The Church is All Wet
November 15, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Hebrews 13:1-8
Two weeks ago yesterday was All Saints’ Day – I was in Colombia. It was also the 11th anniversary of my ordination as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Being a minister has profoundly changed my life – no question about it. The joy I have in my calling is huge – I love my work, I love this congregation. Being a minister energizes and stretches me like nothing in my life has, with the possible exception of being a mother. Yet, a more important day than my ordination 11 years ago was my baptism, 38 years ago. I was not baptized as an infant, but as a fourteen year old. After years of going to church and Sunday School, and during a time when I didn’t feel very lovable, I came to understand that God loved me, and that realization changed my life more fundamentally than my ordination would years later. Baptism is the primary vocational event for Christians.
The Worship Committee has asked me to preach and teach adult ed on Baptism and Communion, so today’s sermon, “The Church Is All Wet” is about Baptism, and next week’s sermon “The Church Is Out to Lunch” is about Communion; and today, I’ll be teaching an adult education class from 11-12 about both sacraments.
In most Protestant denominations, baptism and communion are both sacraments. Catholics celebrate 7 sacraments: baptism, communion, confirmation, confession (now called the sacrament of reconciliation), ordination, marriage, and anointing (which used to be called last rites). Presbyterians do most of these other things, but we don’t count them as sacraments: we confess our sins each week, we have confirmation, we do marriages, we ordain not only clergy but our church elders and deacons, and sometimes, we even do anointing. We just don’t call these sacraments. So what are sacraments? It can be helpful to think of a sacrament as a “sacred moment” – something through which we come to a special experience of God.
In that sense there could be thousands of sacraments -- perhaps you experienced the miracle of God in the birth of your child -- in that sense it was a sacrament for you. Perhaps growing up you experienced the love of God through sharing your family stories together and realizing how God had gifted you with each other -- so storytelling was sacramental for your family. Perhaps springtime is a season that has become sacramental to you -- you experience God calling you from death to life through your experience of new life in nature. In earlier times, people were more comfortable identifying God in their everyday experiences than we are in our modern, secularized world. St. Augustine had a list of 304 sacraments. In the twelfth century, in an effort to bring uniformity and order, and in an effort to make sure that the sacraments weren’t trivialized, the Catholic church defined the seven sacraments I listed earlier. And during the Reformation, as Protestants were distinguishing themselves from the Catholic Church, and what they had come to understand as a church hierarchy out of control, Protestants limited the sacraments to just baptism and communion.
A traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” The outward sign is water, or bread and wine -- it is physical and can be perceived by the senses. The inward part is spiritual -- it is both a sign of God’s grace, and an actual means of experiencing God’s grace. Remember, the word grace is merely a word that describes God taking the initiative to reach out to us. It is not merely a symbol -- through it we actually experience the love of God. But it is only effective with a response of faith -- there is mutuality to sacraments: we act and God acts. We act in baptism, and our actions are both outward -- we physically experience the water, and inward -- we respond in faith to God’s claim on us. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff expresses it this way “A sacrament is a form of expressing dialogue with God. There are two sides or movements to this expression. In and through a sacrament, human beings express themselves to God. They worship and glorify God as well as asking for life and forgiveness. God, too, engages in self-expression through a sacrament, offering human beings love, forgiveness and life. If a sacrament is not an expression of faith, it has degenerated into mere magic and ritualism.” Someone might ask, then how can we baptize babies? We baptize babies because of a few reasons. The first is that in the Bible infants or children were baptized, and since we base the sacraments on the Bible, it would seem odd to restrict baptism in a way that didn’t happen there.
But there is a second, more important reason that we baptize babies, and that is because we recognize that God loves us before we are even able to respond. Our love for God is a response to God’s love for us. Although I mentioned that my own baptism occurred shortly after I came to understand that God loved me, I certainly didn’t understand that as well then as I do now – we recognize that our faith and love is a response to God’s prior action in our lives. A liturgy portion I use from the Church of Scotland during infant baptisms underscores this. We say to the baby, “For you Jesus Christ came into the world: for you he lived and showed God's love…for you he triumphed over death and rose in newness of life; for you he ascended to reign at God's right hand. All this he did for you, child, though you do not know it yet. And so the word of Scripture is fulfilled: “We love because God loved us first.”
