Sermon For September 19, 1999
Baptism
HEBREW TESTAMENT:
People of faith have struggled with a difficult question for thousands of years. Even before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, folks were asking the question, “Is the God that we worship a God of judgment and wrath, or is God a God of love and acceptance? That is a tough question, but it is an important question. Do we live as people of faith so that we won’t get punished by this God of judgment? Or do we live as people of faith because we have been nurtured by the love of a caring God? It has been debated back and forth. It is a subtle tension sometimes, and an open conflict other times. Who is this God and what is this God like? If we turn to the record of faith, if we turn to our Bible, we can start out with a view of God as good in the very first chapter. The description of Creation says that, “God created and it was good.” God created the skies, the earth, the plants, the animals and humans, and everything was good. We can skip on over to Paul, in the New Testament, and hear his interpretation of Christianity. Paul says, talking about humans, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” If we fill in the pieces in between, we can find God coming in with support for the people of Israel, but condemning those who are outside of the faith. Or when the Israelites themselves turned their backs on God, coming down with judgment and revenge on God’s own people. You can go to the New Testament and find places where Jesus seems to be saying that some will be saved and that some will be damned. “The way is narrow, the gate is difficult.” “It’s easier for the camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.” At the same time Jesus calls on us to love each and every one, reminds us that God loves us just as we are. The Bible itself ends with a confused message. The book of Revelation, full of horror, terror, blood, pain, suffering, but also a promise that God will ultimately be victorious. God’s love will draw people of all nations into the Creator.
What do we do as people of faith? There are those who continually struggle with all of these issues. Judgement and wrath, acceptance and forgiveness. When I was a student minister in North Dakota, the lectionary called for a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. As I read through I said, “Well, it would be interesting to hear all of the Sermon on the Mount at one time.” So instead of preaching a sermon, I read the whole thing out-loud. Jesus’ words, probably from different times, gathered together in the gospel of Matthew, but nonetheless presented in our faith book as one complete piece. I read through all of the commands and the challenges. Through Jesus’ words that call on us to turn our other cheek if we are slapped by someone. Jesus reminded that if someone asks for our coat to give them our shirt too. If someone asks us to walk one mile, to walk a second mile. To not only love our friends, because everyone can love friends, but to love our enemies as ourselves. Difficult, challenging words, part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. When I told my internship supervisor and his wife what I had done that Sunday morning, they were aghast. They said, “These people in small towns of North Dakota already have more than enough guilt for their lifetime. They’re concerned that they haven’t done right by their children. They haven’t done right by their husband or wife. They’re worried that they haven’t done a good enough job. They feel bad that they don’t do enough to reach out to help others in need. They’ve already got a healthy dose of conscience, and they don’t need you to stand up in front of them and tell them how bad they are.”
I thought about all of that as I looked at the scripture passages for today. The Lectionary offers us the story of the people of Israel on the Sinai Peninsula, making their way from Egypt to the promised land. That is the story that we have been following all the way through the summer. The last couple of weeks we have celebrated Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea, and today we find the people out of the desert, complaining. They’re saying, “We could have died in Egypt. We didn’t have to come out here to the desert to die, to starve to death. At least we had some food to eat. We were slaves, but we had food.” The faith message that comes through is that if you will turn your problems over to God, God will provide. That is not something that we are very comfortable with. But that is the faith message. God will provide what we need. Maybe not what we want, but God will provide what we need. In this passage from the book of Exodus, we have a very strong unconditional love message. God will take care of things. We’ll be safe.
Because Noah is being baptized today, I thought it would be nice to also share some of those Scripture passages about the flood and the ark. It’s a long story. I chose a piece from the beginning and a piece from the end. As you get passed the stuffed animals on the wooden ark, the cute smiley faces of the chimpanzees, and think about the story, even though it ends with this rainbow and God’s promise never to make a flood cover the earth again, the message is a very strong message of judgement. If you are on the wrong side of God, it’s all over for you. It may not be a
flood, but one way or another you are going to get yours, and there is only salvation for a few of you. It’s a pretty tough message. Salvation for a few. In fact the Scripture says that Noah was deemed righteous by God, but it still wasn’t clear what it was that he did other than agree to build the Ark and gather the animals on board.
