Baptism and Community

First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C

Holy Baptism: January 10, 2013

Isaiah 43:1-7
Ps. 29

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today we are hearing some news that is both very new and very old. In our Gospel story, Jesus comes up to John, so he can be baptized in the Jordan River. This is something very new. Jesus is not there to “repent of his sins.” Jesus does not do this to join a new religion. There is an astounding rush of a mighty wind. The Holy Spirit comes down over Jesus’ head and a heavenly voice booms out, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

When Jesus joined that throng of people coming to John to be baptized, we can imagine that he, like them, was longing for something powerful to happen. They were a group of people who wanted to turn their lives around, and who believed that the whole world could turn around: they were filled with expectation, Luke tells us. For them to want “the Messiah” is to want a world in which God’s justice reigns, where families and communities are whole and prosperous, where there is enough of everything to go around, a world full of hope that the future will be better than the past. When the people – Jesus included – came to be baptized, it was not just about themselves, alone: they were coming to be part of a community, to be part of a new world, to be part of the world that God had always promised was the way things would be.

Luke, unlike the other gospels, gives us some stories about Jesus’ childhood and youth. Luke tells the story of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to be blessed in the Temple, and how people there recognized him as the promised one who would bring about God’s reign. Luke also tells the story of Jesus as an older child on another trip to the Temple, where he leaves his parents and sits and talks with the scholars and teachers, strong and confident, even as a child, about his place in God’s world. These stories give us a hint that in this story, as Jesus comes to be baptized, and lingers and prays by the river, that he is not surprised when God’s voice, proclaiming him “the Beloved,” booms out from heaven. Jesus knows that he has a place in this world, and a role to pay, in making this world the beloved and blessed place God intended it to be.

I said before that this story is about new news and old news. God has always loved this world, and this is the old news about baptism: when we are “marked as Christ’s own forever” it means that we should remember each day who we are, and whose we are, and who we are called to be. And every day, especially on those days when things get difficult, don’t each of us long to hear those words, that we are beloved? That God has loved us from the beginning of time, just as our mothers and fathers and friends have loved us, and just as we love them back?

Our first reading today is one that Jesus himself knew. The prophet Isaiah tells the story of that old news: that God has created us, that God sticks by us in difficult times, and that God wants everyone, all sons and daughters, to come home – to come from the ends of the earth to this party, here, in this place, here in the heart of God. In a few minutes, when we pour water on your head, as Jesus had water poured on his, you will know the old truth: that you belong to God, and God loves you. With this baptism, as with all baptisms, God is saying to each of us, "No matter what happens and no matter how low and discouraged you feel, no matter what is happening around you and in your life, don't you ever let anyone tell you that you are anything but a precious and beloved child of God."[1]

So today, this party is about you, and about how happy we are that you found us. And this party today is about all of you, children here for "First Communion," to take communion together, and how you understand how beloved you are by God. You all are here today to teach the rest of us something so very important: Baptism connects us. It ties us together as a community. We are so much more than a collection of individuals, making our own way, struggling alone with our own burdens. You being here today, taking communion together as a group, are showing us that we are part of something much greater than ourselves, that we are part of a community engaged with God in the transformation of the world – that we, like Jesus, are standing here in this mighty stream of people who from the beginning of time, have worked with God to make this world the blessed and beloved place that God created it to be.

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[1] Kathryn Matthews Huey, Sermon Seeds Year C (Pilgrim Press, 2012), p. 45

Even people we thought were enemies long to see the Light

Epiphany

Jan. 6, 2013

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ps. 72

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

In our hyper-rational world, dreams are the product of a troubled mind. We have alarming dreams of forgetting a homework assignment, of missing an exam, of showing up at a job interview in our pajamas. We have terrifying, strange dreams, finding ourselves at the brink of death, waking up heart pounding and haunted. And occasionally we have dreams of astoundingly wonderful wish fulfillment, dreams from which we never want to awake.

We no longer view dreams as things which tell us what to do, as dreams told the wise men to avoid Herod and go home another way – as dreams told Joseph to flee with Mary and the child to find safety in far-away Egypt – as dreams told an earlier Joseph, of the coat of many colors, how to save the people of Egypt from famine by storing up their bounty for the hard years ahead. When the famine came, it was his brothers that Joseph was also able to save – his brothers, the children of Israel, who had sold him in slavery in Egypt in the first place. Dreams in those “old days” were like twitter feeds, e-mail announcements, facebook posts: dreams were how people interpreted what they were experiencing when they were awake. Dreams were how people understood what they events of the day meant.