As I was thinking about preaching on baptism, I ended up choosing two scriptures that, while they don’t actually discuss baptism, seem to me to illustrate well two of the essential dimensions of baptism.
The first of these is the dimension that is illustrated in the Joshua passage. Joshua became the leader of the Hebrew people after the death of Moses. It was under his leadership that they entered the Promised Land. And they have moved into the Promised Land when he is addressing them in the reading that Leslie read. And Joshua challenges the people to take a stand, saying, “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
This is an affiliative dimension. In baptism, we choose whom we will serve. In the baptism liturgy, the person to be baptized, or the parents are asked to make declarations of faith – we ask whether people turn away from evil, turn to Jesus, and will follow as a disciple of Jesus. We say the Apostles Creed. Having said that, it’s probably also important to say that we don’t require that everyone has the exact same understanding of Jesus. We don’t expect everyone to believe exactly the same things. After all, many of us find our faith growing and changing over the years – we believe differently at different times in our lives. And our church has room for people to understand God, and Jesus, and themselves as disciples in different ways from one another. But a kind of bottom line for Christians, and Presbyterians are Christians, is that we ought to be able to be comfortable describing ourselves as disciples of Jesus, in one way or another. So baptism is an affiliative statement – we are saying that we want to follow Jesus. And that will have certain ethical implications for us – we want to be people who love, we want to be people who reach out to others. Actually, our second reading had a good deal of important ethical advice which is all appropriate for Christians. But that’s not why I chose that reading.
The other dimension I want to highlight this morning may be more challenging for some of us. And that is, in baptism there is also a receptive dimension. The anonymous writer of the letter to the Hebrews said in the second verse, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” He was referring to a wonderful story from Genesis in which 3 strangers come to visit Abram and Sarai, who provide lovely hospitality for them, cooking a hot meal, and offering sweets as well. And it turns out that these are divine visitors, who speak God’s word to Abram about the child that will come to him and Sarai, even though they are both quite elderly at the time. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
In the receptive dimension of baptism, we recognize that God is active in the world, and active in our lives, and we are choosing to welcome God’s presence in our lives. We are acknowledging that there is more going on in life than we ourselves initiate. God and the people of God are part of who we are. We are not merely our own – in God we find out who we are, and whose we are. This receptive dimension of baptism is a fundamental stance of humility as well. We are acknowledging that in our own lives, we have neither the first nor the last word. It is a declaration of Copernican proportions, and the comparison is apt. Copernicus discovered that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system. We are not the center of the universe. This receptive dimension of baptism says that we are not the be-all and end-all of our own being.
And it is not only a stance of humility, it is a stance of delight, and openness, a stance that welcomes surprise and changed plans – it is the dimension that keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. How else can we commit to not being in charge of our lives?
The receptive dimension of faith recognizes that God might lead us where we would not choose to go. The receptive dimension recognizes that God is generous, and that God’s abundant world includes beauty and laughter, delight and surprise. The receptive dimension keeps faith from being grim, and keeps faithful people from being boring people. We don’t just follow rules, we follow a living God – and we follow this God together.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin religere which means ‘to bind’ and some people think of religion as a series of rules and barriers, of shalt nots, and ‘don’t ever think or say’ – a negative, grim, march through virtuous living. What a crock. Such an approach misses the essential joy, the delight, the serendipity of our life in God, – and that the way we are bound is not to some rule list, but to each other, and to the God in whom we are part of each other. Jesus was criticized for partying too much. God isn’t scolding – God is inviting us. Ours is a life of vital and zestful relationships – relationships not built on rules, but on trust and covenant. The God who has freely bound herself to us, pours his love into us, and calls us into community. The God in whose name we baptize: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is a community of love that is dynamic, lively and mutual. That is the kind of community that the church is called to be.
Baptism asks a response from each of us, and from the whole church – for in each baptism, the congregation also makes promises. We promise to nurture the baptized in the knowledge and love of God. It is the only promise we are asked to make in church, except at our own baptism. It is a promise of connection and accountability to one another.
