Robust, Resilient Sheep (Sermon)

“Robust, Resilient Sheep”

John 10:22-39

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/30/22

 

²² At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³ and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴ So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

²⁵ Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; ²⁶ but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷ My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸ I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹ What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. ³⁰ The Father and I are one.”

³¹ The Jews took up stones again to stone him. ³² Jesus replied, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?”

³³ The Jews answered, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.” ³⁴ Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? ³⁵ If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— ³⁶ can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? ³⁷ If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. ³⁸ But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

³⁹ Then they tried to arrest him again, but he escaped from their hands. (NRSV)

 

         Last Sunday, in Luke 4, we heard Jesus claim his messianic voice. His hearers were delighted—until Jesus suggested that God doesn’t discriminate between Gentiles and Jews. Infuriated, Jesus’ friends and neighbors chased him toward a cliff, planning to heave him onto the rocks below.

         Today, in John 10, when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem hear words of grace from Jesus, they want to execute him on the spot. And this time it’s not because Jesus tweaks their religious pride or racial prejudice, but because he dares to claim that he and God are one—one essence, one voice. Instead of throwing Jesus onto the rocks, the Jewish leaders threaten to throw the rocks onto Jesus.

         The conversation that leads to the confrontation arises from a direct question: Tell us plainly, say the Jewish leaders, are you the Messiah? Apparently hopeful, but reluctant to take anything on faith, they demand answers and assurances before committing themselves.

         Last week I quoted Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, When God Is Silent. In that same volume, Taylor says this: “Only an idol always answers.”¹ Taylor’s words are so true as to make certain people want to stone her. Yet even Jesus experienced the silence of God. According to gospel accounts, God spoke directly to Jesus at his baptism and his transfiguration. And after the Transfiguration, we never again hear God speak directly.

The Transfiguration mirrors Israel’s experience at Mount Sinai where God spoke the ten commandments, and the people heard thunder, saw smoke, and then trembled in fear. Afterward, the Hebrews told Moses, Look, from now on YOU speak to us. If God speaks again, we’ll die! (Exodus 20:19)

When Israel came down from Mt. Sinai, their relationship with Yahweh matured into their faith in and their faithfulness to God’s presence through the Law and the prophets. Later still, God’s persistent silence inspired words of lament, cries for God to speak once again. Perhaps most well-known is the cry from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?...I cry…but you do not answer.” (Psalm 22:1-2)

In Matthew and Mark, as Jesus dies—as he who is one with God dies—he wails his delirious prayer into the deep silence of God. And he does so in the accusatory words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Well before his death, though, Jesus answers the Jewish leaders by saying, “My sheep hear my voice.” They trust me. And they follow me. That’s all Jesus says when asked to declare for certain that he is God’s Messiah: My sheep hear me and know me.

There’s a pejorative term being cast about these days. ”Sheeple” is used to show the disdain of one group toward another. It’s used to reproach those with whom one disagrees for not thinking for themselves. In today’s highly-polarized climate, to throw the “sheeple” stone is to dismiss others as expendable livestock.

It’s pretty horrible how we so easily and confidently belittle, condemn, and even persecute each other, isn’t it? Even among like-minded peer groups, if one doesn’t fully engage a prevailing attitude, one can be made to feel unfaithful to what the group deems right and true. I think that today’s culture of relentless suspicion and tribal vengeance is making many of us anxious, depressed, and even hopeless.

It seems to me that a major problem in all of this is that, regardless of which side of the spectrum one identifies with, more and more, we’re feeling forced to choose between absolutes. Whether on the right or the left, we can find ourselves being expected to commit ourselves to specific assumptions and ideologies that put us in constant competition rather than in hopeful cooperation. That allows and even encourages us to be just mean.

The word “sheeple” can be aimed from either side of any aisle, because what matters is not the particular -ism we hold, but the fact that we hold it with such unrestrained certainty that we deny that all of us are limited and imperfect human beings in need of God’s grace and guidance.

For the record: I am not claiming some high ground. Living in the same frenzied world as everyone else, I struggle every day to maintain a posture that is honest and, as Paul says, patient, kind, and humble.

