The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
January 13th, 2019
Baptism of our Lord (C) : Isaiah 43:1-7; Ps 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
On this first Sunday after the feast of the Epiphany, the Sunday we always mark by celebrating the baptism of Jesus, where the voice from heaven announced him to be “my son, the beloved,” my question is, who else counts as beloved? Who, other than Jesus, has worth, and value in God’s eyes?”
If I were to put the question to you all, I imagine most of you would probably say, “everyone!” And according to the catechism, or the teachings, of The Episcopal Church at least, you’d be right![1] We believe that God is the creator of all humankind, that we are all made in God’s image, and we believe, as Isaiah says this morning, that God loves all those he “formed and made.” Humanity therefore has an inherent value in the eyes of our common creator and, maybe this goes without saying, but we are called, therefore, to a similar appreciation for our human family. Because all are valued in God’s sight they should be valued in our sight as well. As we promise in the baptismal covenant, with God’s help we will “respect the dignity of every human being.” Everyone counts as a beloved child of God.
And this is not a conditional belovedness; it doesn’t depend on anything. It doesn’t depend on class, or color, or ethnicity, or country of origin, on gender or sexual orientation. It doesn’t depend on your grades, or your paycheck. It doesn’t even depend, on what religion you are. It doesn’t even depend, believe it or not, on your baptism. I can understand how that might be a little confusing after this morning’s Gospel passage. Since the voice from Heaven comes and marks Jesus as THE beloved, after he has been baptized we might think that it was because Jesus was baptized that he became beloved. But he’s been beloved since he was born—we just spent weeks celebrating that fact. In that voice from heaven, God is not establishing Jesus’ belovedness, He is confirming it.
The same is true for us. Our belovedness, our worth, our value in God’s eyes, is granted to us based on our birth, not our baptism. It’s there from the beginning. Baptism is our recognition of that gift, a chance to affirm a child’s intrinsic, divine worth. And from that recognition, from a feeling of gratitude for it, flows our response: a commitment to living the way of Christ, and our commitment as parents, godparents, as a faith community, to making sure that those who are baptized in our midst go through life assured, above all else, that they too are imbued with intrinsic dignity and worth by the God of Heaven and Earth. In our baptism God does not claim us, we claim God.
Do you know yourself to be a beloved child of God? Do you truly believe that your value in God’s sight is not based on who you are or what you’ve done? That you have existential worth and divine dignity, simply because you are alive? I hope you do. I hope you know that at your core, you are beloved by God.
But if I’m beloved, and you’re beloved, and we’re beloved, if everyone is fundamentally, a beloved child of God, if we really believe that to be true, why do we have such a hard time showing it to others? Because, while it may sound well and good to say that everyone has intrinsic worth, in practice, we have a lot of trouble actually exhibiting it. And I think that’s because if I’m beloved, and you’re beloved, if we are beloved, then so are “they.” Who’s “they”? You tell me. Who is “they” for you?
Our reading from Acts this morning was short, but important. Peter and John are sent to the Samaritans—the Samaritans, who were the longtime enemies of the Jewish people, who at that time wouldn’t be caught dead in each other’s company. And yet God still saw them as worthy, just as worthy as the disciples, to receive the Holy Spirit. Even their enemies—beloved. Who are the Samaritans in your world, that you have a hard time believing are beloved children of God? Because your “they” is whoever stands on the other side of the proverbial (and sometimes not so proverbial) wall that our prejudices and our pettiness have erected in our hearts.
Now just because everyone is beloved, does not mean everyone is good. In this equation of divine value, the constant is our belovedness, the variable is our response to it. Many people have squandered that divine value; crumpled it up and tossed it aside. Even more have rejected its existence in the soul of the other and this has allowed them do some downright evil things. Sometimes the motivation is purely selfish and sinful. And sometimes it is done from a place of fear; fear that there won’t be enough resources or opportunities or respect to go around if we really start treating everyone as having equal worth and value. And so we prioritize our belovedness or the belovedness of our tribe, over others. We all are guilty of this sometimes—to greater and lesser degrees, to be sure. But if we subscribe to the belief that everyone is, at the root a beloved child of God, that means that while those we view as “enemies,” or as “evil” may be in serious need of atonement, they are not worthless in God’s eyes. You cannot erase the fundamental belovedness that lies at our core. You cannot shake that identity. You can mangle it, twist it, stomp on it, bury beneath mounds of bigotry, violence and hatred, but it is still there.
That’s when “everyone is a beloved child of God” is really hard to believe; actually one of the hardest, things to believe. When it’s not our family and friends, but our enemies or those who differ from us. But what would it be like if we really tried to? What would it mean if we really treated everyone as beloved by God, simply by the fact of their existence? Even “them”? Is that even possible to do?
One of the more unlikely friendships of recent history was between the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In every single way they were polar opposites: ideologically, physically, personality–wise. There was seemingly only one thing they shared in common: a love of Opera. And somehow this was enough for them to be, as Ginsburg said upon Scalia’s death, “best buddies.” Their families vacationed together, they ate out together, and of course they went to the opera together. And yet all the while they remained at virtual opposite ends of the bench on almost every issue that came before the court. This friendship was so bizarre, so rare in our age of partisan warfare, that a college friend of mine—in a feat of meta-theatricality—wrote an entire opera about these opera lovers that has actually received some acclaim. Somehow these two people, who by most superficial standards had every reason to hate each other, could find a way to see in the other a worth, a value, a belovedness that could sustain a close friendship.
Our disagreements can be substantive and important and hashed out with passion (Scalia and Ginsburg didn’t pull any punches just because they were best buddies). But the tenor of those debates changes when we start from a place of recognizing and seeking to affirm the other person’s belovedness; when we allow that to guide how we talk about and treat them. And this belovedness begins with our birth, is confirmed at our baptism and then, hopefully, is carried forth in our lives. If we believe we share with every person in this planet an inherent belovedness in God’s eyes, an intrinsic worth and value that is no more or no less than mine or yours, then we need to stop denigrating and demonizing those different from us, not labeling them threats or enemies, but looking across the border, or the street, or the aisle and seeing, not a caricature, but a beloved child of God. This is not a political policy, it’s a spiritual posture. A posture that opens us to the world and says, “I know that I am God’s beloved daughter, beloved son, and I know you are too.”
[1] See Catechism in BCP p. 845