Now Now Now

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

“The hour has come.” May I speak in the name of the Living God who holds all our times in Her hand. Amen.

The last sand is falling through the hour glass. Two Greeks have come to see Jesus in the gospel this morning (showing us that the world beyond Israel is being drawn in) but the time of public preaching and teaching is over. There is no more time for parables that confuse, console and give cause to ponder. No time for miracles and healings to woo and win people to a deeper awareness that something eternal, something transformative and life giving, something of God is breaking in here. There is finally, after all he’s done and tried to do, no more time.

“The hour has come from the Son of Man to be glorified.” Over and over in John’s gospel we have heard the phrase: my hour has not yet come. And now, at last, it has. We know something about this in our own lives. Our daughter is a high school senior. The college acceptance letters have arrived. By fall for her—not to mention her brother, dad and me—the hour will have come.

A seminary classmate described waking up one morning after 10 years of infertility treatment to the quiet conviction: It is enough. “I never looked back,” she said. She’s now the mother of two adopted children. Her hour had come. Sometimes we seem to have a choice and sometimes we’re dragged kicking and screaming to the brink of a new world.

The hour has come for Jesus too. “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” (v. 24).” He is talking about himself. In a few days the events of holy week will unfold. Jesus will die on a cross. He could have avoided it—could have headed for the hills, could have called on his disciples, called on the crowd itching for a king, called on angels to save him. But he didn’t. Jesus came not to be saved but to save. He saw a purpose in his dying that was worth the cost. “What should I say—‘Father save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”

He will let the full weight of our fear, envy, political expedience and sin fall on him. Not in weakness but in power. Not to glorify victimization but to stand by choice with those who have no choice—the victims of domestic violence, rape and child abuse, the victims of poisoned wells, burned huts and bodily degradation in Darfur, the victims of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, of flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota, of economic chaos. I could go on.

This is what God is about. This is what God calls us to. “Whoever serves me must follow me.” It’s what he’s been saying all along. “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Greater love has no one than this than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” “I am among you as one who serves.” No wonder the disciples fled on Good Friday. All of us—if we’re honest— hear our mother’s calling about now. Love to Lord, can’t, gotta go!

God is intimately connected to the suffering of the world. It’s a very maternal image. The great preacher Jim Forbes said God was like his mother calling at dinner time: Are all the children in? Nobody is forgotten. No one is outside the arena of God’s concern and care. It’s a lovely image of God this Women’s History Month. This is no impassible, unmovable God, untouched by human suffering. In the cross God takes the pain of the world and writes it on the palms of his outstretched hands. God loves God’s children enough to die for them—what mother can’t understand that? Or father either.

The suffering cry out in pain but the cry comes first from God. We are such sensitive beings made in the divine image—imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God’s! We are sensitive to suffering and we are created in the image of God. Imagine the exquisite sensitivity that must be God's! We yearn to love and be loved, to see and be seen, imagine the yearning relatedness in the heart of God! God loves us, wants to be in relationship with us, overturning all our expectations, overthrowing all that gets in the way.

“The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus, in the 2nd century. What does it mean to be fully alive? It means to know you matter to God and to the world, to be connected to God and to others in a way life-giving, life changing and free. The divine love will sacrifice whatever is necessary to clothe our nakedness with dignity, to awaken us to the immensity of our worth in God’s eyes, to a love than which nothing greater can be conceived, a love that will cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly, a love that will make the first last and the last first, that will make us fully human, fully alive at last whatever the cost. Fear not! “Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” Now. Now. Now. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.”

The cross has been used to glorify victimhood—especially in women. It’s been used to oppress and control. My friend from seminary had an alcoholic father who used to beat her mother, break up the furniture and come after them. “He’s going to kill us!” she’d scream at her mother, “Why don’t you get us out of here?” and her mother would reply that it was her cross to bear. No. No. No. No. No. This is a criminal distortion that grieves the heart of God. The goal of the cross is not victimhood and suffering—the goal is salvation and joy—human beings fully human, fully alive. To say otherwise is like saying the goal of pregnancy is labor and delivery instead of the baby. Labor and delivery may well be involved but the goal, in both, is new life. Now. Now. Now.

