You Are Loved

On this Sunday in which we celebrate and remember the Baptism of Jesus, I wanted to take a moment and share some thoughts. It is fascinating experiencing church from the other side.  Having now had seven months to deprogram the way that I have always experienced church, I am beginning to see things with different eyes. One of the things that has come into clearer focus is the language that we use to describe our relationship with God.  How do we understand the relationship between us and God?  

Of course this can go a number of ways.  When we describe God — what are the words that we use?  Male pronouns, father, neutral terms, or even as mother?  Is God angry, vengeful, full of wrath, or compassionate and loving?  The funny thing that I have noticed is that often we describe God in multiple, often contradicting ways.  God is a God of love, but God also needs to have us confess our failures (to earn that love?).   It doesn't always make sense and it can cause mental whiplash, or at least some deft mental gymnastics.  My guess is that most of us don’t even notice because we have become accustomed to the verbal descriptions. 

But the biggest thing we often do (and I hope it is subconsciously and not intentionally) is use God to shame us.  Shame is an interesting thing, and from what I have heard, one of the biggest reasons young people don’t go to church.  They want to be challenged, but they don’t want (or need) to be shamed. And there is a huge difference in inviting someone to grow without telling them how bad they are.

I am sure that you can all point to times when I used shame — and for that I am extremely sorry.  It unfortunately, is such a big part of religion that at times we don’t even realize that we (me) are doing it. There has always been in the back of my head a saying my mother taught me: “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”  I am not sure why the church hasn’t understood that principle.

Too often our prayers are ones of shaming us about the things we are not doing, instead of encouraging the strides we are making.  No, I don’t think we should hide our failures, but instead of rubbing our noses in them, we need to use them to “fail forward.”  Richard Rohr has been influential in helping me to stop making everything transactional — to recognize that life isn’t about winning.  It's about relationship with God and each other, even when those relationships are not perfect.

If you have never read Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book Shameless, I recommend it to you.  I guarantee that she will make you feel uncomfortable, and challenge some closely held beliefs, but she also will help free you to see yourself (and the people around you) in a new way.

On this day of remembering the baptism of Jesus, let us also remember our own baptism.  Feel the waters that mark you as a follower of Jesus.  We are baptized not because we are evil or bad, but because we have chosen to follow the way of Jesus.  We are saved not from the fires of hell, but into a new way to see each other and all of God’s creation.  You are loved — a beloved child of God!