You are good, so very good

On the church calendar today, we celebrate the baptism of Jesus. If you heard me preach recently, I spoke a bit about how some modern scripture scholars have begun to frame Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River as a form of being initiated, not into a faith tradition, per se, but literally into his local ecosystem. John was offering people the traditional baptism ritual of renewal and recommitment, but a lot of evidence suggests that John was also ushering people into a new relationship with both the land and the water. (Check out a great reflection by one of my mentors, Ched Myers, on being baptized into a watershed here )

We might do well to follow this lead and let ourselves be baptized into our local ecosystem.

But what I want to focus on in this reflection are the words that Jesus hears when he emerges from the water. In the gospel we hear (from Mark 1), “On coming up out of the water, Jesus saw the heavens open up and the Spirit, looking like a dove, descended upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

I really love this passage because I think it holds such an important message for us.

What is so notable is that Jesus hasn’t done anything in his ministry yet. He was born and grew up. Period. And God already calls him beloved. There’s no test. No proving himself. Nothing he has to do in order to “earn” God’s being pleased with him.

As Fr. Jim so often says, “there’s nothing [Jesus] can do to make God love him any more…and there nothing he can do to make God love him any less!”

We are in the same boat. It may be hard to believe, but we are just as beloved to God as Jesus was.

Just notice what comes up in you when you hear that.

What Jesus hears coming out of the water echoes what God said in Genesis after the creation of everything, “It is good, so very good!”

And God says that about you too. You are good, so very good.

For many of us this is an entirely different spiritual starting point than what we’re used to. It might even make us uncomfortable. We might think, “I can’t be beloved…” Maybe we were counseled to not “get too full of ourselves.” Or, perhaps, no one ever said that we were good.

Most of us have inherited harsh, critical voices that keep pointing out our mistakes, failures, shortcomings and inadequacies. They are the internalized voices of our families, teachers, coaches, churches, friends, lovers and society. And they can get pretty loud sometimes!

But BEFORE any of those voices existed, there was a deeper voice.

Henri Nowen, who has written extensively on belovedness (in part because he admittedly had such a struggle believing it!) says that paying attention to God’s voice of love can be “terribly difficult, because that voice is not very loud…the voice of God, that first voice of love – is a soft, gentle voice…and sometimes, I cannot hear it well because I’m not paying attention.”

Perhaps for today, we can try to listen for this voice that speaks to our belovedness. Do we believe that God loves us like that? If not, how did we come to think otherwise? What other voices get in the way?

My experience is that when we can pay more attention to our own belovedness, we become softer and more compassionate in the world. We recognize that everyone else is also God’s beloved and we try to treat them as such (including all of God’s creation, not just humans).

Just spend a few minutes in silence today letting this reality in. Imagine yourself coming out of the water – just as you are right now – and you hear and feel a voice that says unequivocally, “You are my beloved. You are good. So very good.”

Note: The readings for today are just incredible. If you want some bonus reflection time, click this link and check out the readings from Isaiah, Acts and John that have such powerful messages of hope, restoration and justice in them. I could have easily written this reflection about any of them today.