If women are in the image of God, as Genesis tells us, then women’s experience is part of God’s experience and has its truth to tell. Women’s experience doesn’t separate power and compassion. Women’s lived experience involves openness to the ones loved, a vulnerability to their experience and solidarity with their well being. Women give birth—in pain and in power—in love, undivided. We sacrifice our lives, time, money and no small amount of sanity to bring others to autonomy and fullness. Women’s power brings forth and stirs up. It fosters life in all its dimensions in a movement of spirit that builds, mends, struggles with and against, celebrates and laments. It is the power of love to transform and connect that changes people and changes the world by entering into suffering, entering into the crucified history of the world with healing and liberating power.

Women with children at the breast, at the knee, at the door heading out into the world know the immediacy of love, the urgency of NOW. God is connecting with us NOW through Jesus Christ. “The whole world has gone after him,” said the religious leaders after Palm Sunday in dismay. Little did they know! How will Jesus transcend the boundaries of time and space? How will he make the leap from 1st century Palestine to 21st century America? He will do it by being lifted up. The cross lifts Jesus beyond the boundaries of life and death, time and space: he is utterly unbound. “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all peoples to myself.” He is the grain whose planting has birthed such fruit.

We’re called to do something with our life—as Jesus did with his. “Those who want to serve me must follow me.” We’re called to die, to give ourselves to God and one another sacrificially, in ways that make a difference, in ways that bring life. If you want to know if your suffering is of God ask yourself: does this bring LIFE. Becoming fully alive is not pain free but it is life giving. So many people are looking for faith, for spiritual fulfillment, but aren’t finding it. Maybe they, maybe we, are looking at it the wrong way. We’re looking to gain something we think we don’t have. Maybe we should be looking to lose something that’s already ours—things we “hate” to use Jesus’ phrase, that keep us from the love, mercy and healing of God in Christ, that keep us from trusting in the One who loves us enough to die for us and rise again. What on earth can compare to what’s to be gained in Jesus Christ? The hour has come my friends. What have we got to lose?

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

Nobody Special

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

Take my lips and speak through them. Take our ears and hear through them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for Thee. May I speak in the name of the Living God. Amen.

Abraham got God’s attention not by being a saint but by being someone who allowed God to make him somebody when he was nobody special to begin with. That’s why he’s so remarkable. God said: I’m going to make you the father of many nations and Abraham who was 100 years old and whose beloved wife Sarah had been infertile for decades said: I believe you. He didn’t tiptoe around cautiously asking a lot of skeptical questions. He didn’t say: Look, Lord, by any account that ship has sailed. How could a couple “with one foot in the grave have another foot in the maternity ward” (in Buechner’s lovely phrase). What he said instead was: Count me in and he set out to claim not knowing where he was going for however long it took. Abraham and Sarah embraced what God was doing—not trying to do it themselves (as if!) but trusting-God-to-do-what God had promised. “Hoping against hope,” wrote St. Paul, Abraham “believed he’d become the father of many nations,” Sarah, that she would “give rise to nations.” That God could “give life to the dead and call into existence the things that are not” and on that faith, that turning point, the door to the future swung open.

When I was a student at The General Theological Seminary in NYC they took us to worship services in different traditions to expose us to different ways of approaching God. We went to an Orthodox Jewish service. I remember being shepherded with other women to a back staircase where we watched the proceedings below from the balcony. We went to a Syrian Orthodox service with its incense, bells and vestments. We met the Archbishop I remember kissing his ring. And we went to a store front Pentecostal church in Harlem where we sat in a low ceiling rectangular room, in rows of metal folding chairs. I remember the women in white who assisted those who were slain by the Spirit and I remember the preacher.

The service had already been going a while when we got there and it continued after we left. This young man wasn’t the regular minister but he’d been invited up by him. He stood up there in his new brown suit and started out saying all the right things but it all just lay flat. And I thought, well this sure isn’t what I was expecting. What a disappointment. He was flailing around up there. He knew it and we knew it. Suddenly he turned away and stopped, seemed somehow suspended in some kind of inner debate.