         It seems to me that Jesus was up against similar challenges in his relationship with the Jewish authorities. First century Israel was enduring yet another occupation by a foreign power that ruled by intimidation and military threat, by making occupied peoples feel sheepishly dependent on them, beholden to them, and by demanding absolute loyalty from them. So, when the Jewish leaders ask Jesus for his messianic ID, they want assurances that he has a plan to overthrow Rome. After all, that was the anticipated job description of the Messiah. Instead, they hear Jesus claim a shepherding union with God. His response requires the Jewish leaders to ask themselves important questions. It asks them to think carefully about Jesus’ human interactions. His claim of intimate communion with God puts all people of faith in a place of critical reflection and contemplation. And it’s an uncomfortable place because it has immediate implications on how we live our own lives.

Jesus calls the Jewish leaders, and us, to understand that whenever we hear voices of compassion, justice, and generosity, whenever we hear voices that challenge the world’s ways of idolatrous violence and greed, we are, in truth, hearing the voice of the Good Shepherd—God’s incarnate and universal Christ. To follow the Good Shepherd is not to be sheepish. It’s not to be manipulated. It’s to trust God’s voice and to respond with our own commitment to lives of shepherding love.

Mahatma Gandhi is often credited with saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Apparently, however, what he actually said was deeper, and more challenging and empowering. He said, “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man [sic] changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”²

When John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, Jesus says, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, [and] the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matthew 11:4-5, Luke 7:22)

Again, Jesus doesn’t answer Yes or No. He challenges his questioners to pay attention, to interpret what they have “seen and heard,” then to “go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:37)

If we are truly the body of Christ, all other loyalties are rendered secondary, because what we do and how we do it, and what we say and how we say it become the “seen and heard” things of which Jesus speaks.

None of us are perfect disciples. Still, we ask: How often do our actions and words reflect the world’s selfish idolatries? And how often do they reflect the grace-filled, life-honoring, world-transforming actions and words of God’s eternal Christ?

 

¹Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent. Cowley Publications, Cambridge/Boston, 1998. p. 80.

²https://josephranseth.com/gandhi-didnt-say-be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world/ 

Cliffhanger (Sermon)

 “Cliffhanger”
Luke 4:14-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/23/22

 

¹⁴ Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. ¹⁵ He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

¹⁶ When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

²⁰ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

²² All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

²³ He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’”

²⁴ And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. ²⁵ But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; ²⁶ yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷ There were also many lepers^[a] in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

²⁸ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. ³⁰ But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.  (NRSV)

 

         Spiders, snakes, needles. Honestly, those things don’t scare me as much as they seem to scare some folks. Having said that, I really do not like getting surprised by a snake.

I can get a little claustrophobic, though. If I just think long enough about crawling on my belly in some dark cave, I have to run outside and stand beneath the wide, blue sky.

Heights can bother me, too. The closer you get to the edge of a cliff, the more you feel the invisible hand of gravity reaching up and tugging at you. When I think of free-climbers clinging to rock faces like ants on a brick wall, they seem more like another species than just other people.

The things that scare us do so because they threaten us, or we don’t understand them, or they lie beyond our control. And to face them is to stand at the edge of a precipice and to feel the gravity of some great unknown. Injury or death could be that unknown. It could also be the challenge to claim spiritual or physical capacities in ourselves that we’ve never recognized, capacities that call us to be and to do more than we’ve ever imagined.

Years after the Israelites had been defeated and exiled, the prophet Isaiah appeared and said to Israel, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to” you, Israel.

While Isaiah’s prophecy was good news, even good news can put us at the edge of a cliff. Let’s remember, Isaiah was preparing Israel for deliverance and return to Jerusalem. Since Israel had been exile for many generations, the Israelites knew only captivity in Babylon. So, for Israel, freedom from Babylon meant more than autonomy. It meant a return to a reliance on God, which requires a kind of cliff-hanger spirituality that is both feral and disciplined. 

