Seeing Beyond the Conventional
John 1:29-42
January 16, 2011
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o”clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).
You know, something kind of sad happens to many of us when we get to our thirties. What happens is that as we move into our thirties we start putting our thinking into boxes. We all start to harden in our thinking, and as the years pass we have a harder and harder time thinking outside of our self-created boxes.
Before our thirties, much of our thinking is pretty open. Children have the ability to look at the world with a sense of awe and openness, looking in wonder at everything going on around them. For them, the world is a place of wonders, filled with bugs, snow, seasons, games, beaches, friends, learning, and so much more. As we move into our teens, we get to try out new ideas and consider new possibilities as we become more abstract in our thinking. If we get to go college, we get inundated with new ideas and new concepts (not all of them healthy), and our head is filled with possibility. As we move into the workplace, we become very open to new ways of doing things and new ideas as we learn our craft.
Then we move into our thirties and things start to harden. We start to create boxes that contain the extent of our thinking. We want to create order in our own little universes, so we create boxes that we place the world, God, and ourselves into so that we can have neat and tidy explanations for everything. At first, our boxes are made out of paper. They are thin and easily torn apart and changed as experiences warrant. By the time we get into our forties, though, we replace the paper walls with cardboard. We can rip our thoughts down and replace them, but it becomes a bit harder. By the time we get into our fifties we reconstruct our boxes out of wood. By our sixties we build them out of steel, which requires a chainsaw to tear them down. By the time we get into our seventies and beyond, our thought boxes are built out of concrete, and it requires dynamite to change our thinking.
All of us are guilty of creating little boxes for our thinking. And what’s odd about all of our boxes is that we are not very aware of our own, but we are distinctly aware of other people’s. In fact, that’s part of what irritates us about other people. We can’t understand why their thinking is stuck in such rigid boxes. Why can’t they understand the world like we do? To paraphrase Jesus, we recognize the paper boxes that contain other people’s thinking, while ignoring the steel vaults that constrain our thinking?
We all have boxes to some extent, but we rarely realize it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Back in January of 2007, a solitary man stood in the Washington, D.C. Metro Station, playing a violin. He played for 45 minutes as almost 2000 people filed by to get their subway trains to other parts of the city. He played six Bach pieces, of which one is considered to be among the most difficult of all in classical music.
During that time, ten people out of the two-thousand stopped to listen. After three minutes, a middle-aged man stopped and listened for a few seconds. Four minutes later a woman paused, threw money into his empty violin case, and continued walking. After ten minutes, a three-year-old boy stopped to listen. His mother tugged him along. Each time the child stopped, the mother pulled him forward.
Over the next thirty minutes, six more people stopped to listen for a while, none pausing for more than thirty seconds. When he finished all six pieces, he put his violin away and left the station. Twenty people had put money in his case, and he had collected $32. The irony of it all was that two nights before, people had shelled out $100 each to hear him play in Boston.
You see, this man, Joshua Bell, is considered to be one of the greatest violinists in the world. The violin he played in the station is worth about $3.5 million. Typically, when he plays, people give him thunderous standing ovations, but not in the D.C. Metro. No matter how well he played, he couldn’t fit into their boxes. They were in work mode. They were in subway mode. When we are in those and other modes of thinking, it is hard for anything to penetrate our boxes.
It’s difficult for us to look and think beyond our boxes, yet to be a Christian means to think outside our boxes—despite our attempts to create Christian boxes. And we Christians can often be guilty of creating the hardest boxes of all. Despite that, Christians aren’t called to create hard and fast theologies that explain everything. We are called to be open to God in all areas of life, and that requires flexible boxes that are easily changed as we experience God in new and different ways. The problem is that the harder our boxes get, the more we demand that God fit into our beliefs, rather allowing our beliefs to fit into God’s realities.