Then he turned back. “I haven’t allllways been a preacher.” The change was palpable. (There were a couple of “Amens”). “In fact, I’d never have been seen around people like you.” (“Yes,” people could relate to that.) “I did drugs.” Congregation paused to consider this a minute. “I have the needle marks in my arms.” (Mmmm mmm) “And I did all the nasty, ugly things you think of when you think of people doing drugs.” (There was silence as our collective minds considered what disgusting things these might be.) “I haven’t alllways been a preacher.” (Where was this going we wondered together? This is sin, not salvation. So many of us thinking it it was almost audible: Who did this guy think he was to be standing up there, in church, with a microphone in his hand?)

“I haven’t alllways been a preacher. What do I do when I see the people who used to know me? They see me in my suit. And I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, ‘Who do you think you are being a preacher? We remember you when you were lower than the low.’ What do I do? Do I cross the street?!” (hmmm hmmm) “No, I don’t. I hold my head up and I walk on by because I am not ashamed of Christ!” (“Amen!”) “I am not ashaaamed of Christ!” he said, slapping his heel against the floor for emphasis. “I am not ashamed that Christ has set me free. I am not ashamed that he has washed me clean. I thank him. I thank him every day. I am not standing up here because I’M good. I am standing up here because HE’S good. I am not ashamed of Christ.”

The place went wild. Tears were streaming down our faces. We were in the presence of God. We were eye witnesses to the gospel, like all those people centuries before. And we were ashamed. Not of him but of ourselves. Ashamed of having judged this man for doing things we told ourselves we’d never do, for doing things we’d never admit if we had—for fear of encountering others as judgmental as ourselves. We had found him wanting but God had found him worthy. It still has the power to wound me when I think on it—to wound and to make whole. Like Abraham, he had gotten God’s attention not by being a saint but by being someone who allowed God to make him somebody when he was nobody. There is hope for us yet.

This is why Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him because he knows that until we do we can’t follow him. Not really. Not until we, like Abraham and Sarah and the Pentecostal preacher, deny that our salvation depends on us, deny that our sins and shortcomings are a deal breaker, deny ourselves center stage. Until we do that we don’t really follow because we’re too busy leading. “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus says to Peter and to us when we have lost our place, setting our minds “not on divine things but human things” making us not rocks of faith on which to build but rocks in Jesus’ way. Even the disciples had problems with this. We are not alone.

If we want the new life Jesus died and rose to give us we must take up our cross—sacrifice our pride in going it alone, sacrifice our fear of being seen as vulnerable and foolish and in need of saving—as though Jesus were just the icing on the cake for us, an extra dose of self-help, as if Good Friday and Easter were optional extras. Each of us has some “deal breaker” defect, at least in our own minds. What’s yours, I wonder? What is the impossible thing that God just won’t be able to get past with you? What is the secret you’re afraid will be revealed? Of what are you ashamed?

Friends, we don’t need to be ashamed of Christ, ashamed of what he’s done for us, ashamed we needed him to do it. We’re frightened, broken, guilty and ashamed and God loves us. We love God but strangely we try to do without God. Odd, isn’t it? Not so much because of arrogance maybe as because we don’t even think of asking for help. We feel we should be able to do whatever it is on our own. Because most of the church’s writing on sin has come from these incredible power-house men like St. Paul and St. Augustine—for whom bullying pride and arrogance were the real temptations—we’re all on alert for these rearing their ugly heads with the sometimes odd result of people trying to repent of pride and arrogance who wouldn’t know self-assertion if it came up and hit them in the face.

Since it’s Women’s History Month I feel I should point out that girls and women are more apt to sin—an archery term which means “to miss the mark”—by erasing themselves rather than overly asserting themselves. I think of the cartoon where Donald Duck gets in a fight with the cartoonist who just erases Donald when he gets annoying. You see this big yellow pencil eraser going back and forth, back and forth. Until nothing’s left but the talking mouth which then, too, goes. We don’t need a cartoonist we’ll erase ourselves so our hurt, or anger or point of view won’t disturb the status quo and then we simmer with rage and resentment and try to work our will through manipulation. It’s not that men can’t sin the exact same way and that women can’t be prideful. It’s just that it’s worth it to spend some time checking our assumptions as to where the sin is.