Animals born into captivity almost always remain captive. They depend on being fed, sheltered, and protected—and protected from themselves as much as anything else. They may still have some instincts, but instinct without experience can be a dangerous thing.

We have an old border collie named Todd. Todd struggles just to stand these days, but years ago, by pure instinct, he’d chase a stick all day long. He could not not do it. If we had ever unleashed him on a herd of sheep, though, he would have gone nuts—running, barking, nipping. While Todd had never been a wild animal, as a border collie he had genetically-determined instincts, but he had no training, no vocational continence. And without the necessary discipline, old Todd would have run a herd of sheep right into traffic or over a cliff. 

In his very first sermon, in his hometown, Jesus reads Isaiah’s announcement of deliverance and hope. Then he sits down and says that in that moment, Isaiah’s words are being fulfilled. In him, in Jesus of Nazareth, God’s feral yet disciplined Spirit is alive, present, and bringing good news to those who are poor, captive, blind, and oppressed.

The worshipers in that small town synagogue seem to feel excited and proud that a local boy could preach such a courageous sermon. Then Jesus ruins the mood. He reminds them that God’s grace is not limited to those whose skin, speech, religious expression, or national loyalties line up with their own selfish prejudices and fears.

Jesus reminds the people that, when Israel was struggling just to survive, two of the greatest Jewish prophets, Elijah and Elisha, took time to tend to Gentiles first. They tended to people who did not belong, people who threatened the community’s self-perceived purity. Fearful of Gentiles, Israel abused and exploited them because of the undisciplined, idol-serving leadership of kings who—since the days of Samuel—had ruled a people who demanded to be governed “like other nations.” Israel wanted to be a people of military, economic, and cultural dominance. And when nations who claim to trust God pursue such idols, they almost inevitably forsake God.

Jesus makes his bold and disorienting declaration about God’s grace to people who raised him and love him, and when he does, they immediately try to kill him. Luke’s description of the attempted murder is striking and revealing. The angry crowd chases Jesus up to a cliff, intending to throw him off. And just when they think they have him where they want him, where he can do no more damage with his open-hearted theology and radical ideas about grace, Jesus slips through their fingers and disappears.

It’s not the disappearance that interests me. It’s the fact that the people find themselves at the edge of a cliff. They find themselves at a liminal place, a place of reckoning. Doesn’t it seem that Jesus led the crowd to the cliff rather than the other way around?

In her insightful little book entitled When God Is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about coming to the limits of what human language can say and comprehend about God. She says that when “we come to the end of speech…[we] gaze slack-jawed at what still lies beyond. If you have ever stood on a high cliff over the sea and felt that strange, frightening pull toward the brink, then you know what I mean. There is a human fascination with limits that is both holy and chastening at the same time.

“Without limits, we would have no feel for the infinite. Without limits we would be freed from our longing for what lies beyond…When we run out of words, we are very near the God whose name is unsayable.”¹

         We can grow comfortable with thinking that God is comprehensible. But isn’t that comfort just complacency? Isn’t it a self-serving lack of reverence and awe? Many Christians, says Barbara Brown Taylor, “would rather be bored than scared.”²That could be true—if we’d rather avoid the possibilities of developing the spiritual potential of people who trust and follow an incarnate Mystery?

Todd was happy enough chasing sticks, but what if he’d been taught to use his God-given gifts to participate in a wider purpose? What joy would he have known if he’d been given the chance to help tend a flock?

When Jesus led those folks—who thought they knew him—up that cliff, he left them there to stare slack-jawed into a mysterious and transforming moment of prophetic revelation. They did not, in fact, know Jesus as they thought they did, because they did not know God as they thought they did. God was deeper, broader, and scarier than they had imagined—probably because God was deeper, broader, and scarier than they had been taught.

God is always calling us to participate in God’s deep, broad, and rather scary purposes of doing holy justice, welcoming strangers, showing compassion to the oppressed, lending our voices to those who have been silenced, forgiving and loving enemies. And that call almost always starts with us standing at the edge of some cliff, staring awestruck into the eternal mystery that is God and wondering, “What would happen if we gathered our fears in one hand, our courage in the other, and followed the Christ who calls and equips us to love as he loves—and then disappears?”

