Abundantly Beloved: Pentecost Wednesday

LOOK: Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt - Source

READ: Psalm 38; Psalm 119:25-48; Deuteronomy 4:25-31; 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:17; Luke 15:1-2, 11-32

PRAY: Prayer to the Holy Spirit

Come, Holy Spirit,
fill the hearts of your faithful,
and enkindle in us the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created,
and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Amen.

DO: Throughout the first week of Pentecost, I'll be sharing excerpts from my upcoming book, The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World. In Part 2 of the book, I invite us to consider Jesus invitation in Matthew 11:28–30 to “walk with him” as an invitation to walk with his church. Today, I’m sharing a large portion of the chapter “Baptized Beloved.”

YOU WERE ALL CALLED TO TRAVEL ON THE SAME ROAD

The apostle Paul wrote a poem echoing the invitation to embrace our belovedness in baptism with Jesus: “Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love” (Ephesians 1:4, The Message). Before the earth’s foundations, God, who was, and is, and always will be in communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, had “settled on us as the focus of his love.”

Paul continues to describe this spacious, united path: “You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one Master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness” (Ephesians 4:1–6, The Message).

Then Paul turns the conversation toward how we are different from each other, saying that just because we’re called to travel the same road doesn’t mean we’re all supposed to look and behave the same. Made in the image of the Trinity, God calls us to live as diverse beings united in the peace of Christ.

BELOVED TRINITY

The beauty of the triune story centers on God’s communal life: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And, so, we begin with the One who is named beloved first. The One who is Three. Blessed Trinity.

How does this relate to what it means to be beloved? For starters, to be beloved means to be made in the image of the triune God. As God is one in three, we, too, are made for the depth and breadth of communal life. We are made to give and receive love from others who are not the same as us. The eternal heartbeat of God beats to the rhythm of belovedness.

The founders of our faith described the relationship of the Trinity as a “divine dance.” Early church theologians described the inner life of God as perichoresis, which right there in the middle of the word hints at our English word choreography. In his book The Beautiful Community, Irwyn Ince reminds us that “fragmentation, division, disharmony, and disunity are our story, but they are not God’s.” Ince continues, “God is the apex of unchanging beauty as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternally existent, mutually glorifying, loving, honoring, and supporting diverse community—a never-ending, beautifully choreographed dance.”

The Trinity exists as more than an essential part of Christian doctrine (which it assuredly is) but as the living, loving ultimate reality in which we live and move and have our being. We are welcomed to the never-ending communion of Father, Son, and Spirit and find our truest selves in their midst. We move outward, extending this hand of fellowship to the world, not as individuals but as those who have been deeply and thoroughly welcomed into the friendship of God—and abundantly refreshed to share God’s love indiscriminately with the world.

BELOVED CHURCH

The church is the body Christ forms to live out the pulsing reality of the triune God in the world. While we are called to worship Father, Son, and Spirit every day and in every place, a holy reorienting happens when we gather around scripture and communion. The habits of worship we practice within our local church strengthen us to serve the common good of our cities, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and beyond. We collectively make up the body of Christ and we need each other for this beautiful work.

In the book of Ephesians, we read:

God is building a home. He’s using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. He used the apostles and prophets for the foundation. Now he’s using you, fitting you in brick by brick, stone by stone, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone that holds all the parts together. We see it taking shape day after day—a holy temple built by God, all of us built into it, a temple in which God is quite at home. (Ephesians 2:19–22, The Message)

In some mystical and Christ-saturated way, God places the broken up and diverse pieces that our individual lives represent to form a unified community. Like bricks in a building or stones in a mosaic, our individual gifts, and identities gather the imago Dei into one image of God.

Sheer genius. Spacious grace.

The beauty of our diversity is not about gifts alone. The heart of God is irrevocably intertwined with all peoples and nations. In much the same way God’s image is made vivid through both the male and female of the imago Dei, God’s heart is only fully recognized through the colors and textures, flavors and fragrances, stories and dance steps, personalities, and priorities of all the peoples and nations.

Whenever we are able, Brian and I love to visit churches that help us step out of our familiar worship and lean into the worship expressions of the peoples, tribes, and nations of the imago Dei. As we connect to the diverse parts of the mosaic of Christ’s unified body, each part we encounter expands our imagination for the imago Dei within our congregation right now and deepens our desire for the day we will all worship together at the throne of Jesus (Revelation 7:9–12).

BELOVED IMAGO DEI
When the Trinity declares in Genesis 1:26,“Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness” (NRSVue), God is deciding to make us in God’s triune image. We bear God’s image as a mutually loving, honoring, and supporting diverse community. We glorify God in this. And we are beautiful.

Irwyn Ince defines the Imago Dei as an “overflow of God’s beauty in the creation of humanity.” Ince says that God brought “copies of himself” into being as an overflow of the perfect love God shared as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The truest thing about humans is that we are made in God’s image, and Jesus as both God and human is uniquely qualified to identify the most authentic parts of ourselves—the beloved person God imagined as we were being formed in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13–16). But the invitation to recognize our true selves doesn’t stop with us; Jesus calls us to embrace both our own belovedness and God’s image in other humans. And so the imago Dei, at its essence, is a relational rather than an individualized identity. We are all connected; to embrace our identity is to embrace God’s image in all people—including ourselves—and to reject one is to reject the other.

—from Chapter 6, “Baptized Beloved” pp. 108-111

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Chapter 6, “Baptized Beloved,” invites us to contemplate the unity of diversity in God’s beloved community, centered in the holy Trinity, and revealed in the church and image of God revealed through the imago Dei. What resonated with you as you read this chapter? Where did you notice resistance? Could you begin to name why you might be feeling that? 

Read, reflect, journal, and share your own responses with the rest of us in the comment section below.