Remember you are loved

Dear Friends in Christ, 

How’s Lent treating you? Have you settled into whatever spiritual practice or discipline you landed on for this year? Did you return to the tried and true you do every year? Or are you still struggling to figure out what you’re going to do? Is life busy enough, hard enough, challenging enough, uncertain enough that you’re already wandering through the wilderness and don’t need one more thing to remind you? Or have you not even given it a second thought (which is perfectly okay BTW)?  

At our Ash Wednesday service, I invited you to consider Lent through the lens of agapé love – unconditional, self-sacrificing love. The love of God for each one of God’s children (yes, that means you!). The love we have for our “neighbor” (however you define that). And, if we are to take Jesus’ commandment seriously, our love for ourselves. How do we love ourselves in an unconditional self-sacrificing way? Isn’t the idea of loving ourselves while sacrificing ourselves to that love counter intuitive?  

It’s certainly hard. For me, this is translating as giving up the foods I crave (processed foods full of fat and sugar and salt) and eating nutritious (but still delicious) plant-based whole foods that my body needs; resisting the desire to lounge on the couch in favor of taking a walk; and focusing on my meditative porch time instead of giving into the early morning allure of social media. I am denying myself things that I think I want (hence self-sacrifice) in favor of things that are healthy and life-giving, which is a way of loving myself.  

During Lent we walk with Jesus through the challenges and temptations of his mission and ministry with all the struggle and risk that entailed. We encounter Jesus wrestling with the temptation to give it all up and save himself, and his heartache and fear at what his future holds. His identity as God’s beloved son, spoken in God’s voice at his baptism by John, gave him the hope and courage he needed through all of this. 

Too often we focus on Jesus’ divinity, his God-ness. We imagine him walking confidently toward the cross certain in his purpose and assured of the outcome. We diminish the fact that Jesus was also fully human, with all the fears, uncertainties, and doubts that triggers. We want to believe there was no choice for him, or if there was that it was a choice he made easily. But what if he could have chosen to walk away at any point and live a “normal” life? And what if he sometimes considered doing just that? I wonder if it is easier to focus on Jesus’ divinity and believe that is why he was able to do what he did, because if we understand him as just like us it means we can also do the things he did.  And if we don’t, it is because we choose not to rather than because we can’t.  

And I think that’s okay too. I think it is better to acknowledge that we are not doing the things God wants us to do, for whatever reason, than to pretend God doesn’t want us to do them, because at least that leaves room for growth and transformation. God knows what God is asking of us is hard. God knows that there are many temptations in this world giving us every reason not to do the things God asks of us. Jesus calls us to agapé love… for God, for other people, and for ourselves. Jesus understands how hard what he is asking is, but Jesus would not ask us to do something impossible. The first step is fully and completely understanding ourselves as God’s beloved children with whom God is well pleased. Everything else will blossom from that.  

Remember you are beloved, and to love you will return.  

Yours in Christ, 

Rev. jane+