We open ourselves both to God and to the people of God. Baptism is not merely an individual act. We don’t do private baptisms. And we don’t baptize without bringing someone into membership in a congregation. Baptism isn’t only about some abstract connection to an idea of the people of God – baptism is a connection with the real, live, irritating, blessed, inspiring, annoying, amazing particular community of the church. We can’t baptize an infant unless one parent is a member of a church. Baptism is less about an individual than it is about creating the Beloved Community. And in the Reformed Tradition, the Community is the Priesthood of all Believers. We are all called, all claimed by God, all part of the Mission of God. Baptism is a beginning – in the ancient churches, the font was at the doorway, because it was through baptism that one entered the community of the church and the life of discipleship.
And this is the really significant piece about baptism – it should lead us, every day, to ask “What next?” Because Christianity is not just a body of belief – it is a way of life. The early Christians were called People of The Way. This is why we are teaching Sunday School as a practice-based curriculum – it’s not just about facts, or what we believe, it’s about what we do, how we live: caring for creation, being stewards, worshipping, praying, enjoying each other, seeking justice, welcoming the stranger, welcoming God into our lives, and knowing that our lives are part of God’s mission.
I went to the Wisconsin Council of Churches Non-Violence Conference on Friday and heard an amazing speaker, Ched Myers, who was sharing some of his work looking at the Gospel of Mark – he studied the social, cultural, political and religious context of Jesus, and learned that there were political implications of much of what Jesus said and did, real-life implications that were obvious to people at the time, but because we don’t understand the context, are not obvious to us. And in our context, there are real-life implications of following Jesus. Sacraments use real elements – bread, wine or juice, water – because being disciples occurs in our real lives.
At the conference, Ched said something that really connects to baptism and the life of discipleship. He said, “Nothing we do is too small and nothing we do is too large, given what we’re up against in this world. If we feel like we’re being heroic, we should get over that; if we’re just doing a little bit, we need to ask: what is the growing edge – for me, my household, my faith community, my denomination? …The question is always: what’s next?” Baptism is the first step, the rest of our lives as baptized people is asking and living into, “what’s next?” Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; Hebrews 13:1-8
Two weeks ago yesterday was All Saints’ Day – I was in Colombia. It was also the 11th anniversary of my ordination as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Being a minister has profoundly changed my life – no question about it. The joy I have in my calling is huge – I love my work, I love this congregation. Being a minister energizes and stretches me like nothing in my life has, with the possible exception of being a mother. Yet, a more important day than my ordination 11 years ago was my baptism, 38 years ago. I was not baptized as an infant, but as a fourteen year old. After years of going to church and Sunday School, and during a time when I didn’t feel very lovable, I came to understand that God loved me, and that realization changed my life more fundamentally than my ordination would years later. Baptism is the primary vocational event for Christians.
The Worship Committee has asked me to preach and teach adult ed on Baptism and Communion, so today’s sermon, “The Church Is All Wet” is about Baptism, and next week’s sermon “The Church Is Out to Lunch” is about Communion; and today, I’ll be teaching an adult education class from 11-12 about both sacraments.
In most Protestant denominations, baptism and communion are both sacraments. Catholics celebrate 7 sacraments: baptism, communion, confirmation, confession (now called the sacrament of reconciliation), ordination, marriage, and anointing (which used to be called last rites). Presbyterians do most of these other things, but we don’t count them as sacraments: we confess our sins each week, we have confirmation, we do marriages, we ordain not only clergy but our church elders and deacons, and sometimes, we even do anointing. We just don’t call these sacraments. So what are sacraments? It can be helpful to think of a sacrament as a “sacred moment” – something through which we come to a special experience of God.
In that sense there could be thousands of sacraments -- perhaps you experienced the miracle of God in the birth of your child -- in that sense it was a sacrament for you. Perhaps growing up you experienced the love of God through sharing your family stories together and realizing how God had gifted you with each other -- so storytelling was sacramental for your family. Perhaps springtime is a season that has become sacramental to you -- you experience God calling you from death to life through your experience of new life in nature. In earlier times, people were more comfortable identifying God in their everyday experiences than we are in our modern, secularized world. St. Augustine had a list of 304 sacraments. In the twelfth century, in an effort to bring uniformity and order, and in an effort to make sure that the sacraments weren’t trivialized, the Catholic church defined the seven sacraments I listed earlier. And during the Reformation, as Protestants were distinguishing themselves from the Catholic Church, and what they had come to understand as a church hierarchy out of control, Protestants limited the sacraments to just baptism and communion.