 

¹Barbara Brown Taylor, When God Is Silent. Cowley Publications, Cambridge/Boston, 1998. p. 91.

²Ibid. p. 66.

It Is Time (Sermon)

“It Is Time”

John 2:1-11

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/16/22

 

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ²Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

⁴And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”

⁵His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

⁶Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. ⁷Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.

⁸He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.”

So they took it. ⁹When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom ¹⁰and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

¹¹Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (NRSV)

 

         When biblical writers want to grab our attention, they usually say things like, In the beginning, or, They went up a mountain, or, An angel of the Lord appeared. In the story of the Wedding at Cana, John escalates things to a whole new level when he says, And Jesus’ mama was there, too.

In first-century patriarchy, where women have to be careful about how they dress, where they travel, and with whom they speak, Mary transforms the significance of women from water into wine.

Let’s re-enter the story.

         A wedding is underway in Cana. The servers, who have been told to keep the wine flowing and the matzo balls rolling, are facing a dire situation. The night is still young, and the wine is gone. It’s like they’ve been pouring it into colanders.

         Insufficient wine at a wedding means several things, and none of them are good. It means humiliation for host. It means vocational catastrophe for the chief steward. And all-in-all, it’s an inauspicious start for the young couple.

         Just inside the kitchen door, the servers put their heads together in a nervous conversation.

“We’re out of wine,” says one of the servers.

“That can’t be!” says the other.

“But it is!”

         Stunned and anxious, they have no idea what to do. Nor do they have any idea that someone was privy to their fretful conversation. Jesus, his disciples, and Mary are all guests at the wedding. And Mary has overheard them.

         From across the room, Mary catches her son’s eye, and with a quick tilt of her head tells Jesus to follow her—to “come and see.” Jesus has been chatting with some new friends, relaxing, sharing stories, blissfully anonymous in the crowd. But he knows the look his mama gives him, so he slips away from his company and follows her.

         In the kitchen, Jesus sees his mother standing with the servers, their faces sagging like a couple of empty feed sacks hanging on a fencepost.

         “They have no more wine,” says Mary to Jesus.

         “Mom, that’s not my problem,” says Jesus. “Not right now.”

         Mary has imagined a day like this, a day when she lends the authority of her voice as well as the sanctuary of her womb to the creative Mystery at work within her and beyond her—the Mystery who is revealing a holiness that is as universal as the stars and as intimately hers as the children to whom her body and her love have given birth.

         In the awkward silence following Jesus’ protest, she thinks of Moses’ unnamed mother setting her son among the reeds in the shallows of the Nile. Who would find him? Another Hebrew? An Egyptian? A crocodile? What would become of her fine baby boy?

         She thinks of Rebekah scheming Isaac’s blessing upon Jacob. To arrange that deception will mean that Jacob must flee from her as far as he must flee from Esau. And Rebekah knows that she may never see her favorite son again.

         She thinks of Hannah, who, for the privilege of bringing just one life into the world, gave Samuel, her only child, to God.

         When Mary speaks, she’s more than a wedding guest. She is a mother surrendering her son.

In the warm, moist air of the kitchen, she turns toward the servers and says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

         Jesus has envisioned a day like this, too. But in his vision, he decides when it’s time to make himself known. He decides when it’s time to step into the river and accept the fullness of his calling. He decides when it’s time to make the wild and lavish promise of himself to God. And he’s tempted to put off that decision, to put off the arrival of his hour. But his mother’s words burrow into his ears, and burn in his heart.

         If Jesus tells the servers nothing, they will do nothing, and the celebration will collapse. People will fall away. They’ll scatter and look for joy elsewhere.

         If he tells them to do something, they’ll do that, and heaven knows what will happen next. And whether Jesus tells them anything or not, when his mama told the servers to “do whatever he tells you,” she opened a door he knows that he cannot shut. So, now, Jesus confronts his identity and the uncertain future to which it calls him.

