Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is a part of most pastors' seminary careers. While part of the training is the practical experience of acting like a pastor, another important part is regular gatherings with one's classmates and a mentor to talk about how the work experiences and written assignments affect one's emerging understanding of oneself as a pastor. Overall, the purpose of CPE is to get one's Self out of the way of doing ministry. The point is to learn to recognize when you are going into a situation with a hidden agenda, or projecting your own "stuff" onto your pastoral care, reading your own fears instead of those of the person you are visiting, solving someone else's problems instead of giving them room to heal. My first written assignment for CPE was to take today's story and explore how I heard the phrase, "This is my beloved," applied to me. The wisdom of that assignment, as I watched both myself and my classmates grapple with that question, was the understanding that, when you are firmly convinced you are God's Beloved, you don't need to earn love in other ways.

Jesus was getting prepared to start ministry. The very next thing that happens to Jesus after his baptism, in all four gospels, is that he goes into the wilderness to face temptations. As if his baptism is what gears him up to face those temptations. As if his baptism was a way of being fed - to withstand not only the forty days of fasting, but to withstand the temptations the devil threw at him. What is it about his baptism that feeds Jesus, gives him the energy to go out to be tempted? And does that work for us? What feeds Jesus at his baptism is probably a complex array of things - the community of worship surrounding the baptism, the sheer fulfilling of God's will by being baptized, the descending dove, hearing the Voice that claims him as Beloved.

Again, does this work for us? As Christians, the event that most identifies us, the thing that begins our lives as Christians, is our baptism. Whether we are baptized as infants, as children, or as adults, it is our baptism that identifies us as Christian. It is how we know who we are, whose we are. It used to be that infant baptisms were called "christenings." Before civil birth registries, a christening was when a baby officially received its name. In baptism, we are joining God's family, we receive our "last name." By virtue of my baptism, my name is not "Parfrey," it is "Eileen Child of God."

And that's important. By knowing we are named and claimed by God, we also know that we are loved. We are, in fact, God's beloved. What works from Jesus' baptism works for us: we are God's Child, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased. Wow! And because we know that, we can get our Self out of the way to serve God.

Now, I suspect that most of you know in your heads that you are claimed by God, or you would not have bothered coming to church today. When you fill out a form and it asks your religion, you check the box "Christian" and know that means God has claimed you as a child. That would be "knowing in your head." Many of you also know in your hearts that your are claimed by God. When I was younger, there was a lot of talk about "having Jesus in your heart." It's evangelical, soul-winning language, and maybe Presbyterians think that's old fashioned, but we still mean that when we talk about "loving God" and the claims on our lives of being Christ's disciples. It's commitment language, spiritual discipline language. God's claim of you as God's own Beloved, moving from "knowing in your head" to "knowing in your heart."

Now I'm going to ask you to move down, but first let me slip in a little Greek. In the New Testament, when we read that Jesus looks at the crowds and feels pity or is moved to compassion for them, the Greek word is splanxna. I love that word. It means that Jesus' guts are moved. I want you to understand in your guts that God claims you in your baptism. I want you to know in your very bowels that you are God's beloved.

For what? To get out of the way. To get your Self out of the way. Just like what we were doing in CPE, removing our personal concerns about whether what we do is OK, whether it is going to earn us any love. Knowing so deeply that you are God's Beloved that it will remove personal agendas and allow God's agenda to get to work. I'm not saying that we are a congregation of whiners who only do things so that people will like us. In all modesty, I'm willing to admit that most of us are pretty lovely people, and the folks that I know in this congregation are hard workers who do kind things for no other reason than that the like to do kind things. My uncle once gave me an insight into human behavior. "Most people," he said, "just want to be loved." Jean Vanier, whose mission is with disabled people, says that the deepest, most fundamental human question is, "Do you love me?" My grama must have known that. "Eileen," she used to say with love in her voice and sticks of wood in her arms. "You are such a lovely girl. I don't know what I'd do without your help." And there I would be, carrying in armloads of wood for the stove, washing dishes, you name it. I loved being loved.

Knowing that you are God's Beloved means that you can get your Self out of the way. You don't have to wait for Grama to tell you how helpful you are. God has already said something more than that. God has already said, "You are my Beloved, in whom I am well pleased." Unlike my Grama, God doesn't say that so we carry in more wood and wash the dishes to earn that love. We are God's Beloved because God just loves us. Period. That's it.

As I was trying to figure out what knowing this Beloved-ness is about, I read something by Oswald Chambers. Chambers wrote the spiritual classic, My Utmost for His Highest. What he said seemed to apply to the knowing in one's guts thing that I'm trying to explain. Chambers uses a ship in harbor metaphor to explain what he meas. The way to know is to leave the harbor, give up the moorings and move out into what he calls, "the great deeps of God and begin to know for yourself, begin to have spiritual discernment." Then he says, "When you know you should do a thing, and do it, immediately you know more. Revise where you have become stodgy spiritually, and you will find it goes back to a point where there was something you knew you should do, but you did not do it because there seemed no immediate call to, and now you have no perception, no discernment; at a time of crisis you are spiritually distracted instead of spiritually self-possessed. It is a dangerous thing to refuse to go on knowing." The doing Chambers speaks of, the doing that leads to knowing, would be the "fulfill all righteousness" Jesus does to prepare for the wilderness. For us, the "doing" is discipleship and Christian service.

But it's dangerous to not. It is dangerous to refuse to do. Chambers makes it sound like it's a matter of life and death. And it is. God is always inviting us to life, to become who we were created to be. Recently I told you that God loves us where we are. This is true. But the rest of that saying is, "and God loves us too much to leave us there." We can do our best to thwart God's growth plans for us, and many of us do. Stay where you are. Don't move. Don't let the knowledge that you are God's Beloved go any further than checking the box on the form that says "Christian." And for pete's sake, don't let the knowledge that you are God's Beloved go to your guts. If you do, you might find your own guts moved with compassion for others. You might start taking ministry risks. You might find yourself teaching Sunday School. You've never taught before. God would never ask you to read with ESL kids after school. You can't speak Spanish. You will not have to go on a mission trip, because you don't know the four spiritual laws. And since you know nothing about young people, God cannot ask you to help with developing a youth group at Springwater. Whatever you do, do not let knowledge of "Beloved" go past your head. Check the box "Christian," but don't let it touch your guts. Or your life. You might forget your own personal agenda and concerns.

Friends, that is the point. It isn't our agenda in the first place. It is God's. And God's agenda since the beginning of time is to let us know that we are God's own Beloved. Live into that. Point that out to each other. As you do so, you will find your Self has faded in the light of being God's Beloved. Thanks be to God.