City of Belonging

City of Belonging

A Sermon on Mark 1:9-15

by Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On the First Sunday of Lent

February 18 2018

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

Oprah Winfrey has a pretty good understanding about what it means to be human, what is our core human experience, she states that in every one on one interview she has ever done, which is considerable considering she has a library of well over 5,000 shows, she says that every guest has one thing in common.

In her words: “Everybody… whether it was Barak Obama or Beyonce or the guy who murdered his family or the guy who molested his kids… everybody that I have ever interviewed after the interview at some point will turn to me and ask, How wast that? Was I okay? How’d I do?”

Continuing… “Everybody just wants to know that you heard me, you saw me and that what I said mattered.” Oprah says this need, this validation, is the common denominator for all humankind. 

Did you hear me?

Did you see me?

Do I matter?

Do I belong?

Early on in psychology Freud believed that all of human foundation stemmed from two driving forces: our sexuality and our aggression.  Abraham Maslow, thank God thought there was more to use than sex and aggression. He argued there was considerably more to us and developed a hierarchy of needs, 5 human needs and in that the sense of belonging is foundational. Right after our psychological needs (including air, breath, water, food and sleep) and after our safety needs (health and personal security) comes the need to belong. Although many now say the need to belong may outweigh our safety needs as evidenced by those who stay in abusive relationships and institutions, belonging might be more foundational than safety. 

As human kind we have a distinct need to belong, to be accepted, to be part of something greater than ourselves. And this need drives so much of what we do… it is about power, intimacy, approval, achievement and affiliation. 

It’s why we buy jeans that make us look skinny and young.

It’s our need to have the latest technology, the latest must have device.

It’s why we believe we deserve to be in the know.

It’s our need to make a higher salary.

It’s our need to walk a few more steps on the stair machine than the person next to us.

It’s our need to be in charge and in control.

It’s why we eat Tide Pods on Youtube challenges.

It’s why we joke at other’s expenses.

It’s why we vote the way we vote.

We need to know that we belong. Which really should be so very easy, but we have not made it easy, in fact we have made this quite hard. Look at our world and how we divide, how we compete and how selfish we can so quickly become. We don’t do community, we do competition as though all of life is a game and the winner’s circle is a podium for a select few and not a large table with seats for everyone.

Just look at the news from our own denomination last week, why is it so hard to simply say everyone belongs?

But the saddest truth of all is we can’t even get it right here at church the local church. Even here we compete, we exclude, we think of belonging in terms of you are in but at the expense of someone else being out. 

John Pavlovitz’s sums this up perfectly in his incredible book A Bigger Table, there he writes “Most of us are raised in some self centered faith story, asking ‘If God is for me, who can be against me?’ And assuming that there is some competition with others that we are required to win in order to secure our acceptance. Such thinking forces us to quickly become experts at exclusion and crafting a God who plays favorites. This is far easier when everything around you tells you that your skin color, gender or orientation grantee you a place at the table.”

We struggle to imagine a God who has room for all. Sure we might say “all people, all people, all people” but util we actually put that into practice and it becomes more than just words, we don’t get it and we fall for less.

And maybe we simply get too lost in what it really means to belong… Is it about being able to recite the right creed? Or is it about voting for the right political party? Or knowing the right things to say? Or being part of the right group? Or having the right friend or being the person everyone wants to be friends with? 

And maybe it’s nothing like that. Actually hopefully it’s nothing like that because that won’t work (and if you don’t believe me, look at all of our history). 

We need more and this should be easier to do.

I was reminded of this last week when Kimberley Shappley led us at Midweek in our discussion of how we can be better church to and with our transgender community. Kimberley said, “Transgender identity issues are not simple but this is: call people by the name they want to be called the name that makes them feel like they belong.”

It’s a great sermon on this Scripture passage….. how to belong.

We begin our Sundays of Lent today in the Gospel of Mark, in his sanctuary and in his story. Which means we need to hang on because we are going to be moving fast, it’s the Gospel of immediately. 

And Mark does not bother to give us a proper introduction to the story. There is no once upon a time, it came upon a midnight clear… Mark does not mention a virgin birth, actually Mark does not even mention a birth or Mary or Joseph or the angels or the wisemen or a manger. Mark does not even bother to give us Jesus at 12 years old lost in the temple. 

Mark is like watching Slumdog Millionaire or Unbroken or 12 Years A Slave or Ironman or Batman Begins or Fight Club (surely I covered all the bases there), you have to catch up on the story. As Rod Machen taught me this week these movies follow the words of Homer, it’s a film in media ris, in the middle of the story line.

Mark throws us in the deep end and shouts “sink or swim and I suggest swimming real quick because we are headed somewhere important and I don’t have time to baby you.”

