2-17-19
Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our
Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit Amen.
On this day, in the middle of our Season of Baptism we
welcomed Michael into Family of God, and also into the ENTIRE family
of God in all of space and time. We welcomed him into the community of all
faithful people who have gone on before, and into the community of Christ which
makes us one.
But little Michael was born into an imperfect and unhappy
world. I’m sure that if Michael's parents would have had a say in what kind of
environment their son would grow up in, this would not have been their first
choice. Michael is held captive by this world, by his own body’s limitations, bound
by time, whose steady march will cause both joy and pain in his life. His
world, his peers, his friends, his family, even his body will betray her
someday. But through his baptism, God has promised to never leave his side.
The Bible is brimming with stories where God has
delivered on this promise in both small and big ways…. Often involving water in
some way. When God sent a flood to the whole world, God saved Noah and his
family, and promised to never do it again.
When the enslaved Israelites cried out under their heavy
chains, God heard them, liberated them, and brought them to safety through the waters
of the Red Sea.
When the prophet Jonah lamented his lot in the belly of
that big fish, God heard him too from under the waters.
In the Jordan River, God revealed to all of creation that
Jesus is God’s beloved son, sent to save us.
And God is here with us now and is especially present in
this holy moment we call baptism. When the waters were poured over Michael’s
head, his old self: bound by the limitations and constraints of this world, was
washed away. He then rose up the waters as a new person, claimed by God as a beloved
child, no longer held captive by the chains of the world he has been born into.
The forces of evil in this world was rejected and sent packing. The traps,
chains, shackles, and locks of the world will be broken open. Michael is now
free. But free to do what? That’s what our next letter will tell us.
We are nearly to the end of our series on baptism, and
have gotten all the way to S, which stands for Serve. In our Baptisms, we are Born
Anew, Affirmed by God, Empowered by the Holy Spirit, called to
trust God and, today with S, serve our neighbor. You’ll have to come
back next week to find out what the last letter stands for!
Martin Luther was reputed to have said something like, “God
does not need our good works…. but our neighbor does” (Wingren, Luther
on Vocation, 10). And so, we serve our neighbors, not because we need
to prove our worth, or earn our way into eternal life, but because our neighbors
need us, and Jesus himself modeled
this as a way of life.
This is the year we hear from the Gospel of Luke, and you
may have been surprised at how familiar this passage feels. It SOUNDS a LOT
like the part of the Sermon on the Mount we call the Beatitudes from the Gospel
of Matthew. Similar… but just a little bit off. For one thing, Jesus HERE is
speaking on a plain, not from a
mountain … “Jesus came down with
them….to a level place…. And Jesus looked up at his disciples” when he started speaking.
The next thing you might have noticed is that there are
some WOES that go along with the blessings… and even these blessings looked a
bit different. Blessed are the poor. Full Stop. Not poor in spirit, like in
Matthew. And blessed are the hungry. Full Stop. Not those who hunger and thirst
for righteousness. In Luke, Jesus is blessing those who work 3 part-time jobs
and still can’t afford health care. Blessed are the people who are hungry
because their SNAP benefits were withheld because of the government shutdown. Jesus
is saying, blessed are the ACTUAL poor and the ACTUAL hungry.
For those who were listening, this was bonkers! Their
minds were exploding. Their whole lives, they were told, that the RICH, the powerful, the nobility, and the insiders
were blessed.
The world was clearly divided into Haves and Have Notes, into Blessed and
Blessed-Nots. And the people listening were clearly the Blessed Nots – the
sick, the foreigners, the demon-possessed, those in needing to hear the good
news… plus Jesus’ own inner circle, filled with rough-neck fishermen, a despised
tax collector, a political extremist, and the man who would one day betray him
to his death. All being healed, and all listening to a radical message of
reversal and inclusion, when the rest of the world excludes clearly excluded
them.
What Jesus has listed in his Woes, clearly seem to be
blessings by the rest of the world’s standards. Really, come on… who WOULDN’T
WANT to be rich instead of poor, be full instead of hungry, laugh instead of
weep, and have people speak well of you? But what if all these things do not
actually give us life… but instead give
us death. What if we have been sneakily trapped by them, tricked into thinking
these things will make us secure and keep us comfortable? Because what if all
these things actually BLIND us and BIND us? – BLIND us to God’s presence, and BIND
us into being possessed BY them.
For all our seeking after security, we are still
insecure. For all our comfort in our possessions, we may find they possess us.
Earlier in today’s service, during Michael’s baptism, we
“renounced” a few things before we said the Apostles Creed together. We
renounced - or turned our back on - the forces in the world that defy God,
rebel against God, and draw us from God. It’s a neat throwback to ancient
rituals of exorcism, where harmful evil spirits were cast out, and the person
suffering was freed.
For most of us, we are not possessed by actual evil
spirits. Instead, we are possessed by institutions that give benefits to some
and harms others. Many of us are possessed by the demons of fear, white
privilege, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, agism, able-ism, shame, violence, xenophobia,
and others. These demons cause us to act in ways that are harmful to the body
of Christ.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, ““As long as there
is poverty in the world, I can never be rich… as long as diseases are rampant …
I can never be totally healthy.... I can never be what I ought to be until you
are what you ought to be…” As we heard
from earlier in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, if one part of the Body of
Christ suffers, we all do. When one of us is denied our human dignity, we all
are.
We have been baptized into the Body of Christ – freed
from the demons of fear and the powers of the world which seek to keep us
bound. We have been freed from the belief that there is a finite amount of
God’s love and grace in the world. We have been freed to serve our neighbor who
might be struggling with poverty, hunger, and injustice.
We can serve our neighbor by giving away the power we HAVE
been given – or use that power to lift those who have been dis-empowered. We can
serve our neighbors by giving them coats in the winter, and also by asking why
some people can’t afford such a basic need. We can serve our neighbor by
feeding them, and also by advocating for them so they no longer struggle to
afford food. We can serve our neighbor by comforting those who weep, and also
by removing the stigma of mental illness.
To be clear, We don’t serve others because they have NOT
been blessed by God … we’re doing it because they HAVE. But because all of us
have been created by a loving God. We are blessed because we are loved. And woe
to any of us who forget that – about other people, AND about ourselves. Thanks
be to God. Amen.
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