Having said all that, maybe this erasure problem is an inverse sin of pride after all. Maybe I don’t want to see myself—or heaven forbid for others to see me—in need of God. I suspect I’m not alone in this. As the Bishop pointed out in his Lenten letter we’re all about independence in this culture. We want to gain salvation the old fashioned way (to a coin a phrase) we want to earn it. The pain of seeing ourselves complete—without excuses—is so great. But I am because you are. Because you see me I exist. To the extent that I will not let you see me, I do not exist. We bring one another into being. Nothing human is alien to us. Nothing human is alien to us. We want to see ourselves through rose colored glasses—maybe we hope others will see us that way—because maybe we’re afraid we’re not that beloved after all.

Everybody has a reason why they think God can’t use them. Abraham was too old and Sarah laughed out loud; Moses protested that he didn’t speak well; Isaiah that he was “a man of unclean lips;” Jeremiah that he was “only a youth;” Mary that she had “no husband.” Every one of them said: I cannot do it. I am not enough. And every one of them was right! They were not enough. But God is enough and God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that are not” can make ANY of us equal to ANY task to which God calls us. We are saved by grace through faith and we are transformed the same way: not by our own efforts but trusting and embracing the love of God at work in us. Abraham and Sarah were 100 years old when Sarah gave birth to a son, Isaac which means: he laughs. They are the parents of many nations: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Moses our insecure speaker is remembered for his words: Let my people go. The young Jeremiah faced down the principalities and powers of his day. The forgiven Isaiah saw the throne of God. The virgin, Mary, gave birth to God’s own Son.

What are you and I called to do that we’re OBVIOUSLY ill-equipped for? What are you and I called to do that everyone can see we’ll need God to accomplish? What cross will be your resurrection? What do you need to lay down so that God can raise you up? What impossible life is being born in you? Nothing we’ve done or can do will ever be able to separate us from the love of God who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that are not” and on that faith, that turning point, the door to our future swings open.

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven

God's Beloved

By The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven, Sabbatical Priest

O God you call us on journeys whose ending we cannot see, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Good morning, Saints! It is wonderful to be with you for the 14 weeks of Father Poppe’s sabbatical. Fr. Poppe’s on his way to Africa, London and Europe—poor thing!—but we who stay home are on a journey, too. Proust says, “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” We’re on a sabbatical journey, a Lenten journey and, for the month of March, a women’s history month journey—a journey that can help us see the truths that can heal us, the patterns that hurt us, the assumptions that limit us. Unlike Bernie, we’re hoping to lose some baggage on this trip, you know what I mean? To see ourselves as God sees us, to look at things we think we know—ourselves, God, each other—and discover things we never imagined, to see them with new eyes.

To go on this journey we have to believe there’s more to life than what we’ve found: more joy, more purpose, passion and peace. Like Jesus in the gospel for this morning we have to be willing to leave Nazareth for the waters of new birth, to step out in faith in spite of all the reasons not to. Their name is legion and I’m sure Jesus knew them: My mother needs me. My work needs me. It’s selfish! It’s risky. I know who I AM here. What makes me think God wants something different for me now? Change is scary. What will it mean? What will it cost? And yet—it might answer this nameless yearning; it might energize me beyond my knowing, it might make a difference to the world.

Jesus bursts on the scene in Mark’s gospel with no advance warning, no introduction, no birth narratives, no stories of growing up, for all we know he’s just a carpenter from Galilee come down with everyone else to this crazy prophet John baptizing in the Jordan. John was a kind of performance artist, as all the prophets were—enacting the story of repentance, the story of being new birth. It was the enactment of a distance closing—the huge distance between guilt and forgiveness, brokenness and wholeness, being lost and being found. Jesus, not in need of forgiveness, goes anyway leaving—literally—home and mother, job and identity—on the river bank with his clothing. He steps out into the water and discovers a distance has been closed for him too.