A traditional definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” The outward sign is water, or bread and wine -- it is physical and can be perceived by the senses. The inward part is spiritual -- it is both a sign of God’s grace, and an actual means of experiencing God’s grace. Remember, the word grace is merely a word that describes God taking the initiative to reach out to us. It is not merely a symbol -- through it we actually experience the love of God. But it is only effective with a response of faith -- there is mutuality to sacraments: we act and God acts. We act in baptism, and our actions are both outward -- we physically experience the water, and inward -- we respond in faith to God’s claim on us. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff expresses it this way “A sacrament is a form of expressing dialogue with God. There are two sides or movements to this expression. In and through a sacrament, human beings express themselves to God. They worship and glorify God as well as asking for life and forgiveness. God, too, engages in self-expression through a sacrament, offering human beings love, forgiveness and life. If a sacrament is not an expression of faith, it has degenerated into mere magic and ritualism.” Someone might ask, then how can we baptize babies? We baptize babies because of a few reasons. The first is that in the Bible infants or children were baptized, and since we base the sacraments on the Bible, it would seem odd to restrict baptism in a way that didn’t happen there.
But there is a second, more important reason that we baptize babies, and that is because we recognize that God loves us before we are even able to respond. Our love for God is a response to God’s love for us. Although I mentioned that my own baptism occurred shortly after I came to understand that God loved me, I certainly didn’t understand that as well then as I do now – we recognize that our faith and love is a response to God’s prior action in our lives. A liturgy portion I use from the Church of Scotland during infant baptisms underscores this. We say to the baby, “For you Jesus Christ came into the world: for you he lived and showed God's love…for you he triumphed over death and rose in newness of life; for you he ascended to reign at God's right hand. All this he did for you, child, though you do not know it yet. And so the word of Scripture is fulfilled: “We love because God loved us first.”
As I was thinking about preaching on baptism, I ended up choosing two scriptures that, while they don’t actually discuss baptism, seem to me to illustrate well two of the essential dimensions of baptism.
The first of these is the dimension that is illustrated in the Joshua passage. Joshua became the leader of the Hebrew people after the death of Moses. It was under his leadership that they entered the Promised Land. And they have moved into the Promised Land when he is addressing them in the reading that Leslie read. And Joshua challenges the people to take a stand, saying, “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
This is an affiliative dimension. In baptism, we choose whom we will serve. In the baptism liturgy, the person to be baptized, or the parents are asked to make declarations of faith – we ask whether people turn away from evil, turn to Jesus, and will follow as a disciple of Jesus. We say the Apostles Creed. Having said that, it’s probably also important to say that we don’t require that everyone has the exact same understanding of Jesus. We don’t expect everyone to believe exactly the same things. After all, many of us find our faith growing and changing over the years – we believe differently at different times in our lives. And our church has room for people to understand God, and Jesus, and themselves as disciples in different ways from one another. But a kind of bottom line for Christians, and Presbyterians are Christians, is that we ought to be able to be comfortable describing ourselves as disciples of Jesus, in one way or another. So baptism is an affiliative statement – we are saying that we want to follow Jesus. And that will have certain ethical implications for us – we want to be people who love, we want to be people who reach out to others. Actually, our second reading had a good deal of important ethical advice which is all appropriate for Christians. But that’s not why I chose that reading.