It is easy to get caught up in the magic of old language like these bible stories. The old language can distance these stories from our current lives. Those “magical” things happened then; this is now. But let’s look again at this story of the wise men: Matthew was trying to tell his readers something important, in the words they could understand – what is he trying to tell us?

The wise men – and Matthew doesn’t tell us how many there are – come from “the East.” From Asia, Persia, Babylon. From the place where hundreds of years earlier the people of Israel were held in captivity by their conquerors. People from “the East” are the enemies of the people Matthew was writing to. Yet even these people see something important in the birth of this child. These people can see it in the world around them – in a star, in a wonder of the natural world. Everything points to this birth as something miraculous, something awaited – the ultimate “aha!” moment – the key interpretation that unlocks the meaning of the dream that everyone has been having.

The other theme in Matthew’s story is that of Herod, the frightened, the powerful, the violent. Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience, and here he depicts Herod, the leader of the Jews, as reprehensible and cruel. Herod is the one who does not dream. Herod is the one who wants no interpretation of the world around him other than his own – that it is a world completely under his power and authority. Soon after this passage, of course, he looks for the baby Jesus, and when he can’t find him, he kills all infant boys. Herod’s world is the world of ultimate rationality, ultimately ruled by fear.

Our two readings from the Old Testament – the passage from the prophet Isaiah and Psalm 72 – tell us what all the dreams point to. They tell us what Matthew had in mind, when he described Jesus as the true king and Herod as the false one. God’s vision for the world has always been one of justice, one of abundance, one of mercy. This is the light God shines on all the world – all the peoples – not just the ones who came out of Egypt as “God’s chosen people.” The kings who rule as God would have them rule defend the needy and rescue the poor and crush oppressors.

Given human nature, it is likely that there will be more people like Herod in this world, people who get power, and fear loss, and take revenge by shedding blood. But lessons like these let us know that we are not alone in condemning that way of doing things – that even people who we thought were our enemies yearn to live in peace and prosperity – that peace and light and justice are not only vague dreams but the means by which we interpret what is going on around us, even now, even today, “as the day dawns, and the morning star rises in our hearts.”[1]

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[1] 2 Peter 1:19

God appears and God is Light

Christmas 1

Dec. 30, 2012

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Psalm 147

Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

John 1:1-18

Years ago, when Tim was the rector of the Syracuse Urban Cluster, we worked closely with the minister of a Pentecostal Holiness congregation. We shared services, festivities and community events. We marched through the neighborhood, praying in front of crack houses and anointing with oil any who came up to “Father Hall” or “Minister Ellis,” as our friend was called, to be saved.

Not long before he started his congregation, Minister Ellis was a jazz musician, a studio and session musician, and the grandson of folksinger Libba Cotton. What drew him and his congregation to the Episcopal Church, we wondered? After not too many sermons we understood: it was the Gospel of John, with its deep poetry, its stark contrasts between darkness and light, between those who hear Jesus’ voice and follow him and those who stray. The Gospel of John is not easy to understand, but if you live a life of ups and downs, of tragedies and near-misses, the Gospel of John is easy to feel.

Soon after we moved back here a year ago, Tim ran into Larry Ellis, a joyful reunion with many promises of getting back together. Sadly, not long after that, Larry Ellis died, unexpectedly, putting to rest a glorious voice and a magnificent soul. His music rose from the depths of his experience to the heights of glory, confident that no matter what came to pass, he belonged to Jesus, the rock of his salvation.

A theology based on the Gospel of John revels in contrasts: darkness-light; knowledge-ignorance; blindness-sight. Taken to an extreme, it defends an “us against the world” understanding of Christian community. It can feed notions like the “clash of civilizations,” leading to the demonization of “others” who just don’t get it, others who reject our world view.

It is all too easy to stay on the surface when we read the Gospel of John, and revel in its dualisms of good and evil, dark and light. But to do so can distort the Jesus about whom John is talking in this Gospel, a Jesus who brings a light to enlighten everyone – everyone – into the world.

In 1803, the English poet William Blake wrote a poem which ended,

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

God comes in a form we understand. If we live in gloom or trouble, God first appears to us as light. But if we already have had a glimpse of that light, God comes to us as one of us, embodying our hopes for righteousness and justice, love and freedom, giving us something tangible to hold on to and model our lives upon.

The Gospel of John reminds us that God has been calling us into being since the beginning of time. The light still shines and there is no darkness – no depth of human evil, no ignorance or fear or violence or death – that can block it out. If you listen closely, you can hear the angels – and Larry Ellis – sing.

