Lent 1 (B) + Beloved, BRAVING + 2.18.18

M. Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

(Genesis 9:8–17; Ps. 25:1–9; 1 St. Peter 3:18–22; St. Mark 1:9–15)

In an image straight from the movies, or perhaps straight from our Sunday school lessons, we are reminded today of God’s promise to us through Noah. God places a rainbow in the clouds to let us all know how deeply we are loved and that God will not abandon us to destruction.

This promise, so clear at our baptism, is made all the more vivid with the reminder of Jesus’ baptism.

In other Gospels Jesus has been introduced as a baby, but not so in Mark. In Mark, this is the first time Jesus steps on the stage of this grand and true story. And in other gospels, John quibbles a bit- not I that should baptize you, but the other way round. We don’t see that interchange in this quick reading gospel, just the big stuff. Just the Holy Spirit dive-bombing the scene in the form of a dove and the thunder of God saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased (Mark 1:11).”

This, dangerous speech later on (The Son of God), just fills everyone with wonder right now. At who this Jesus is.
Not many of us can say we have had baptisms quite this dramatic. Perhaps the most dramatic thing was if you were a baby crying at the shock of all the strangers and the water. Perhaps someone here was baptized in a river. Some of us got to see a lovely set of baptisms last Sunday, and a beautiful moment when a baby actually stopped crying during a baptism J. Mostly, Episcopal Church baptisms are in the seemingly quiet confines of a church, and are moments of tenderness and welcome. They are heart-warming, full of symbols – water, light and the holy oil. But truth be told, baptisms are wild! We are bold to claim each person’s goodness once more as we pronounce that they belong to the Father, the Son and the wild Spirit. We say that we are marked forever as Christ’s own. Not until we say the wrong thing or otherwise mess up. But forever. Yes, we need to act accordingly and even within the rite we are called to repent and return when we do go astray. But it is indisputable. We are God’s.

Which brings me back to that moment. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The first time I remember really hearing this phrase from the scriptures, I was a teen in youth group. And I thought then as I do now, that you could hear this scripture in two ways. First, you could hear it as just affirming who Jesus is. He is God’s Son, the Beloved. And that is definitely true. We are supposed to hear about Jesus and who Jesus is. We are clear that Jesus is God’s son.

But are we not also brothers and sisters of Christ by adoption? We share in the rainbow promise of God, and part of what we do at baptism is claim that we are part of the family of God. We are also sons and daughters of God, beloved, and whom God is well pleased.

But whether or not we have had much of a wilderness moment at our own baptism (with the possible exception of anyone here who was also baptized in a river), all of us enter a wilderness at some point. A place where we may doubt our beloved-ness and our belonging to God or to others.

I know I felt thrust back into the wilderness again this week, seeing the senseless killings of young people and adults in Florida at the high school. Why so much senseless suffering and death? A young man everyone knew was disturbed, but somehow the system still failed him and those at his former school who suffered in part because we stepped back rules about whether people with mental illness can own certain kinds of guns. The wilderness seemed rage around us as we heard this story, and I felt tears and anger coming up on behalf of all of the victims.

In her book Braving the Wilderness, social researcher and speaker Brené Brown begins by sharing a painful struggle of her teenage years, but in comparison a much lower stakes one. Nonetheless it had a powerful impact on her emotionally. She described how she worked so hard to get onto a cheering squad at her Texas school, but being the new back to the area, she didn’t know that in addition to being the right weight and knowing the dance routine perfectly, she also had to look the part. She went dressed for a workout rather than all dolled up, and she got rejected. Because fitting in and being athletic was important to her family, they felt embarrassed on her behalf, and as such she felt she didn’t belong at school or in her family. She goes on to use the Maya Angelou quote from a conversation with Bill Moyers in 1973, "You only are free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place -- no place at all,"[1] to illustrate how she has come to believe that once you belong to yourself, you can belong everywhere, even if by the world’s standards, you belong no specific place.[2]

I think that all of us can hear these words, “You are My Son or Daughter, the beloved, in you I am well pleased” and brush them off the way a teenage kid brushes off the love of a parent. You are just meant to say that, God, from you it kind of doesn’t count. But it does count. As the mother says in the movie Wonder, “Because I’m your mom it counts the most because I know you the most. Believe me.”[3] The same could be said of God. When we hit those wilderness moments in our lives, may we hear these words anew and know that because God created us, we are good. Because we are baptized, we belong.

Stephanie Spellers uses the Ash Wednesday reflection that kicks off our Living Compass guide this Lent to invite us into a practice of “giving and receiving belovedness.” She encourages us to see how Jesus uses the love he experienced in baptism to go out and brave the wilderness. To confront temptations and to rise above them. She says “After he hears the announcement of his original belovedness, Jesus steps into the wilderness. He does not go into that dark night alone. He knows himself to be cloaked in the love of God, and that love makes him strong, rooted, protected, and true.”[4]

In her book, Braving the Wilderness, Brené Brown goes on to explain how we can use the acronym “B.R.A.V.I.N.G.” as a guide for how we can live into our own bravery and integrity and there is a handout in the narthex describing all of the definitions. But today I will focus on the “g” which stands for “generosity.” This means that if we make a mistake, we are generous with each other that it was not intentional and we try to give each other an opportunity to make it right, and vice versa.[5]

Who knows? If he and those around him had been brave in this way, would the shooter the other day have felt the need to go to those lengths? Perhaps we will never know. But we can do what we can to make better choices ourselves.

All of these tools can help us re-claim our beloved-ness in our own right as children of God. If you have not yet selected a Lenten discipline, may I suggest that you consider focusing on one of these practices this Lent? I am going to pray on which one is calling to me, too. We may not do it perfectly, at least I know I won’t, but we can try to both belong to ourselves and God and thereby to each other by BRAVING together.

Starting from here and now, knowing we can brave any wilderness this Lent and indeed this year might bring, safe in the company of a God who loves us and treasures us as God’s very own.

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[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/06/14/maya-angelou-bill-moyers-1973/.

[2] Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone (New York: Random House, 2017), 3-42.

[3] https://www.moviequotesandmore.com/wonder-trailer-quotes/.

[4] Stephanie Spellers, “Reflection: Ash Wednesday (February 14, 2018),” Living Well Through Lent 2018 (Living Compass, 2018), 12.

[5] Some pictures of what this looks like are at: Isabella El-Hasan, “B.R.A.V.I.N.G” Brené Brown,” https://bellaelhasan.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/b-r-a-v-i-n-g-brene-brown/.