John the Baptist, in our passage this morning, is a great example of being able to move outside the box. You wouldn’t recognize this just by reading it, but what the story it presents of John the Baptist is quite radical: “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”’”
Seeing Jesus as the messiah would not have been easy for John. The reason has to do with John’s background. You see, John was an Essene, or at least he came out of the Essene tradition. You know what the Essenes produced, even if you don’t necessarily know the Essenes. The Essenes were the ones who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, scrolls of ancient scripture found in caves by the Dead Sea that the Essenes inhabited 2000 years ago. They were a Jewish sect that believed that all of society was evil and corrupt, and that the only way to achieve salvation was to separate themselves from it and live apart. They believed that they were children of light, and that everyone who lived in the cities and villages were children of darkness. They believed in a rigid life of strict observance of law, restricted diet, and regimented prayer life.
John came out of this tradition to baptize people to make them aware that God was coming soon. He baptized in the Jordan River to call people to live clean lives. In many ways the Jordan was the membrane between the eastern desert wilderness of the Essenes and the western cities of Israel. He would go no further because to walk west of the Jordan was to become corrupted by civilization.
Yet John recognized Jesus as the messiah, despite the fact that Jesus ate, drank, and lived as one of the civilized people the Essenes saw as so corrupt. Jesus did not observe a strict diet, he played fast and loose with much of the Law, and he had a different message from John. Jesus did not fit into John’s box, but John could see beyond it. He was able to recognize God’s presence and actions despite his beliefs. Not an easy thing to do.
You see, what John overcame is a common problem we all have. Our problem is our “ologies” and “isms.” We all have our own personal theologies about how the world works. We all have our particular “isms”—Capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, idealism—about how things should work. And these become the walls of our boxes. They blind us. They keep us from truly seeing what God is doing because we can only see what God is doing if it fits our ology and ism
How do you tell if you’ve put yourself in a box? The answer is somewhat easy. When your life is in trouble, how easily do you find God? The harder it is to find God, the stronger your boxes are. If you are going through grief, unemployment, divorce, illness, or something else, are you available to God? Do you find God working with you, or do you wonder where God has gone? I think that many people have a hard time sensing what God is doing because their boxes cause them to expect or even demand that God act one way, while God is really acting another. Their boxes cause them to miss completely what God is doing.
For example, over the years I’ve talked with a lot of people about where God is during their unemployment. Typically people ask, “When is God going to get me a job? I’ve been praying, doing all the right things, but I’m hearing nothing.” I have to be careful how I say this, but eventually I say something like, “What if getting you the next job isn’t what God is focusing on? What if God is saying to you, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you a job. But first, I want you to focus on your life. I want you to get you to look at what’s important in your life. I want you to do a reappraisal.’” That’s a perspective that’s outside of most people’s boxes. Whether we are going through unemployment, divorce, grief over the death of someone close, an illness, or something else, what God is doing, and how God is present, may be off our radar because of our expectations. How well we find God depends upon how flexible our boxes are.
James Sevigny is a good example of how boxes can make it tough to experience God in hard times. Back in 1983, when Sevigny was 28, he and a friend decided to go rock climbing in the Canadian Rockies. It was a climb,... until they heard a deafening CRACK, and then a thunderous roar overhead. It was an avalanche. They were hurtled 2000 feet down the side of the cliff and the mountain. After what seemed like an eternity of falling, he stopped. He could tell his body was broken. He could feel fractures in his back and busted knees. He also had internal bleeding.
A number of years ago he had what he thought was a premonition that he would die this way. So he lied there in the snow thinking, “Okay, this is it. This is how I was meant to die.” As lied there, he heard a voice and felt a presence. As he later recounted, the voice said, "No, you can't give up. You have to live." He also said, "It was right over my right shoulder. It was like if I would sneak up to you and put my nose a quarter of an inch from your neck. It was that kind of physical sensation."
The voice not only told him to get up, but it told him how to rearrange the blood in the snow into an arrow pointing the direction he was walking. For the next several hours he was directed until he finally stumbled into a camp. There he fell before three campers. As he recounted later, he could not have imagined three more expert people to fall in front of in his condition. One was a nurse, another a mountain guide, and another an elite cross-country skier. They took him to safety.