Mark starts with a prophesy from Isaiah, then we get John the Baptist an his camel hair clothing and diet of locust and wild honey and then this baptism thing… and then we get Jesus.

Jesus enters from stage left, rather obscure, just another face in the crowd there to see John and  to experience this baptism, and then suddenly he is in line to actually be baptized. It’s like when you and your friends walked up to look at a rollercoaster and suddenly you looked over and your friend is in line., wait I thought we were just checking this out?

And in Mark’s Gospel there is nothing special about Jesus until after the baptism, as if nothing mattered until this pivotal moment, until he comes out of the water… and the heavens opened up and a spirit like a dove (key word being like, not an actual dove even though every artist loves this moment) and then the words, the pivotal words: You are mine, my Beloved, with you I am well pleased.

And that is Mark’s introduction to Jesus.

This week I keep picturing the scene: Can you imagine the crowd around Jesus at that moment? Can you see the confusion on the first reader’s faces? Wait what did we miss, why is this guy so special? How is that? Why is he the Beloved Child of God? What did I miss? Why did I not get that same introduction?

But for Mark all he needs us to now is this and this alone: Jesus is beloved, Jesus belongs.

And then Mark moves on… quickly to the wilderness where Jesus will spend the next 40 days with wild beast and fighting for his identity which is the core of every temptation he will face, are your really the Beloved? And that is not just the core of his three, that is the core of every temptation known to man…. Are you the beloved?

And then after that Mark has Jesus with his first sermon, just 18 words: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel” 

According to the set up of this Gospel, victory over the tempter and the ability to proclaim and bring about God’s kingdom- only occur after one has been called Beloved.

After Jesus receives his identity.

After Jesus claims that identity.

After Jesus discovers that he belongs.

Which is exactly what we need to receive, what we need to claim, what we must discover. To realize that belonging is knowing we are God’s beloved, no more and no less. We are God’s and that is all that matters.

And the Gospel is I think those are the words God is constantly whispering over us, around us, in us: “You are beloved.” If only we could learn to listen because if we could still our soul enough to hear those words, we could live into them and we would find everything we need.

We stand here this Sunday at the beginning of Lent, our 40 day journey, and looking around our world and the news of recent, it will certainly be full of wild beasts and temptations (which might not look like temptations) and the only way we can make it thought is to know that we belong and so does everyone else.

Because that is the battle going on right now for the soul of the world and our own souls right now, a battle of belonging, of having a place, of having rights and equality. It’s a battle over who belongs here and there, over who we are going to exclude, over who we can scapegoat to feel better than ourselves and who we fear and who we need to cast out. It’s everywhere we turn.

And the truth is so much better: you belong and so does everyone else.

And that is part of our work, part of the soul of who we are… this week I have shed tears reading your replies to the Illumination Project because they share so much of you and your beautiful souls. One mother wrote me to express how deeply important it is that we make sure our LBGTQ community knows we love and accept them fully, 100% and she ended with these words, a testimony to her own story here at the church and how we saved her daughter’s life: 

“You are right- I don’t care who First Church affiliates with as long as we continue to be all people all people all people. We love gay and straight, neurotypical and non-nereotypical, with and without gender dysphoria. We love and we don’t judge and the reason we do so it that we don’t want to go to our children funerals saying I am sorry because we could not love you enough when you most needed our acceptance.” Amen.

Hear that again because that is everything: “We love and we don’t judge and the reason we do so it that we don’t want to go to our children funerals saying I am sorry because we could not love you enough when you most needed our acceptance.”

You belong and so does everyone else. And we will not settle for less than that, this is part of the foundation of the beautiful city.

I John 3:1: “See how great a love God has bestowed on us, that we would be called Children of God and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us because it did not know God. Beloved, we are children of God….” 

Beloved.

You belong.

The very core of our existence, it all begins here.

Gay or straight, cisgender or transgender, rich or poor, black or white, liberal or conservative, been here since you were born or just walked in for the first time, young or old, educated or not, full of questions or full of answers, wanting to be here or not wanting to be here…. You belong, You are beloved. 

And that name will change your life.

So may we be like Jesus who hearing these words did not swell up with pride and act like class favorite, but instead went and tried to make sure that everyone understood those words were bigger than just him, they were for all of us.

So First Austin hear these words: You are mine, my Beloved, with you I am well pleased.

You are Beloved.

You belong.

You are God’s dearly loved child. 

And so is everyone else.

And that is all that matters.

Hear this, know this, and knowing that go a change the world by creating a city of belonging.

Amen and Amen. 

*artwork: The River, Mosaic from painting by John August Swanson, johnaugustswanson.com