         Looking around the kitchen, Jesus sees six stone jars, big ones, the kind used to hold water for the celebrations that restore God’s people to holiness and to unity with God. He turns to the servers and says, “Fill [those] jars with water.”

-----

         The sign Jesus performs at Cana is not about coercing belief through some sort of magic. It’s about revealing to the creation a presence in the creation that transforms water jars into vessels of holy and spirited wine. For Jesus, it’s about being that transforming presence in and for the Creation.

         Maybe miracle isn’t something that happens outside of reason. Maybe miracle is the very realm of our existence, something that saturates what appears to be the emptiness between you and me, or between any two creatures. If we live in the midst of miracle like fish live in water, then it’s no small miracle in itself to become aware of miracle.

In his song “Holy Now,” Peter Mayer sings:

 

“Wine from water is not so small,
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all.
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles,
But finding where there isn’t one.”¹

 

We become aware of miracle through faith—faith being the gift of trusting that we are holding wine where others see only water.

We are stewards and servers in a trying time—a time when the spaces between us are not simply watery, but muddy and dark. The world has seen times like these before, though. The world has known all manner of turmoil, division, jealousy, dishonesty, injustice, violence, and fear. And in the story of the wedding at Cana, I hear God saying to all who claim the mothering, miracle-rendering gifts of faith, hope, and love: Listen, the wine you are used to may be gone. The celebration may seem to be faltering. Nevertheless, a future you have not imagined is unfolding. And while that future will be different, I, the Lord, am in its midst now no less than I was in the past. Don’t just believe me. Trust me. Follow me.

As it was for Jesus when he and his mother turned water into wine, so it is for his followers today: It is time.

It is time for us trust miracle.

It is time for us to embody hope.

It is time to embrace one another in compassion.

It is time for us to do justice.

It is time for us to receive, to hold, and to share the new wine of God’s ever-expanding, all-transforming grace so that we participate in keeping the celebration alive, joyous, and open to all whom God loves.

And that leaves out exactly no one.

 

¹Peter Mayer, “Holy Now,” from Million Year Mind, Peppermint Records, 2001.

Becoming the Beloved (Sermon)

 “Becoming the Beloved”
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

1/9/22

 

¹⁵ As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶ John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

²¹ Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²² and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (NRSV)

 

Luke 3 begins with John the Baptist roiling human hearts with prophecy and the Jordan River with baptisms.

From the wilderness, his lonely voice cries, “Repent!”

And the crowds ask, How?

         While tailoring specific answers for specific groups of people, John remains consistent: Deal generously, fairly, justly, humbly, and gratefully with everyone—including yourselves.

True repentance is as straightforward and simple as it is complicated and challenging. It’s about far more than admitting and “feeling sorry” for past mistakes. It’s about turning toward and living a new and different life right now. It’s about loving God and neighbor by working for justice for those who are poor, forgotten, and exploited. It’s about stewarding the earth, treating it like we’re borrowing it from future generations—because we are.

Apparently moved by John, the crowds wonder out loud, Could this be the Messiah?

         And John says, No. A different baptism awaits you at the hands of “one more powerful than I.”

         Ironically, the more powerful one of whom John speaks, shows up seeking John’s baptism of repentance—like everyone else. And like almost everyone else in Luke’s gospel, John doesn’t recognize Jesus at first. Indeed, Luke suggests that not until Jesus sloshes back up on the riverbank and begins to pray does even he begin to understand that he is the Beloved. And Jesus demonstrates that it’s in living the life of repentance that one really begins to understand and to become the Beloved.

         When John’s listeners ask what they need to do to help make crooked paths straight and rough places smooth, John gives practical instructions. And while those instructions are illuminating and helpful, many of us need more than instructions. And to the extent that rigid theologies often short-leash spiritual growth, we need farmore than abstract doctrine. We need a flesh-and-blood guide who exemplifies the life of the Beloved. We also need that guide to take the next and even more vital step—the step of freeing us to recognize the Beloved within us, within the people around us, and within the earth that sustains us. As God’s Beloved, Jesus redeems us by revealing and releasing the spiritual inheritance of our own Belovedness.

