Friends,

Yesterday, I preached about the situation on the ground here in Minneapolis and the ways it connects to Jesus' experience of baptism. This is the story in which a voice from heaven says, This is my child, my beloved. This one gives me great joy.

Lest we get the wrong idea—that this story is a cozy moment between Jesus and John the Baptist and God—I reminded people that John the Baptist was anything but apolitical. Jesus received a baptism into a way of life transformed away from the empire’s violence and toward God’s way of love. That way of life led John the Baptist and Jesus both to be executed by the state.

In our rite of baptism, participants make these promises:

Celebrant: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
People: I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant: Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People: I will, with God’s help.

Our baptism calls us to lives led with defiant, embodied, joyful love. Seeing God's image in every person—regardless of immigration status, party, and even regardless of their employment with oppressive organizations. Telling the truth, protecting and serving our neighbors, and proclaiming God's love for all people: That's the way of Jesus.

So: remember your baptism. Wherever those actions are happening, the Holy Spirit is moving, and we’re going to be there with God’s defiant, embodied, joyful love.
You can listen to the sermon here.

In addition to the many ways people are living out their baptismal promises locally here in Minneapolis this week, there are two more ways you can act. Looking further out, stay tuned for ways to put your faith into action with other members of GEC and interfaith groups around the state by caucusing and marching on Palm Sunday to support feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger.

With love,
Susan+



Being the Beloved
In my sermon, I promised to share more with you about being God's beloved. Here are a few thoughts.

Some of us have been given a deep sense of trust that we are loved. Maybe we got that from a parent or a grandparent, a partner, a friend, a teacher, a coach. Lots of us never heard from a trusted person that we are loved just for existing. And even those of us who have heard it over and over again, we know how easy it is to forget. The machine of capitalism runs on creating the anxiety that we are not ok, and we hear that message so often that it’s encoded in our bodies and our minds. So just about every morning, before he leaves for school, I turn to Luca and say, Not nobody, not no how, can ever make me stop loving you.

I want him to hear his belovedness loud and clear every day. Because I know, and you know, how easy it is to forget.

If this resonates with you, the Christian writer Henri Nouwen wrote a book called Life of the Beloved that speaks to this very issue. I commend it to you. He says that just as God calls Jesus the Beloved, so God calls you, and every other person, Beloved.

“Though the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. I think you understand what I am talking about. Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope, ‘May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country, or relationship fulfill my deepest desire? But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied.”

Nouwen invites his readers to listen to that voice calling you Beloved, and to choose to trust God’s voice calling you Beloved, and to live from that truth.

It is a daily choice, sometimes a moment to moment choice, to go to that well, that spring, in the midst of all the self-doubt and fear that grip each of us all the time.
There’s something extraordinarily courageous and defiant about choosing to believe you are already beloved in a world that tells us that we are nothing. If you can trust that God will never stop loving you, then you can, with God’s help, live out your baptismal promises to honor the dignity of every human being and to strive for justice and peace. You can live out those promises with courage and integrity and gentleness in the face of all kinds of oppression.

Tags: Rev Susan, Belovedness, Baptism