Beloved

A question I have been pondering over the recent years is whether we as God’s people believe we are God’s beloved. Do we believe that we are connected to God, made in God’s image and do we accept our call to act that out in our communities? Do we act as if we are chosen and accept the flawed nature of our being? Being God’s chosen does not mean that God likes us over another person or that we are better than anyone. The beloved of God, those connected to God are quite flawed as people or are at least ordinary people.

It is not that God thinks any one is more worthy but it is that God chooses us for the sake of communicating this state of “being chosen” to everybody else. It is a paradox that we as God’s chosen miss and take a long time to learn and to see the depth to which we are being led. So, the question is, have we accepted that we are chosen and that our role is to lead and support others in finding this depth of relationship with God. It seems, we to are slow learners like those who have gone before us and we tend to remain at an immature level of exclusive election. We see only ourselves and eliminate those around us from the experience of finding connection to God.

The principle I am advocating here is that you can only transform people to the degree that you have been transformed. We can only lead others as far as we have gone. We have no ability to affirm or to communicate to another person that they are good or special until we know it strongly for ourselves. Once we have got hold of this, we will cease to worry about being centre stage and we will have the time and energy to support other people on their journey to connectedness and acceptance as the beloved of God. If we do not understand the inclusiveness of being a member of Christs body, then our religion almost always becomes exclusive against the unworthy or impure.

Sadly, parts of the Body of Christ practice this sort of exclusion today. Our parish or

congregation or denomination then becomes ‘my belonging system’ instead of being good news for those who don’t belong. This is the opposite of what Jesus did and what God through Jesus Christ calls us to do and to be.  This kind of exclusiveness is unable to see the gift of our connection with God as a gift for others. Instead we see it as a gift for ourselves. We do then end up in a very smug and self-satisfied religion which excludes others and becomes inward focused.  

In no way is the Christian faith designed to make us think that we are better or to create a group that is superior. For me it is more about the gathering of the weak and the wounded to enable us to see how God transforms and heals. Note that it is God who gets the glory and not God’s creation. True belief means that we can see that we are an immoral minority. However we are also shown that we are able to be for God the starter yeast, the savouring salt, or light to show the way. It should be obvious to us that yeast is not the dough, salt is not the meal and light always illuminates something else.

I come back to that question of why we seem unable or unwilling to honour our call from God. Why is our yeast not enabling the dough to rise, why is our salt not savouring the meal and why has our light become so dim? In this there is much to reflect on, and most importantly of all for us to seek our connectedness again with God and honour our role as God’s beloved wherever we are.