All we have is a child, and everything in the world looks like a promise

Christmas 2012

Christmas is a confused jumble of stories, sources, traditions, customs. We pull together what is “Christmas” to us from a variety of places. At the 4 pm service we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus from both the Matthew AND the Luke gospels. Those two evangelists tell different stories about Joseph, Mary and the Babe in the manger; Mark and John tell us nothing at all about how Jesus got here, but they both allude to Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters.

We also include in “Christmas” dozens of customs from all over – a mélange of Charles Dickens and medieval carols and Coca Cola ads. The piano accompaniment to “the Charlie Brown Christmas” means the holiday to us as much as Handel’s “Messiah.” “The Miracle on 34th Street” captures the essence of the season as much as any number of elegant musical settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams. This season is a sentimental time, and a hopeful time, as we approach the turning of the year and all of the promise that the birth of a new child brings.

But back to the Bible: even with all these different strands of stories about the birth of Jesus, the Gospels all include some mention of dark things. Even the blessed Wise Men, when they come to honor the Baby Jesus, inadvertently play a role in terrible destructive things. Herod, powerful and yet weak, so fearful of this child, this king-to-be, uses the Magi’s hopeful seeking for his own wicked ends. He uses his military might to kill all the baby boys just in search of the one who escapes his grasp. The Holy Family flies to safety, just in time.

Christmas has always included this poignant mix. Charles Dickens wrote his “Christmas Carol” against the backdrop of the deprivations and hardships of industrial England, contrasting the bounty and warmth and cheer with loneliness and hunger.

Christmas is, in a way, a kind of crystal ball: what we see in it, what we experience, is influenced by what we bring to the encounter. There is an old saying, that if all you have is a hammer, then everything in the world looks like a nail. The terrible events of the past couple of weeks have reminded us that if all you have is a gun, then everything in the world is a target.

But tonight, all we have is a child, and to us, everything in the world looks like a promise: a promise of hope, of love, of grace, of forgiveness, of starting over, of seeing the world in the way this child sees it. And since this child is God, that means seeing this world in the way God sees it.

One of the things that our Christian tradition enables us to do during this season, is to hold together all of these things: the promise and the pain, the abundance and the loss. We can miss someone so much during these days that it hurts, and yet at the same time be overjoyed with gladness at the things around us. 

We are all meant to be mothers of God

Advent 4-C

Dec. 23, 2012

Micah 5:2-5a

Canticle 15: The Magnificat 

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1:39-55

People of faith are viewed by many people in this society as kind of kooky. People of faith are just not realistic. Even the “I’m spiritual but not religious” types are seen this way by the hard-headed realists. We are sometimes dismissed as “Religious do-gooders,” airy-fairy types. Just how much of a difference can our meager efforts make in this world where the problems are immense and the solutions nearly unimaginable?

Mary and Elizabeth must be seen as the ultimate kooky “people of faith.” What could be less realistic than the words Mary sings when she meets up with her cousin, Elizabeth? Casting mighty from their seats of power? She, a pregnant, poor, unmarried girl? Filling the hungry with good things? Her cousin Elizabeth is elderly, and is now pregnant for the first time in her life. These are just ordinary people, not miracle workers; how much more delusional can they be?

These two women, and the two baby boys they carry in their wombs, come to us today in the line of prophets. Mary and Elizabeth came from people who read their Bibles carefully. They lived on the fringes of society, where they could see the things that were wrong, where they could see how poor and powerless people were treated. They knew their Bibles well enough to know that God promised that the world would be a better place. They stood in a long ling of prophets who listened carefully to God, and who looked carefully at the world around them, and said, Wait a minute here. There are things going on in this world that are not what God intends. When Mary and Elizabeth listened for God, they heard the great and powerful swooshing sounds of angels’ wings, the Holy Spirit coming upon them, overshadowing and empowering them to see the world as God sees it, and to speak and to act.

And all the world is grateful that these two kooky women, these people of faith, and hope, these attentive listeners to God, said yes.

Meister Eckhart, a popular and mystical teacher of the Middle Ages, said this about Mary: “We are all meant to be mothers of God.” To be mothers of God in the sense of being a kooky person of faith like she was. To be a person who listens closely for the swoosh of those mighty Holy Spirit wings, and who looks closely at the world around her. We are all meant to be mothers of God when we say yes to the promises God has in store for us. Mary and Elizabeth certainly saw lots of darkness and violence in the world around them – December 2012 has no corner on that! – but in spite of that, Mary and Elizabeth said yes to the goodness God put here when God created this world. We are meant to be mothers of God when we open ourselves to be changed by God, even if we only take one step at a time, not exactly sure that what God would have us do is reasonable, or socially acceptable, but we do it nonetheless. To be a mother of God is to be willing to be a kooky person of faith.