So we have a message about the people on the Sinai with manna raining down from heaven and quail dropping dead fully plucked into the pots. Contrasted with the message of God’s judgement over 99.98% of the earth. What do we do with all of that? There are plenty of Christians that find it easiest to focus on judgement. They say that God has some expectations. If we do what God wants us to then we’ll be saved and if we don’t, it’s the deep water for us. So you can go to churches today and the minister will tell you that if you are not saved by Jesus Christ, you are going to hell. If you are not saved in a particular way, with a particular formula, you are going to hell. There are people of faith from other churches that don’t get that message, but sit in the pews overcome by guilt about the failings of their lives. There are people who believe that without God’s love they’re not going to make it, and even then it’s questionable. The message, I think that most of us really need, is the message of unconditional love. It’s not to say that we can forget about being judged, or that we don’t need to be challenged from time to time. That we don’t need to be told that we are in the top 20% or 10% of the world in terms of money and education and life style. We need to be reminded about those things, because those things are critical. But more than that we need to be reminded that God love us just as we are, because most of us live our lives carrying the burden of our failures. We live our lives being told by people what we should not do and why we aren’t right. Why we are unlovable and unattractive and not talented and pretty mediocre. We carry that burden with us.
How does that come out in the life of a congregation? Most congregations think that when you gather together you need to be pretty darn serious, because you are here for serious business, that is keeping out of the fires. So when you are here you had better sit straight. You had better try to keep awake. You make sure you put money into the plate. If you have kids with you, you had better shush them, and you had better have a straight mouth on your face. What if we came to worship with the attitude that we are coming here to receive God’s unconditional love? Would you sit ramrod straight. Would we be shushing the children? Or would we be laughing and sharing stories and spreading love out in all directions, a kind of an energy flow filling up the room. Would we be applauding if we were touched by something? Celebrating God’s love here in this place? I think the best way to come to worship is with an attitude of joy. To come here celebrating the energy and enthusiasm of the children. To come here reminding each other always of what it means to be loved by God. What happens in the world when we don’t do those things. What happens when we are afraid of what somebody else is going to think when we are embarrassed? In my first congregation, I knew an older man named Warren. Warren was treated his whole life as though he was retarded, and as he grew older he became more and more difficult to handle. Later in his life people discovered what the problem was. Warren was very hard of hearing. He had never been diagnosed as being hard of hearing. He was treated his whole life as if he were not smart. People believed he couldn’t do anything. The problem was when people talked to him, he didn’t know what was going on because he couldn’t hear them. His whole life would have been different if he would have been diagnosed correctly. His life would have been different if he would have been appreciated for his abilities. The issue of being appreciated for you abilities, or encouraged to develop those things which reside deep within each and every one of us, is an interesting topic. Some of you know that our oldest son Matthew graduated from college this Spring, and decided that what he wanted to do was to find some excitement, some challenge, see the world and learn things. He has decided to enlist in the Marines as a language specialist. In another month he will be going to boot camp, which he is looking forward to despite all of the horror stories. He will then go to Monterey for language training. I read an article that a friend gave us from the Harvard Business Review, talking about companies training their employees. It said that most companies will gather the cream of the crop, focus on those and push everyone else off to the side to do all of the dirty work, the grunt work that has to be done. This article held up the Marines as a model of the right way to train and motivate people. People are encouraged to belong, so their heads are shaved, making them all look the same. They march together. They chant together. They depend on each other because they know that they have to if they are in battle. When they are in battle, they have to know that if they are injured their buddies will come back for them. If one of their buddies is injured, they know that they are going to go back for them. One of the extremely impressive things is that when those companies take the cream of the crop and push the rest aside, the Marines do exactly the opposite. At boot camp every single recruit is treated as a leader. Every single recruit is trained as if that individual is going to have to take over. So each one has a turn at leading the platoon. Again, this is so that if they find themselves in battle, and the commanding officer is killed, and the next, and the next and the next, then whoever is left will be able to step up and take command and provide leadership.