Years later he still can’t talk about the experience without starting to cry. When asked about the experience, he has a hard time explaining it, especially because it didn’t and doesn’t fit into his box. You see, Sevigny is an atheist. He says the experience didn't make him religious. He sees himself as a scientist and has little use for organized religion. As he has said, "I don't give it great thought. I'm not a spiritual person. I don't say it was God or a guardian angel. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry." What he will say is that mysterious presence was the only reason he got off that mountain alive.
All of us have boxes, and depending on how strong our boxes are, it can inhibit our awareness of God. Sevigny was gifted to discover God’s presence in a time of crisis, but even now he has a hard time with the idea that it was God or something from God because it doesn’t fit into his box. When it comes to experiencing and following God, sometimes the stronger our beliefs are, the harder it is to see what God is doing.
The question I’d like you to reflect on today is this: are you able to develop an open flexibility to what God is doing? Are you able to move beyond the conventional?
Amen.
Does It Really Matter How We're Baptized?
Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2011
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
About ten or eleven years ago we had an interesting situation here at Calvin Church involving one of our confirmation class students. The young man went through the confirmation class and gave a great statement of faith. When it came time for the actual confirmation, there was some question about whether he had been baptized or not. I tried calling his mother, but she was out of town and unavailable. So I called his father. I asked him if his son had been baptized, and he said that he thought so but wasn’t sure. He remembered bringing his son forward in the church, having something take place in the front, and he said of it, “I think they called it a ‘christening.’” I told him that christening is another word for baptism. We could go ahead and confirm him, and didn’t need to baptize him. No worries…
…Or so we thought. After we confirmed him with the rest of his class, his mother called me and said, “You know, my son was never baptized. Before joining here we went to a church that believed in adult baptism.” I told him what his father had said, and she replied, “That was a dedication service, not a christening. I can’t believe he didn’t know that.”
So, we were in a bit of a pickle. We had confirmed him without baptizing him. Confirmation is a “confirming” of a person’s baptismal vows, but without a baptism can a person confirm? I talked with the young man a few days later and told him that we needed to schedule a date for his baptism. That’s when we hit a snag. He said to me, “What if I want to be baptized by immersion?” I told him that we didn’t do immersion because there was no immersion tank in our church, like they have in the Baptist churches. He then told me that the pastor of another church in town was willing to baptize him by immersion at a member’s pool. I told him that this was fine, but that this would make him a member of that church. “I don’t want to join that church, but I want to be baptized by immersion.”
I explained that from the Presbyterian point of view, baptism was always done in front of a congregation because they are part of the baptism. They take vows to care for the baptized person since all the members of the church become godparents at baptism. That’s why we don’t have godparents stand up during baptism. The whole congregation are the godparents. To take him to a pool or the Connoquennessing Creek would take the congregation out of it.
Round and round we went, discussing all of this, but no matter how we kept trying to resolve it, he wanted to be baptized by immersion. Finally, I asked him why he wanted to be baptized by immersion. He said that he wanted to have the kind of spiritual experience some of his friends had talked about, and that he had read about—where people come up out of the water feeling renewed and reborn. I told him that this kind of experience is a gift from God, and that the style of baptism doesn’t guarantee that kind of experience. Also, I mentioned that only a small number of Christians have that kind of experience at baptism, but that many have it in other contexts. It’s up to God to grace us with that experience, and it’s dependent on our need, not our desire, for that kind of experience.
We were still at an impasse. So we agreed on a course of action. We would let things stand as they were, since he was already a member of Calvin Church. If he wanted to be baptized by the other church and become a member there, that would be up to him and God. Otherwise, there would probably come a time in the future where he would move somewhere else and join another church, or decide to be baptized in the way we practice it. At that point he could decide how to be baptized.
So what do you think? Does how we’re baptized matter? I suppose the answer depends upon whom you ask. There’s been an ongoing argument between adulters and birthers for centuries, ever since the Reformation. I don’t mean an argument between adulterers—those who commit infidelities—and birthers—those who believe President Obama was actually born in Kenya and should be disbarred from being president. I mean an argument between those who believe in adult baptism and baptism soon after birth.
I’ve been in a number of conversations over the years with people about the “right” way of being baptized. Because I come from a tradition where we baptize infants, it’s normal for me to support infant baptism. Still, my Baptist, evangelical, and Pentecostal friends would tell me that I’m leading people down the wrong path. For them the method of baptism is crucial.
