"Beloved"--July 10, 2019

"Beloved"--July 10, 2019

"Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." [1 John 4:7-8]
"Beloved" has come to be one of my favorite words, I must confess. Especially the way John uses it in a place like this.  When John calls someone "beloved," it carries a lot of weight in a single word.

Think about what it means for anybody to address you as beloved. It's a way of saying that of all the other words you might use to get someone's attention or to describe a person, the most important quality to call attention to is that he or she is loved. And that means that the most important quality you are calling attention to is not necessarily something inside the one who is loved, but is a matter of what the love-r thinks. Being beloved is different than being smart, or athletic, or pious. All those other words are about qualities I have inside myself, whether by genetics or personality or willpower and commitment. And in that sense they are value judgments about how intelligent, strong, or religious I am... and it is up to me to keep those up or else I could lose them.

But being beloved is entirely dependent on someone else loving me. Being beloved defines me in terms of how someone else chooses to see me--that for whatever other unlovely things there are inside me, someone else sees me and is determined to love me nonetheless. In other words, it is at least in some sense a rather passive thing to be "beloved;" it does not require any activity on my part to make it happen, but comes from the ongoing commitment of someone else to go on loving me. I just sit there and am beloved--I haven't done a thing to earn it or make it happen, technically speaking.

Now, when John calls us "beloved," notice that what flows from that status is that we are to love one another.  But this is a time when it's critically important to get the horse before the cart.  We are called--commanded, really--to love others only after we have already been identified as beloved ourselves.  Someone is loving us before we can get up the courage to love someone else. Before John even gets to the command that we should love one another, he already starts out calling us "beloved." So... who is it that loves us before we even love each other? John's point here is that we are beloved because no less and none other than God has determined to love us--even before we get to the question of how well we in the Christian community love each other.

This takes care of all those scary, risky, possibilities that come with being beloved, because we are promised that God's love doesn't flake out on us. Even if I might have anxiety that a friend might stop loving me after a falling out, or that one day grown children will move away and make love harder because of distance, or that people who love me will die, we are promised that the living God loves us with a deathless, ever-present, persistent love. I do run a certain risk letting myself be defined as "beloved" by any human person, because human love has its limits before it runs out of steam, and because human love is always tainted by our own self-interest and neediness. But I don't have to have that fear when I know I am beloved of God. 

We are taught to stake our lives on the sure promise that God has loved us with an everlasting love, and that love defines us. We are, before anything else gets said about us, and before we do anything else on our own, beloved--passive recipients of God's faithful goodness. We just sit there and are beloved, and that says more about who I am and who you are than any of the other traits or details of our history. Before I am foolish or smart, athletic or clumsy, pious or lazy, rich or poor, or any other adjective, I am--we are--beloved, defined by what God says about us deeper than anything else.

And because of that, we can get to everything else that follows.  We love because we are first beloved... and because we reflect for the world the God who has loved us already.  That love is always meant to be more than just emotions, more than just endorphins in the brain or butterflies in the stomach (those aren't love anyhow--that's just chemistry and infatuation).  But we are called to love in actions and words beyond just feelings, because God has loved us in Christ with actions that go beyond flighty emotions.

This is a big deal to pay attention to: of all the ways we could reflect the character of Christ, John singles out love.  Just like Jesus says to his disciples in the upper room, the world will know we are Jesus' people by the love we practice.  Not our rituals.  Not our cross necklaces or "Prayer changes things" bumper stickers.  Not our good citizenship.  And certainly not by some holier-than-thou attitude that wants to put ourselves a step above everyone else.  None of those will rightly reflect the character of the God we are sent to represent.  Love does, though.  Love for people who are like us, and love for people who are not.  Love for people who have been kind to us, and love for people who have been rotten to us.  Love for people who love us back, and love for people who have disappointed us or broken our hearts.  Love is the touchstone.  Love is the way folks will catch a glimpse of Christ when they look at us.

And we can dare to risk that love for others because before we have even done a thing, God has loved us first and called us by that beautiful name... beloved.

Lord God, lover of our souls, our very lives, let us be defined by your love so fully that it seeps into every portion of our lives, and that we might be made into people who love you and your creation the way you have first loved us.