Epworth United Methodist Church

Epworth United Methodist Church
Rev. David Weekley, Pastor
January 10, 2010
Isaiah 43:1-7
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

“The Sea All Around Us”

The late Rev. Laron Hall, who served as pastor at First United Methodist Church here in Portland before his death due to complications from H.I.V./AIDS in 1994, preached a sermon about Christian Baptism that I will never forget.

Two years earlier, following a Christmas Eve service, Rev. Hall had received a nasty letter from a young man who had come to that service; most likely he came knowing that Laron was ill with H.I.V.

He accused the church of being a dead church because Rev. Hall was openly gay, and because he had preached a sermon on Christmas Eve that said Christmas is God saying to everyone, “I want to be part of your life; I want to be in your life. And no matter what other people say, no matter what you say, I love you.”

The young man had a real problem with this concept of God’s grace.

Oh, he had no problem accepting this grace for himself; it was clear from his letter he believed grace applied to him and others who shared a similar view and theology.

But the young man had a real problem extending God’s grace to people this young man despised.

His thinking was that if he despised these people, then God certainly must despise them, too.

So the young visitor declared that until First United Methodist Church started pointing the finger of harsh judgment at “sinners”, it would be a dead church.

Rev. Hall said the young man ended his letter saying, “I’ll be praying for you”; to which Laron remarked, “Well, that’s good news and bad news. It’s good news to know that we’ve got someone out there praying for us. It’s bad news that he’s praying for us to fit his image.”

As Rev. Hall went on the say, for two thousand years the Christian Church has been preaching the good news, the gospel of God’s unconditional love, a love that is not choosy, but universal, a love that does not have to be earned, because if it has to be earned then it is not love.

For more than two thousand years we’ve been teaching and preaching that God loves us because we are God’s children, and because it is God’s very nature to love: this has been our message, but it is a message that still confuses and mystifies us.

It’s a message that confuses us exactly because it is such a mystery.

We cannot figure out why it should be so, or how it could be so.

After all, like that young man who wrote to Rev. Hall years ago, we know plenty of reasons why God would or should not love certain people, or certain types of people- so the idea of God’s relentless unconditional love is nearly impossible for us to comprehend.

The great Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman once directed a movie called, “The Magician.”

It’s the story of a magician travelling through Sweden in a wagon.

He does not speak, he just performs his act.

So he looms as this great, mysterious presence wherever he goes.

One day the magician and his company were invited to have dinner with the mayor of a town in which they were performing; the mayor also invited all the leading citizens of his community.

The doctor is there, the head of police, teachers and lawyers and business people were there.

They eat together, and then the magician puts on a show for them.

What follows next is remarkable as the guests react in a variety of ways to this mysterious person and performance.

Some of the guests even react violently, attacking the magician and inflicting physical harm.

Some act manipulatively, trying to get favors from the magician; others simply mock him, insult him, and have nothing to do with him.

The scientist among them is especially uneasy with the magician’s silence.

He keeps trying to engage the magician in a debate, but as he continues to refuse to speak, the scientist turns to the magician’s wife and says, “Your husband contends there is a power in this world that cannot be explained. But that would be disastrous for science if it had to accept the unexplainable, for if there is the unexplainable then we would have to reckon with the possibility of God.”

Well, grace is exactly this kind of mystery: the unconditional love of God is unexplainable.

Some people even find the idea of God’s unconditional love offensive at times, especially perhaps when considered available to people whom we do not like or approve!

Still today we hear two Scriptures that declare this very grace of God, this unconditional love as God calls us all by name and offers all of us love through Jesus the Christ.

Jesus’ baptism was an epiphany, a divine revelation that tells us who Jesus is and what he is here for; it is an act that tells us who God is and what God is up to.

Jesus is baptized, and then the heavens open, the door into sacred mystery swings open, and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus “like a dove.”

Then a voice came from heaven, “You are my son, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Jesus’ baptism really doesn’t explain much; the mystery is still there.

It simply makes the mystery known, telling us that Jesus was loved, and was given power by God to live out his identity.

This is a good day for us to remember our own baptism as well; to recall to mind that we have been baptized, and to consider what God was doing and saying as we were.

The Church has baptized people from its very beginning; doing it because Jesus told us to go into the world to make disciples, baptizing them as a public declaration of the mysterious love of God.

In the beginning, only adults were baptized and only believers who had studies the teachings of Jesus.