The heavens were torn apart. The Greek word means “split open.” The membrane between heaven and earth, between God and Jesus split open—it’s very much a birth image—and the Spirit descends like a dove into him (says the Greek) and from within heaven comes a voice: You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased. They were words that would have been familiar. The first part from Psalm 2:7 for the king’s coronation—“You are my Son, this day I have begotten you,” or, in the words of the Message: Today is your birthday. The second: “With you I am well pleased,” is an echo of Jesus’ beloved Isaiah, one of the Servant Songs: Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect in whom my soul delights! The suffering servant by whose wounds we are healed.

He sees himself with new eyes. It’s a shattering insight, an experience that divides life into “before” and “after.” The Spirit drives him out into the wilderness, the place of no illusions and no resources of our own. There is no one to impress, appease or distract; no place to hide from angels, wild beasts, Satan, and God all of whom see us more clearly than we see ourselves. We’re alone with God, alone with ourselves. The temptation is to run away, head back home and try to carry on as before. There is the temptation to take control from God: Yes, Lord, I know you rent the heavens and came down but I got it from here! I’m good to go. Gotcha covered. There is always the temptation NOT to be who you ARE because the devil knows that once we discover who we are then we are well on the way to discovering what we can DO, which is to make a difference in this world beyond our wildest dreams.

Satan aids and abets our “going it alone.” Some of you know I was an interim at St. Mark’s, WO, several years ago. It was a wilderness experience—poor, black, urban, mission: which one of those words did I know anything about? “We can do this,” I said rolling up my sleeves as they watched. “Busy, busy, busy,” they said. It was like trying to turn a battleship. Eventually I got tired—just like they’d gotten tired, 35 people rolling around like marbles in a shoebox in a landmark church that sat 400. Eventually I got it. I’d never met a circumstance—not at work, not like this—that I couldn’t woo and win by sheer force of personality. And when we all got to the end of our collective strength we finally realized: We don’t have anything but God. What a funny thing to say: if we had God who could have more? The place might close. It might stay open. We couldn’t control it. We were thrown back on God. It was total surrender. And I have to tell you our spirits caught fire, my preaching caught fire. In practical ways and spiritual ways we asked and received, we sought and found, we knocked and doors were opened—file cabinets, computers and a secretary materialized, 3 Sunday School teachers, energy and hope. I left a new person.

A new clergy couple came—wonderful spirit filled people. Eventually, still, the church closed. Being faithful doesn’t make things always turn out the way we want them to: Father, take this cup away from me; being faithful means discovering that the worst thing is never the last thing. The worst thing is never the last thing. It’s never the end of the story. Like Jesus, we came out of that wilderness with good news and were sent forth to proclaim it. God loves us. If we really want to experience that we have to stop trying to change ourselves, and others and our circumstances by our own efforts, on our own terms, under our own power. We need let go of who we’re trying to be so that God can free us to be who we are.

We need to change our minds. That’s the first sermon Jesus ever gave. I have it on my desk, in slightly different translation than we heard this morning: After John’s arrest JESUS came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God and saying, “The time has come at last—the KINGDOM of God has arrived. You must CHANGE YOUR MIND (all caps) and believe the Good News.” (Mark 1:14-15) If we want to live the life Jesus lived and died and rose to give us we have to change our minds, change our lives, not by our own heroic efforts but by absolute surrender to the absolute love of God. “Yeah, yeah,” we say. “Jesus loves me this I know.” Tell me something I don’t know.” But the problem is we DON’T know. We know it as an idea, a concept, but far less as a living, breathing, certain, sustaining, transforming, alive, empowering REALITY.

No less a prophet, priest and teacher than S. Africa’s first black Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said he gives only one sermon everywhere he goes: God loves you. Full stop. I was listening to an old 1999 interview between Father Tutu (as he prefers to be called) and Bill Moyers who asked him: What is the worst thing about Apartheid? “When it makes you doubt that you are a child of God,” he said. “When you are subjected to treatment that begins to work in here (taps his forehead) and you begin to say, maybe they are right. Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes. And so when they call you a non-European, a non-this you may think it is not working on you, but in fact it is corrosive of your self- image. You end up wondering whether you are actually as human as those others.” He started preaching, “God didn't make a mistake creating you black. Celebrate who you are. God loves you.” (From The Moyers Files: Bill Moyers talks with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, April 27, 1999 www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives/tutu_ts.html)