There is something curious about this Magnificat song that Mary sings. It is in the words of a young woman, talking about the promises God has made for the world, but it is spoken from the point of view of something that has already happened. God has already overthrown the mighty and given the hungry enough to eat. God has already pulled the downtrodden up and sent away the rich people, who were not willing to participate in this way that God would have the world work.

This kooky person of faith seems to think that all those things have already happened, and that the birth of the son she carries is part of this ongoing process of healing the world, of bringing it back to the world God created it to be.

What a kooky imagination this Mary has, to listen to the swooshing, swooping powerful wings of the Holy Spirit, and to begin to see the world as God sees it – to take it on faith, as it were, and to begin to live her life, now, in the real world here and now, believing it to be true.

“We are all meant to be mothers of God.” Kooky. Hopeful. Knowing that the world could be, and is, a better place, and saying yes to God, when God shows us how this could be so.

Sharing our coats, sharing our hearts

Advent 3 C

December 16, 2012

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Canticle 9: Isaiah 12:2-6

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:1-6

How hard it is today to sing “rejoice!”, as our first three lessons from the prophets Zephaniah and Isaiah, and from St. Paul’s letter to the people in Philippi, exhort us. Everyone’s hearts, since the horrific news came out on Friday morning, have been torn and tortured, our minds filled with terrible things, and our feelings angry and agitated:

What then should we do? What then should we do? Gun control? Better treatment of people with mental health? Turn our elementary schools into locked-down fortresses?

What then should we do? What then should we do? Hug our children more tightly? Praise the heroic acts of gym teachers and librarians and school psychologists? Weep? Mourn? Shout? Stay home and pull the covers over our heads? All of the above?

And is any of this an appropriate conversation to have in church?

Churches in Newtown, CT

Even though I was born in Syracuse, my mother’s family has New England roots, and several years ago she came upon a quote from the diary of one of our 19th century Peabody relatives, who had gone to hear Henry Ward Beecher – one of the great American preachers. “Politics and the pulpit don’t mix well together,” was my ancestor’s now famous (in our household at least) line in response to Beecher’s visit to his New Hampshire town. 

That remark may have signaled one of the first cracks in the non-separation of church and state in America. There was a time when politics and the pulpit were joined, when everyone who came to church understood church as so much a part of American society and American culture and the American way of life that preachers could and did combine the two. Everything fit together, reinforced each other. Maybe some of us here think we remember that time of happy union – happy for Protestants with New England roots, anyway. We are probably remembering its distant echo in the church-going 1950s – when churches like this were planted, grew and flourished in an expanding, prosperous and peaceful America.

But not only for Mr. Peabody but for many other Americans as well, what happened in church became disconnected with the travails and challenges of daily life. A survey of the current church-going habits of Americans revealed that right now 20 percent of us – fully one-fifth of all Americans – have no religious preference. Many of these people believe in God, have an active prayer life, even went to church in their younger years, but now, on Sunday morning, when we get in our cars and come here, they say, no, thanks. I’ll stay at home. I’ll go to Starbucks. I’ll go to the gym. I’ll do yoga. I’ll spend time with my children, and hug them tight, because, after all, you never know.

I think this is what the people who flocked around John the Baptist were talking about. The religious establishment of their time – the Temple and their leaders who were in the thrall to the Roman Empire – and of course the politics and economics of their day were, from their point of view, morally bankrupt. John the Baptist made sense to people for whom nothing worked. Prophets like John used to speak to the reality of real people – prophets like Isaiah and Zephaniah, and that whole host of characters we read during Advent – prophets who promise that God’s creation of abundance and mercy and peace will be restored. In the lives of the people gathering around John the Baptist, their religious leaders are paying no attention to those prophets, and so are paying no attention to the daily needs of these people, no attention to the challenges and demands of their lives. What then shall WE do, they say to John the Baptist. What then shall we do? For these people at the bottom of the social ladder, it all made sense: share your warm coats. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. It’s pretty basic. The Good News from God is pretty basic.

There are a lot of reasons why people don’t come to church, why the membership of this parish has declined in recent years. Some of those reasons have nothing to do with us: the population has shifted. Corporations who were massive employers have left the area. Sexual abuse, loss of trust, bitter fights over who is in and who is out – all of that and more are prevalent in the big society, and there are echoes of that here. Some people are just bored with the church of the 1950s, or ‘60s, or ‘70s – as lovely and attractive as we think we are -- and want nothing to do with it anymore.

Look again at the appeal of John the Baptist to the people around him. He was direct. He spoke to their reality. He did not mince words. He paid attention to them. He offered real hope that spoke to their real longings.