For some time that seemed like the best way to proceed: first you came to believe certain doctrines, specific creeds; you came to a certain understanding, and then you were baptized.

The order was: first you found God through Jesus, then you were baptized.

But soon after early New Testament times, the Church realized it had been missing the whole truth and point of baptism.

By limiting baptism to indoctrinated adults, it was making the grace and love of God a prize to be earned, a gift for some, but not for others.

It was actually attempting to make the mystery of God and God’s calling each of us by name into something we could explain and manage ourselves, i.e. when you understood and loved God, that’s when God would love and know you.

So some in the Church declared that God is not like that at all.

God’s love is not conditional; it’s a given.

God’s love is there first; John Wesley named this, prevenient grace.

That’s why many churches began baptizing babies, because this is what the love of God is like: it is ours from the very beginning.

It is ours even if we don’t know God.

Baptizing babies was a very symbolic way of proclaiming the sacred mystery of God’s love and grace.

Of course some still argue about all of this, and there are some churches that say that unless you know what’s going on it’s a meaningless ritual.

But that is saying that it’s as if our human understanding and awareness are what activates God’s love and grace; and that is like saying God’s love is conditional!

Sometimes people come to me and tell me they want to be baptized again, that they were baptized as infants but don’t remember it and now they’ve had a spiritual experience or awakening and so they want to be re-baptized.

They tell me they were not really aware of anything when they were baptized, and it was not something they chose.

And I tell them that that is exactly the point: your baptism is a declaration that God loved you and called you by name before you ever knew it, before you had the sense to know or to choose it; God loved you before you understood or even felt it.

As Rev. Laron Hall put it, “Before you prized God, God prized you. And even when you do not prize God, God prizes you. You are precious in God’s sight. And it isn’t just baptism that makes it so, just as it wasn’t the baptism of Jesus that made him God’s beloved. Baptism is a way of proclaiming who we are, whose we are.”

Baptism doesn’t change God’s opinion of us, of course, but there is something very important that does happen in baptism, that did happen when we were baptized.

God not only told us who we were, told the world who we are, but God also claimed us for a special purpose, claimed us for a special mission.

In baptism we are called to live as God’s children, to live into all that are called to become, to allow God’s love to shape the way we live.

This is the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism: God at work in us.

I know what some of you are thinking.

No infant can possibly know that God has claimed them and given them a special purpose; and this is true.

That’s the job of parents, and the task of the Christian community.

We’re the ones who need to say to those children and even the adults who come to baptism and say, “You know, you are really something special; that’s what God says about you. You have a special name, a calling and a sacred purpose.”

It’s a little bit like a story I heard about a little boy in Alabama who had no shoes and was standing on a grate one winter day trying to warm his feet.

A woman came along, and her heart went out to this child, and she said to him, “Where are your shoes?”

And the boy told her he had no shoes.

SO the woman took the child to a nearby department store and bought him a pair of shoes, and some socks and a sweater.

As they were coming out of the store the little boy was so excited to show his family what he had gotten he started to run off down the street.

But all of a sudden he stopped, turned around and walked back to the woman.

He thanked her, and then he said, “Could I ask you a question? Ma’am are you God?”

The woman just laughed and said, “Oh, no, I’m just one of God’s children.”

The boy said, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew you were related!”

Baptism tells us who, and whose we are- beloved children of God.

How or why it should be so is a mystery, and some people try to dispute and deny it.

But Baptism is God’s word on the subject.

You are God’s son and God’s daughter, whether you declare it or even accept it; this is just the way it is.

The Scriptures say that, sooner or later, we will all know this as we return to the One who loves us and calls us by name.

There are many people in community right now who are ill, some of them may be dying.

Rather than despair, this is the time for us all to grasp the hope that is ours in Jesus our Christ.

Baptism is a declaration that we belong to God, whether in this life, or in the life eternal, we belong to God, and it is God to whom our spirits return when life here ends.

In her book, “The Sea Around Us” Rachel Carson writes, “For the sea lies all about us. The commerce of all lands must cross it. The very winds that move over the lands have been cradled in its vast expanse and seek ever to return to it. The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers. In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives, in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea- to Oceans, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.”

We believe that Jesus our Christ is our beginning and our end; as Scripture puts it, our Alpha and Omega.

So remember your baptism; remember, and be thankful. Amen.