Girls and women have a similar problem. Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history,” wrote Myra Sadker (1943-1995) who pioneered much of the research documenting gender bias in America's schools, “she learns she is worth less.” “From grade school through graduate school, from inner city to rural towns, Sadker uncovered not only blatant gender discrimination in textbooks and sports funding, but also subtle patterns of inequities that shaped the lives of girls and boys.” (http://www.sadker.org/) I was shocked to learn on the National Women’s History Projecth website that only 3% of educational materials deal with women’s contributions. How can we know what we’re capable of when we have no idea who we are? (http://www.nwhp.org/)

The Congressional Resolution Designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month” first passed in 1987 speaks of the historic contributions to the growth of our Nation in countless recorded and unrecorded ways by American women of every race, class and ethnic background women’s critical economic, cultural and social roles in every sphere of life. It tells of women constituting a significant portion of the labor force working inside and outside of the home, women’s unique role as the majority of the volunteer labor force of the Nation, the role of women in the establishment of early charitable, philanthropic and cultural institutions, women’s leadership in every progressive social change movement; women’s leadership in securing not only their own right of suffrage and equal opportunity, but also in the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, the industrial labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other movements, especially the peace movement which create a more fair and just society for all; the Resolution concludes that “whereas despite these contributions, the role of American women in history has been consistently overlooked and undervalued, in the literature, teaching and study of American history therefore be it resolved that march be set aside as Women’s History Month… the Congress and President calling upon the people of the United States to observe these months appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities.”

When women’s history is taught the self esteem of girls and women goes up and their vision of what is possible expands. The respect of boys and men goes up. Achievement by girls and women increases. And violence against women decreases. We need to know who we are. “You are my beloved daughter. With you I am well pleased.” What might happen if we changed our minds and believed this good news? If our self talk weren’t about our “fat thighs” and how sensitive, dumb and emotional we are and instead was: God loves me. I am God’s beloved. God is pleased with me.

Like the narrator sang last weekend in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: You are what you feel. What we think may be wrong but if we believe it it’s true for us. Our beliefs change our reality. If we want to change our LIVES we have to change our THINKING and to change our thinking we have to be aware of it. I saw a therapist on television who said he told his patients to put a rubber band on their wrist for a week and snap it every time they said or thought something negative about themselves. Red wrists at the end of 7 days show us a lot about our thinking. I told this story to my kids and for days when they heard me say something negative about myself they’d say: Snap! Most of us wouldn’t be friends with people who talked to us the way we talk to ourselves.

God says: You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased. God is not in heaven slapping the divine forehead saying to Jesus, “Oh, no! There goes Anne being Anne again!” God is not in a state of shock and surprise that we are the way God made us. We are not a disappointment to God. God made us black, white, gay, straight, lesbian, male and female. God made us who we are as we are for a purpose. Want to know your purpose? You need to learn who you are. If we want something to be useful we first need to see what it is. What are its given characteristics: is it a dahlia or a donkey an orange or an automobile. I wasn’t created to be a Carmelite nun under a vow of silence, you know? Much as my family and friends would like it from time to time. I’m a TALKER. That’s what was always on my report card: “Talks too much in class.” Oh well, now I talk for God. God doesn’t seem to mind. God made me fired up and ready to go. I’m learning to accept I’m more your crashing ocean deep than your still silent pond. I’m learning more how to surf the waves of my enthusiasm rather than let it send me cart wheeling onto the beach in a heap. Point is: I’m not a mistake. You are not a mistake. You are not a disappointment to God. God loves you: Full stop. No disclaimers.

Jesus believed God loved him—fully, utterly, completely. Everything else he accomplished flowed from that. Jesus found his identity in God. Jesus found his strength in God. When John was arrested he came out of the wilderness preaching what he had discovered. That God’s love makes all things possible. It was enough to sustain Jesus to the cross and beyond. It is enough to sustain us. “Change your mind” Jesus calls to us “and believe the one that can make all the difference if only you will let it in: You are God’s beloved. With you God is well pleased.”

© 2009 The Rev. Anne Bolles-Beaven