What would it be like in life if we treated each person as if they were talented? Each person as if they were worthwhile? Each person as if they were loved? What if we encouraged the best to come out of them, rather than telling them who they aren’t and what they can’t do, and why they are wrong.
Barbara Thomas, a member of our congregation for years, was always told by her family that she couldn’t sing. At about the age of sixty, Barbara began to write poetry. In her writing she found a way to express things that she had not had a way to express before. She said one of the comments that she frequently heard form people was that her poetry had music to it. The way the words rolled along sang to people. A couple of years ago, I asked Barbara to do a dramatic reading for worship, The Woman at the Well. According to the script, the woman sang a little song. When Barbara read that, she was really intimidated, but she decided to take up the challenge. She went to talk to a friend of hers, who was a voice teacher, and worked with the friend to develop a simple song. When she did the dramatic reading, she sang the song. Another step taken down the road. She decided, not only did she have music in her heart and in her words, but she had music in her voice also. That year she joined the church choir where she continues singing today. This year she auditioned and began singing with the Kirkland Choral Arts Society. Now, how many of you were told in your life that you couldn’t sing? You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket? You were being lied to. You were being judged by someone who probably also worshiped a judging and vengeful God. If you had been nurtured by people of a loving God, you would be singing out louder in worship, singing in the choir, and enthusiastically lifting your voice even when we have a brand new hymn to sing.
There are other stories in much the same vein. This week I dropped off the “Prayer from the Ark” for Keenan Nolan. (Michael, I did ask Jan and Keenan if I could share this story, they said it was OK.) I dropped off the prayer for Keenan, and Michael, his dad, said, “Would you like to see Keenan’s invention?” I said, “Sure.” We went up to the bathroom and there was Keenan’s answer to turning on the lights and the fan while you were in the bathroom, seated on the toilet when you had forgotten to do it on you way in. OK? Forgotten to do it on the way in. There were some pulleys rigged up above the toilet, and over in the corner by the medicine cabinet, there were two lines that went up to the pulley, over, across and down, wrapped around a brick. The brick was right below the light switch. Now, not the inventor or the father, but the little brother, Brian said, “I’ll demonstrate this for you.” Brian explained, “If you pull this one, the brick tilts up this way and turns on the light. If you pull this one, the brick tilts this way and turns on the fan. Then if you lift the brick up above the switches and let it down, it turns both of them off.” OK? So now not only is this a fantastic invention that all of you better buy stock in quite quickly, but it’s an example of parents who are willing to approach their children, not as a judgmental and vengeful God, but as a loving and nurturing God. Instead of saying, “No, that is a stupid idea. You’re not putting any holes in my ceiling. Why don’t you just get up and turn on the light.” They said, “OK, let’s try this out and see how it works.”
What a fantastic way to approach life. With an openness to new things. With an appreciation, with affirmation, with encouragement, with love. One of the things that distressed me last week when we had a congregational vote on the tile project for the wall to the south of the building, was that someone spoke up and said, “I don’t think we should have kindergarten art on the wall. We don’t want our amateur efforts to be up there on the wall for everybody to see.” Now people have different tastes, and I understand that people have a right to decide what they think is beautiful, and what they think is not beautiful, but that statement says more than taste. That statement says that people are to be judged, and there are only a few that are worthy of being artists. All the rest better just forget it. You have been lied to again, because that is not true. Everyone is an artist. Everyone is a singer. Everyone is a poet. Everyone is a gardener. Everyone is a cook. If we have been told that we can’t do those things, of course we can’t do those things. If we have not put in the effort necessary, maybe we can’t do it to our satisfaction. But to be told that God created you with no abilities. To be told that God created you with no worth. To be told that you are judged and you better be careful or you’re going to burn, is wrong. God loves us, each as we are, loves us completely, wants the best for us. Wants us to live life abundantly. We need to be challenged from time to time, but much more than that, we need to be loved. So we come here to this place and we share God’s love with each other. For that I give great thanks. Amen.