What do we offer today, on this Third Sunday of Advent? What do we say to our friends and neighbors who are hurting and yearning for hope? To whom are we opening our hearts, and our doors? 

It is time we took our light out from under the bushel. This is a safe, a meaningful, an important place to talk about the things that matter to us. This is a place where we share our coats and share our hearts, where we know, and where we are not shy to say, that in the face of the horror that drove that young man to kill all those innocent children, God is with us, God is with us, God is with us.

Amen.

Find the Prayers of the People from today's service, along with links to the authors of some of the prayers, at our Forming Disciples blog.

Tender Mercies

Advent 2-C                 Dec. 9, 2012

Malachi 3:1

Luke 1: 1:68-79

Philippians 1:3-11

Luke 3:1-6

We live in a time obsessed with the particular. TV news shows are on a lot at our house. Pundits, bloggers, reporters, editors, historians, analysts, you name it. At any time on any channel, frequency or URL, you can find a comment, an opinion, a fact about someone or something important, middling important or just plain gossipy. If it walks, talks, flies or misbehaves, we will soon know about it.

We think of this obsession with taking the pulse of the body politic as something modern, but look here: the Gospel of Luke is very concerned to place John the Baptist in his particular social and historical context. John the Baptist was not wandering around the Jordanian wilderness at any time; it was in the 15th year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberias, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee. Nor are we living in just any time: it’s the 4th year of the presidency of Barack Obama, the 2nd year of the Governorship of Andrew Cuomo, Joanie Mahoney is County Executive and Gladstone Adams is the bishop. The way Luke is telling this story of John the Baptist, place – and who rules that place – is crucially important. It was in THIS place at THIS time that the Word of God came to -- not just anybody, but to John son of Zechariah.

To the first readers of Luke’s Gospel, these little phrases would mean a lot. “The Word of God” comes to prophets in the Hebrew tradition. All the prophets identify the rulers whose reigns their prophecies will unseat. Remember Isaiah, to whom the word of God came “in the year that King Uzziah died.” Baruch, a scribe for the prophet Jeremiah, writes from the context of the terrible exile in Babylon. Malachi was written at the end of the exile, when Cyrus was King of Persia. Prophets come from particular times and places, and the word of God speaks to them and through them in those particularities.

Luke shows us a different picture of John the Baptist than we get in the Gospels of Matthew or Mark. There is no description of his attire, no eating of locusts and wild honey. He doesn’t even baptize Jesus in this Gospel – he has challenged Herod so much that he lands in prison before Jesus gets to the Jordan River.

But Luke is very careful to place John in history. In place of the psalm today, we read the passage from the first chapter of Luke that follows the announcement of the birth of John. This is the song of Zechariah, an elderly righteous man, “living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord.” As he serves in the temple, an angel comes to him:

“I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.”

Gabriel announces the birth of John:

“ … he will be great in the sight of the Lord … He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Zechariah was made speechless by this prophecy, and not until baby John is born does he speak, revealing some of what Gabriel had told him. This is not any child, Zechariah says; this child will be the prophet of the Most High, preparing the way of the Lord, letting the people know that God’s salvation will come, that sins will be forgiven, that by God’s tender mercies the dawn from on high will break upon us. This child, Zechariah says, will be the one to announce the Good News.

But even though this child is a New Prophet, he does not proclaim NEW news. This Good News is Old News, Zechariah says, reciting in his song all the mighty deeds of God, saving the people from their enemies and showing mercy.

That is what all this particularity is about, placing John here, in this family, under these rulers, and not just anywhere. He’s not just any righteous man: the same Word of the Lord comes to him that came to the prophets of old – the Good News he brings is the same Old Good News of the covenant made with Abraham. Those rulers might be very current in their fashions and their weaponry and their empires and their Roman names, but they are the same enemies from whom God has always rescued his people. Those representatives of the shadow of death might be unique and particular, but the words John speaks, of the dawn from on high, the light in the darkness and the tender mercy of God, are the old words, the old prophecies, the old promises of God’s love.

The wilderness itself is old and familiar, reminding the people of Israel of the very place where God first called them “My people.” Out of that old place John calls the people together again, calls them back, as the angel Gabriel promised his father he would: even the disobedient ones will come to the wisdom of the righteous. John will make them ready.

This is the Old Good News, a prophecy of restoration. John quotes the prophet Isaiah, writing about how the people of Israel will be able to return from exile to Jerusalem: the Lord will lead the way, on a path straight and smooth, only now, it’s not only to Jerusalem. It’s not only to one particular people or one particular place and time. It’s for all flesh – all of us in our particular time and our particular place – this time all of us will see just what God has in store.