In the early 1980’s, Henri Nouwen, the Dutch theologian and mystic, sat down with a young New York Times journalist named Fred Bratman. Bratman, a secular Jew, had been told that Dr. Nouwen might provide good material for an article. Thinking “potboiler,” but needing a story, Bratman traveled to Yale University where Nouwen served on the seminary faculty. After a tedious and uninspired interview, Nouwen said to Bratman, “Tell me, do you like your job?”

         “Not really,” said Bratman, “but it’s a job.”¹

         What do you want to do? asked Nouwen.

Write a novel, said Bratman.

So do it.

I don’t have the talent.

Sure you do.

I don’t have time or money.

Excuses, said Nouwen.

Reality, said Bratman.

         Come here and write, said Nouwen. Yale loves artists-in-residence. I can make that happen.

         Eventually, Fred Bratman did go to Yale to write. He never finished a novel, but the two men became friends. After Bratman’s residence, they visited each other back and forth between New Haven and New York. Nouwen remembers feeling overwhelmed by the noise, the pace, and the angst of his friend’s harried and spiritually unattached big-city life. And Bratman apparently felt something genuine in Nouwen, something he trusted and to which he became willing to listen.

         During one of Nouwen’s visits, Bratman said, “Why don’t you write something about the spiritual life for me and my friends?”

         Like Bratman earlier, Nouwen balked. He had heard that request from friends and family who had left the church or who had never been, and didn’t want to be, associated with any religious tradition. And he had never been able to start that conversation.

“How [do I do that]?” Henri asked.

“‘Speak from that place in your heart where you are most yourself,” said Bratman. “Speak directly, simply, lovingly, gently, and without any apologies. Tell us what you see and what you want us to see; what you hear and what you want us to hear…Trust your own heart. The words will come.’”²

Nouwen eventually sat down and wrote a book for Bratman. And he recalled searching for a word that would remain as a kind of gift to those who had asked for the book. Referencing the story of Jesus’ baptism, he settled on the word Beloved. Nouwen had studied that word. He’d preached and lectured on it. And as he focused on it as a metaphor for spiritual practice, it took on new life. So, he titled his book, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World.

In the book, Nouwen tells Bratman that the phrase, “‘You are my Beloved,’ reveal[s] the most intimate truth about all human beings, whether they belong to any particular tradition or not…[and] my only desire,” says Nouwen, “is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being—‘You are the Beloved…’ Being the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit.”³

It’s a brief but spacious book, full of grace and wisdom. And it missed the mark.

While Bratman did appreciate that his friend had written honestly and lovingly, the language presumed things alien to him. Failing to appreciate just how far apart their worlds were, Nouwen assumed that his readers would understand God language—how to hear it, how to speak it. And that’s where he lost Bratman and his friends.

Initially disappointed, Nouwen would learn that his book did have transforming effect on many who were familiar with the language of Belovedness. In fact, the book helped Nouwen become a kind of guide to many who wanted to follow Jesus more closely into the challenges and possibilities of a Beloved life.

Nouwen writes that even if Belovedness is a birthright for God’s children, truly becoming the Beloved requires practice. “Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do.”⁴

The life of the Beloved happens in the often-messy realities of incarnate existence. We become The Beloved by giving water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, shelter to the refugee, clothing to those who are cold, grace to the enemy. We become The Beloved by seeking solitude and stillness in the world’s chaos, by living generously amid the world’s selfishness, and peaceably amid its violence. We become The Beloved by following Jesus—by living as he lived.

And brothers and sisters, that is the repentance of which both John and Jesus spoke.

So, may you be always aware of your own Belovedness, and the Belovedness of everyone around you.

And may you be always aware of Jesus, the universal and eternal Christ, guiding you from within and without.

 

¹Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular Word. Crossroad Publishing, NY, NY, 1992. P. 10. (*All references to the relationship between Henri Nouwen and Fred Bratman come from this book. Only longer quotations are footnoted.)

²Ibid. p. 20.

³Ibid. pp. 26 and 37.

⁴Ibib. pp. 38-39.