld by the waters of baptism. The water’s surface is choppy. The future is unknown and precarious. His path is a lonely and formidable one, eventually leading to his suffering and death.”
Pittman says that for her, “this is what trusting your belovedness feels like—muscles and bones relieved of gravity’s burden, serenity, weightlessness, oneness with creation, and the warmth of God’s love permeating every cell of your body and every corner of your soul.”
This picture of Jesus reminds me of when I was two years old and fell into the fountain at church. This was at Carmichael Presbyterian Church in California. (Carmichael is a suburb of Sacramento.) My dad was the choir director, and while he and mom were rehearsing with the choir, I was playing in the courtyard, which included walking around the edge of the fountain into which I fell. I vividly remember looking up from under the water, kind of like Jesus in Pitman’s picture. The only other thing I remember is sitting in the front seat of someone’s car as she drove me home to change clothes. At two years old, I was trusting in my belovedness without knowing it. Wherever I was someone was taking care of me, and especially at church.
The church is sometimes called the beloved community or the blessed community, I suppose because a church is a group of people who know that God loves them, and that they are beloved and blessed. Sadly, for many the church has become a place to be judged, a place where you have to dress right and believe right to be accepted.
“Everyone deserves a community where it is safe to ask the hard questions and be wherever it is that you are on your faith journey.”[2]
I saw this on Facebook this week and shared it, because that’s what I hope people will be finding in us, the people of UPC, when they come here or when they meet us out in the world. I am thankful that more and more we are doing this. I feel it – the freedom to be creative without worrying so much about how my creativity will be judged or whether it will be good enough. In our creative community group that meets on Wednesdays we practice this as we share whatever we’re with each other. In our working on becoming a fully inclusive church and being a Matthew 25 church, we practice this.
Sometimes maybe we aren’t so comfortable with loving one another because we aren’t so good at claiming and trusting our own belovedness. It’s so easy to listen to the negative voices instead. Henri Nouwen in his book Life of the Beloved says that “claiming our own belovedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others.”[3] Nouwen suggests that hearing God’s loving voice takes practice, spending time in silence listening, even if it’s just a few minutes at a time. He says that a concrete way to focus on listening is by meditating on an encouraging verse or word, and this also helps keep us from being distracted by the negative voices that creep into our thoughts. Maybe this verse would be a good one:
For God’s Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we really are God’s children. Romans 8:16 TLB
We can trust this for ourselves, and for the people around us. We can show it in many ways, big and small, but maybe the most important are the words we say. We underestimate the power of saying something nice or encouraging.
My daughter Tabitha learned this in a big way. Tabitha was twelve years old the year we moved from California to South Carolina. The youth group at our church in California was big, and the youth pastor got all of the kids to write encouraging notes to Tabitha which they put all together in a big envelope and gave her as a goodbye gift. When she read those notes….well, I’ll let her tell it. She said:
“I was fully taken by surprise. I had no idea any of those kids knew who I was let alone having an opinion on something they liked about me. I had convinced myself that I was unlikable and those who were being kind to me were doing it out of pity. But then an entire class of students wrote letters talking about what they liked about me and why they were going to miss me. I held onto those letters until last year, actually. I believe I still have a few.”[4] That was twenty years ago, and those encouraging words are still having impact.
Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves have us convinced that we are unlikeable, unloveable, unworthy. Or that someone else is because they’re different. But God tells us the truth – we are all BELoVED.
Dearly beloved, we need to believe this with all our hearts, and help the world know we love them too.
[1] “Beloved” by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman, Inspired by Luke 3:21-22, Digital painting and collage. © a sanctified art | sanctifiedart.org
[2] Lizz Enns Petters, Deconstructing Mamas Podcast, https://www.deconstructingmamas.com/podcast
[3] Nouwen, Henri. Life of the Beloved, Kindle version, pg. 82.
[4] Tabitha Krabbe on Facebook Messenger, January 6, 2024.
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