So what are the arguments for the two styles of baptism? The argument for adult baptism is primarily scriptural. Jesus was baptized by immersion as an adult. The disciples were baptized by immersion as adults,… or were they? Other than John, Andrew, and maybe Philip, who were previously disciples of John the Baptist, we don’t know if anyone else was baptized as adults. In fact, there aren’t a large number of scriptural accounts of baptism at all. The other argument for adult baptism is that it offers people a chance to make a mature choice at baptism, not have that choice made for them.
What are the arguments for infant baptism? There isn’t much there scripturally, although there are some inferences. For example, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he says, “I did baptize also the household of Stephanas…” This implies that he baptized everyone, including infants. Also, in the second letter of Timothy, Paul says to him, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” The implication of this passage is that Timothy has been a Christian since birth. Of course, both of these are inferences, but not proof, of infant baptism. The other argument for infant baptism is that we do invite people to become confirmed, which means that they “confirm” the baptismal vows that their parents took on their behalf when they were children. Confirmation becomes the second half of baptism, and it invites people to make the same kind of mature choice that takes place with adult baptism.
There’s also one other argument. This argument is that despite the scriptural example of adult baptism, the fact is that there couldn’t be any other example. The first Christians were adult converts. So they would only have received an invitation to follow Christ as adults and then become baptized as adults. Scripture cites adult baptism because that was the only possibility. The fact is that within the first hundred years of Christianity infants were baptized.
Still, the debates rage on. I have a very simple way of cutting through the arguments, though. My way involves a question. Look at the great Christians of history. Did the method of baptism make a difference in how they turned out. Certainly, if we look at Jesus, the disciples, and people around the world throughout history who became mature Christians after being baptized as adults, it says that adult baptism can be the foundation of becoming a mature Christian. But look also at all those who were baptized as infants and still became mature Christians. Look at all the Christians from about 100 to 1600 A.D. Look at people like John Calvin, Martin Luther, George Fox (the founder of the Quakers), John Wesley (the founder of the Methodists), Mother Teresa, most of us. What matters is not the method of baptism, but our openness to God after we’ve been baptized. Let me repeat that: What matters is not the method of baptism, but our openness to God after we’ve been baptized.
It’s apparent to me that the method of baptism doesn’t correlate at all with spiritual growth and spiritual maturity, since people who choose to commit their lives to God are able to grow and become mature regardless of how they were baptized. I agree with something that John Calvin often said: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, charity. He was saying that in things that really matter to the Christian life, such as belief in God, trusting in Christ as our savior, and being available to the Holy Spirit, we should be united. But in matters of theology to which people disagree, such as the virgin birth, method of baptism, who’s saved and who isn’t, we should be charitable and caring toward one another, knowing that we ourselves may be wrong.
I believe that the people who get caught up in arguing over the “right” method of baptism forget about the power of God’s grace. What do I mean by this? Think about what Paul says about grace. In his letter to the Romans he says that we are justified by grace through faith. In other words, we aren’t saved by our deeds, by our knowledge, or by our ability to be obedient to the law. God gives us grace as a gift, a gift that we haven’t earned. And our role is simply to have faith, and through faith to receive God’s grace in our lives so that it can make a difference for us and for others through us. The point that Paul makes is that it’s God’s love and grace that matters, not our beliefs and deeds. People who claim that the method of baptism matters are now taking away grace as a gift, and saying that grace is only given to us if we are baptized in the right way. So, if we are baptized as adults, we receive grace. If we aren’t, we don’t. When they do this, they are proclaiming Paul’s words to be false.
This argument over the method of baptism is one more example of the constant tendency of humans to try to wrest control of salvation from God’s hands. Throughout the history of Christianity and Judaism, people have tried to find a way to be in control of grace and salvation, rather than trusting in God to be in charge. The Jews tried to take grace out of God’s hands by emphasizing the righteousness of following the law. For them, justification came through perfect obedience to the law, and so God ceded to us the power to obtain grace. For them grace wasn’t a gift, but an earned reward. But as Christ taught, obedience to the law does not lead to salvation. It just leads to better moral behavior, a better moral behavior that can also come through openness to God.
