Knowing that they are loved is possibly the most fundamentally important thing that a human being needs in order flourish and become all that they were created to be. When Jesus was baptised, before he had done anything for which he was to become renowned, he heard the most amazing words of affirmation from God his heavenly Father:
“You are my son, my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”
And the wonderful thing is that those words were not a rewards for a job well done, they were the starting point for all that Jesus would go on to do. Those words rang in his ears as he went out into the desert to be tempted, and they rang in his ears throughout his three years of ministry, and they were still ringing in his ears as he journeyed to the cross. Before he was anything else, he was beloved.
Of course, he already knew that. Jesus was brought up in a loving home and he had first learned about the love of God through the love of a parent. That’s how most of us, if we are lucky, learn about what love is like. Knowing that we are loved needs to be the first thing we ever know. We need to know it before we are old enough to articulate it. And we need to know it if we, in turn, going to offer that same gift of unconditional love to another person.
To tell someone you love them and mean it is the most profound of gifts. It is to give them what they need to face whatever life can throw at them.
You, too, are beloved, and your love is your greatest power. Use it well, use it generously.
Author: reverendally
Human, parent, priest, (hymn)writer, painter, vegan, amateur. She/they. Chaplain @catz_Cambridge (views my own). Trying to do justly, love mercy & walk humbly.
Love life live Lent – Tuesday 11th March – care for the world
When we forget to switch off a light as we leave a room, sometimes it’s simply because the light itself seems so harmless. The damage being done to the environment isn’t being done right there in my living room, it was done somewhere far away as the coal burned to generate the electricity, and then further way still as that coal was mined from the ground. We’re often better with our care for the environment when we can see the cause and effect together, but with so many of the problems of climate change and energy resources for the planet, the product that we have to treat more carefully is far removed from the process that brought it to us, and the environmental cost of producing it.
Someone said to me a while ago that if we really do end up, through economic and environmental disaster, with a new Dark Age, this time there will be no coming back from it. If we reach a point when our post-industrial-revolution life is no longer possible (rather than just no longer sustainable) then there can be no easy industrial revolution to enable us to begin again, because all the coal that was easily reachable by pre-industrial means has already been mined. The question was put to me, “Do we yet understand enough about how to generate power, and live more simply, so that we could begin again, but this time not destroy the earth in the process?”
Turning off a few lights may not, in itself, make the difference between the planet healing or the planet dying, but it’s a really good start, and more than that, it’s a way for us to get realistic about the connectedness between the lifestyle comforts that we enjoy and the cost of having them. It may make us value those comforts more, but also value more the raw materials involved in producing them and the planet that provided it all.
Love life live Lent – Monday 10th March – be more creative
We got creative in collective worship at school today. Our theme this half term is ‘aspiring’ and today we looked at Ephesians 2.10 (God has created us to do good things). We explored it by making things out of salt dough – one person made a thumb pot, another made a person, someone else made a pair of angel wings, and another made a round ball to be world in God’s hands. We thought about how we are all works in progress, still being created by God, still able to be shaped and changed for good. Were our models great works of art? Not really! But were they about celebrating our own creativity, and ourselves as fruits of God’s creation? Absolutely!
Lent 1: Matthew 4.1-11
There was once a short-lived reality TV show called ‘SAS: are you tough enough?’ in which ordinary people undertook SAS style training and were, one by one, eliminated from the programme. I remember watching one episode, and reflecting on the title that no, I really really wasn’t.
There’s a strand of the Lenten tradition that teeters on the brink of being all about whether we are tough enough. Fasting, strict disciplines, and onerous rules for Lent can, if we’re not careful, become a matter of will power.
But that’s precisely the opposite of what Lent is really about. The Eucharistic Prayer for Lent speaks of how we are to “learn to be God’s people once again” – in other words, we are on a quest not for self-improvement, but for a deeper rootedness in our identity as people of God.
If we give things up for Lent, we do so so that our usual props – the things we think we are relying on but are really just cosmetic, with no real strength – fall away, and we are left with only the real, structural, load-bearing columns that really are keeping the building standing. Sometimes it takes some time in the wilderness to find out what those columns are.
In Jesus’ time in the wilderness we see a process of stripping away. Jesus fasts, giving up the comfortable feeling of having enough. And he heads out alone, giving up the tangible signs of support from his family and friends. And he goes away from the towns, away from the trappings of human civilisation, and from the sacred places of his Jewish practice. And there, he faces temptations to make himself comfortable, to take the easy route to power, and to test the love God his Father.
So what is it that enables him to survive this brutal wilderness experience? Is it simply that Jesus was “tough enough” when we are not? Undoubtedly Jesus was strong spiritually, mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, but if we make him out to have some sort of souped-up will power, then we deny his full humanity, and ignore all the evidence from the rest of the gospels that he was “tested as we are”.
When I read this passage it seems to me that we see Jesus finding, in his battle with Satan, that even without many of the things that he had relied on, there were certain things that were deeper sources of strength and courage in the face of adversity. He turns to scripture, refuting each of Satan’s advances with his own, deeper understanding of the Bible’s witness to the eternal and irrepressible love of God for his people. And, I suspect, he also went into the wilderness with the words of God his Father ringing in his ears at the day of his baptism: “You are my son, I love you, and I am pleased with you.”
It is a fundamental need of each human being that they know they are loved unconditionally. This applied to Jesus just as it does to all of us. It is the foundation of our psyche, the ground of all our loving, the sound basis for our risk-taking, our growth and development, and the central core of our ability to love God and love our neighbour as we love ourselves.
Jesus shows us that it is not, and never was, about being tough. It is about being human. And to be human is to be loved for ever by a God who reveals that love through scripture, and through his calling us by name at our baptism, and through his presence with us in every one of our life’s wilderness challenges.
Love life live lent – 8th March – Plant some seeds
A colleague of mine used to embellish well known gospel stories in the most wonderful way. I particularly enjoyed his version of the parable of the sower, which he used in our children’s service, acting it out by carrying the children around in a laundry basket and ‘planting’ them on various appropriately coloured mats for the path, the stony ground, the weeds and the good soil.
Unable to bear the idea that the parable gave three ways to fail and only one to succeed, he continued the story after the gospel left off: “And the birds that had gobbled up the seed from the path flew away to another field a long way away, and there they pooed out the seed and it fell into the good soil there and grew and grew and produced a wonderful crop!”
We’ve all seen or at least heard of the magnificent tomato plants that grow at sewage plants – tomato seeds, like many seeds, are not digested, and can happily pass all the way through a person (or a bird) and grow wherever they eventually reach fertile soil.
In the same way as the farmer who scattered the seed on the path may never see the plants that grew from it, so also we may sow our kindnesses, our ideas, our encouragement, and not see the fruit of it, because that fruit grows and ripens far away. As you plant your seeds, reflect on all those who invested in you and perhaps never got a chance to see the fruit of their time, energy and commitment to you, but who gave it anyway. Give thanks for them.
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