The other dimension I want to highlight this morning may be more challenging for some of us. And that is, in baptism there is also a receptive dimension. The anonymous writer of the letter to the Hebrews said in the second verse, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” He was referring to a wonderful story from Genesis in which 3 strangers come to visit Abram and Sarai, who provide lovely hospitality for them, cooking a hot meal, and offering sweets as well. And it turns out that these are divine visitors, who speak God’s word to Abram about the child that will come to him and Sarai, even though they are both quite elderly at the time. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
In the receptive dimension of baptism, we recognize that God is active in the world, and active in our lives, and we are choosing to welcome God’s presence in our lives. We are acknowledging that there is more going on in life than we ourselves initiate. God and the people of God are part of who we are. We are not merely our own – in God we find out who we are, and whose we are. This receptive dimension of baptism is a fundamental stance of humility as well. We are acknowledging that in our own lives, we have neither the first nor the last word. It is a declaration of Copernican proportions, and the comparison is apt. Copernicus discovered that the sun, not the earth, is the center of our solar system. We are not the center of the universe. This receptive dimension of baptism says that we are not the be-all and end-all of our own being.
And it is not only a stance of humility, it is a stance of delight, and openness, a stance that welcomes surprise and changed plans – it is the dimension that keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. How else can we commit to not being in charge of our lives?
The receptive dimension of faith recognizes that God might lead us where we would not choose to go. The receptive dimension recognizes that God is generous, and that God’s abundant world includes beauty and laughter, delight and surprise. The receptive dimension keeps faith from being grim, and keeps faithful people from being boring people. We don’t just follow rules, we follow a living God – and we follow this God together.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin religere which means ‘to bind’ and some people think of religion as a series of rules and barriers, of shalt nots, and ‘don’t ever think or say’ – a negative, grim, march through virtuous living. What a crock. Such an approach misses the essential joy, the delight, the serendipity of our life in God, – and that the way we are bound is not to some rule list, but to each other, and to the God in whom we are part of each other. Jesus was criticized for partying too much. God isn’t scolding – God is inviting us. Ours is a life of vital and zestful relationships – relationships not built on rules, but on trust and covenant. The God who has freely bound herself to us, pours his love into us, and calls us into community. The God in whose name we baptize: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is a community of love that is dynamic, lively and mutual. That is the kind of community that the church is called to be.
Baptism asks a response from each of us, and from the whole church – for in each baptism, the congregation also makes promises. We promise to nurture the baptized in the knowledge and love of God. It is the only promise we are asked to make in church, except at our own baptism. It is a promise of connection and accountability to one another.
We open ourselves both to God and to the people of God. Baptism is not merely an individual act. We don’t do private baptisms. And we don’t baptize without bringing someone into membership in a congregation. Baptism isn’t only about some abstract connection to an idea of the people of God – baptism is a connection with the real, live, irritating, blessed, inspiring, annoying, amazing particular community of the church. We can’t baptize an infant unless one parent is a member of a church. Baptism is less about an individual than it is about creating the Beloved Community. And in the Reformed Tradition, the Community is the Priesthood of all Believers. We are all called, all claimed by God, all part of the Mission of God. Baptism is a beginning – in the ancient churches, the font was at the doorway, because it was through baptism that one entered the community of the church and the life of discipleship.
And this is the really significant piece about baptism – it should lead us, every day, to ask “What next?” Because Christianity is not just a body of belief – it is a way of life. The early Christians were called People of The Way. This is why we are teaching Sunday School as a practice-based curriculum – it’s not just about facts, or what we believe, it’s about what we do, how we live: caring for creation, being stewards, worshipping, praying, enjoying each other, seeking justice, welcoming the stranger, welcoming God into our lives, and knowing that our lives are part of God’s mission.
I went to the Wisconsin Council of Churches Non-Violence Conference on Friday and heard an amazing speaker, Ched Myers, who was sharing some of his work looking at the Gospel of Mark – he studied the social, cultural, political and religious context of Jesus, and learned that there were political implications of much of what Jesus said and did, real-life implications that were obvious to people at the time, but because we don’t understand the context, are not obvious to us. And in our context, there are real-life implications of following Jesus. Sacraments use real elements – bread, wine or juice, water – because being disciples occurs in our real lives.
At the conference, Ched said something that really connects to baptism and the life of discipleship. He said, “Nothing we do is too small and nothing we do is too large, given what we’re up against in this world. If we feel like we’re being heroic, we should get over that; if we’re just doing a little bit, we need to ask: what is the growing edge – for me, my household, my faith community, my denomination? …The question is always: what’s next?” Baptism is the first step, the rest of our lives as baptized people is asking and living into, “what’s next?” Amen.