The Beloved / Advent Day 18

In the gospel of John, there is a disciple of Jesus who is called, simply, the "beloved" disciple. He is introduced halfway through, days before Jesus death. After Jesus washes the disciples feet – sort of like cheerfully sprucing up the toilets of a home where you’re a guest as an example of serene, committed hospitality – he begins to talk about one of his followers turning him over to the police.

Then it reads: "One of the disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to Jesus..." Immediately, Peter asks this "beloved" disciple to be an intermediary, grilling Jesus as to who the betrayer is. This shows that Peter, in other gospels the go-to guy, is really not tops on Jesus’ list, at least not in the Gospel of John. The beloved disciple is.

This shows that at the beginning of Christianity there was a non-hierarchical way of "following Jesus." It was community-based, not leader-centered, and focused on relationships rooted in authentic love, not on doctrines or on the succession of dynasties. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. One led to the Vatican, which did all it could to destroy the other road compeletly. The other led to the Society of Friends (the Quakers), and all kinds of committed communities based on human rights and earth-sustainability.

My friend Kathy Franzenburg, a Lutheran pastor in Palmer, AK and now in Iowa, sent me an interpretation of the Psalms which refers to God always as "the Beloved." It’s not your grandmother’s Book of Psalms. A "beloved" God assures that there is love at the center of each of the 150 laments, prayers, and songs. Christians would call it "grace," as in "Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound."

With love stipulated as being central, community follows. Love, at the center of things, means that we are all part of one community, even if we fail to acknowledge it or live by it.

I believe this. I believe that when we live as if we are part of a community, things fall into place nicely. When we don’t, it’s sometimes easier – like not changing the oil in the car is easier. But it’s also destructive, possibly painful, and probably irresponsible.

Beloved. I was telling Marin as we drove through the -30 degree ice fog this morning – her truck blew a hose – that a lot of the edginess and difficulty of the Psalms can vanish in this interpretation.

Psalm 137, for example, a lament of a captive, hauled across the desert from Zion where God dwells -- Jerusalem -- to a ghetto "By the Waters of Babylon." His revenge fantasy includes dashing infants, children of his captor, against rocks. (Luther finessed this psalm, apparently, by allegorizing infants as nascent sin, and rocks as sturdy Jesus: dash those infants!) In the new interpretation, the songs that are sung in Psalm 137, are sung by dolphins, and no alien babies are harmed, or even mentioned.