The Roman Catholics, at the time of the Reformation, also became guilty of trying to control grace. They made salvation and grace dependent upon contributions to the church. Even today the Roman Catholic tradition restricts grace by emphasizing what deeds need to be undertaken to receive grace. For instance, to receive grace we have an obligation to weekly worship and participation in the mass; an obligation to confess our sins to a priest; and an obligation to other acts of charity. Again, these are attempts to restrict God’s grace from being a free gift by making it contingent on our acts.
Evangelical Christians have their form of restricting grace. They make God’s grace contingent on declaring Jesus Christ as our Lord and savior. In other words, the name you give God (calling God Christ) is what matters. I don’t disagree that we need to declare Christ as our Lord and savior to fully receive that grace, but God can dispense grace to us regardless of what our declarations are. Pentecostal Christians tend to make evidence of grace contingent on whether we have gifts of speaking in tongues, prophecy, holy laughter, healing, or other gifts. The implication is that if these gifts aren’t present, our faith isn’t good enough and therefore God’s grace isn’t in our lives. This is another restriction, seemingly putting grace under our control, not God’s.
We mainline Christians (those of us in denominations such as Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian, among others) have our own version of restricting grace. We emphasize living by the Golden Rule and doing good deeds as ways of getting into heaven. Again, the emphasis is on our behavior that merits grace, not on grace that is freely given and that changes our behavior.
And we can say the same kinds of things about those who proclaim adult baptism as the only way. What they are saying is that if we aren’t baptized in the right way, we don’t really receive the fullness of God’s grace. Well, God’s grace is a free gift. It is not contingent upon our acts or beliefs. The beliefs we have and the deeds we do can help grace work more thoroughly in our lives, but the grace is available still as a gift, not as something earned. If the method of baptism matters the most, then God’s grace really isn’t a free gift, and Paul was wrong.
What I think people really miss is the fact that ultimately it is God who is in control of our salvation, and God’s criteria is love, not deeds, law, works, golden rule, manifestation of gifts, or anything else. We believe in a simple idea. Grace is out there as a gift, and we don’t need to do anything to get it. It’s much like Christmas. How many of you were given a gift for Christmas, and before even opening it up, said, “You know, I haven’t done anything to earn it it. How about if I make everyone breakfast, clean up the house, clear the gutters, muck out the garage, and chop wood before opening it? That way I will have earned it.” This would be silly because gifts are given out of love, just as God gives us grace out of love.
The way we Presbyterians look at it all is to say that God’s grace is freely available, and all that we do is a response to grace. We worship to thank God for grace, and to learn to live lives that allow grace to flow more freely in our lives. We do good deeds because we want to share that grace that is already there. We engage in ministry and mission in order to share this grace. The grace is there. What we want to do is to share it.
The sacrament of baptism reveals of the nature of God’s love and grace. For us, baptism is an act that shows the nature of God’s grace by telling us something simple: “Do you see this child, this youth, this adult before you? This person has been loved by God from the moment God thought of him or her. That doesn’t mean that God has loved him or her from the moment she or he was conceived or born. It means that God has loved her or him from the moment God decided that this person should be created. The washing of baptism shows what God has done, which is to wash the person from the very beginning, saying, ‘I love this person and do not see, nor will see, the person’s sin. Sin may be there, but I will always be there to wash this person clean, and I will always look upon her or him with Christ’s eyes of love, forgiveness, and blessings.’” Baptism reveals God’s blessings in a person’s life, regardless of when he or she is baptized.
Ultimately, the issue is not how we are baptized, it’s whether we have the kind of faith that allows the grace of our baptism to flow throughout our lives
Amen.
Singing to God a New Song
Due to the fact that this sermon had a piece of music as part of it's center, it cannot be written out. I invite you to click on the link below not only to hear the sermon, but especially to hear an amazing version of "We Three Kings" that our music director, Bruce Smith, did on the piano plucking the strings of the piano as part of the song.
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