Baptized Into Ministry

Jeremiah 1:4-10
The word of the Lord came to me saying:
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you
And before you were born I made you holy;
As a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”

I said, “Ah, Adonai Yahweh, look, I don’t know how to speak because I am just a youth.”

But Yahweh said to me:
“Don’t say, ‘I am just a youth;’
because you will go to all to whom I send you
and you will speak all that I command you.
Don’t be afraid of them,
because I am with you to deliver you, says Yahweh.”

Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth. Yahweh said to me:
“Now, I have put my words in your mouth.
See, this day I have set you over nations and kingdoms
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”

God is calling you and it is NOT a wrong number. It may not involve a phone ringing, or a text message on your cell phone, or a pager going off, or a new IM popping up on your computer screen saying “God wants to be your buddy; would you like to add God to your friends list?” It may not be a voice in the night or a whisper at dawn. It may not be clear and it may not be like a lightning bolt from heaven. But rest assured, God is calling you and it is NOT a wrong number.

How do I know this? Because of the water. The water in the baptismal font…the same water that we used last week to baptize Isaac Christopher Stodghill…this water has a claim on you. This water is speaking to me and it is calling to you. You were not baptized to be an entertaining moment in the worship service. You were not baptized to recognize a rite of passage in your family or in your life. It wasn’t an archaic ritual that we have domesticated so that we can sell more Hallmark cards, like we have done with Groundhog’s Day. (Did you ever think about that? Groundhog’s Day was once a day that our ancient Celtic ancestors met with a great deal of trepidation because if it didn’t happen just right then light and fertility would not return to the earth. Now we celebrate it by pulling a terrified rodent out of a box in Pennsylvania in front of TV cameras.)

No, this will not happen to baptism because it is God’s work and God refuses to be domesticated. God claims us in these baptismal waters. When we pass through these waters we follow Christ into a new community with new brothers and sisters and with a new purpose. We have something to do in this life and God is calling us to it. We are launched onto a journey into deep waters where winds will blow and storms will come, but we are not alone. When we hold close to the water…when we remember the claim that God has on our lives…when we respond to the love that has been shown to us…when we sense that all of our lives are a gift…a gift made known to us in the saving work of Jesus…then all that follows is a glorious “living up to” our baptisms or living into them. We may have been infants when we were baptized…we may have been youth…we may have been adults…but we were certainly not complete when we came to the waters. We had a long way to go and we still do.

Perhaps there are some of you who have not yet been baptized. Maybe you’re wondering if you’re ready. You are. All it takes is a willing heart and a willingness to accept that God has had an interest in you since before you were born. Saying it that way I realize that that’s a whole lot more than it sounds.

I tell you who would recognize this language about calling: Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet, (not a bullfrog). God was calling Jeremiah when he was very young. Perhaps he was just a teenager, living in a land and a time when it seemed that everything was falling apart. His nation, Judah, had been set apart by God. It was meant to be a light to the nation but it all seemed to be going wrong. Babylon and Egypt, two major powers of the day, were threatening on either side. The nation was corrupt, its roots in God’s promise forgotten. The end seemed near. Then God called.

Actually the call had come long before. Before birth, God had set Jeremiah apart for the work he would eventually do. “Before I formed you in the womb,” God said to Jeremiah, “I knew you. And before you were born I made you holy. Before you could even say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, before you could utter a word or consider whether you had anything as crazy as choice in the matter, I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Of course, Jeremiah objected. Who wouldn’t? He didn’t ask for this. He wasn’t equipped for the job. At least he didn’t think so. He was just Jeremiah. Not Jeremiah the Prophet. Not Jeremiah the Lord’s Anointed. Not Jeremiah the Great and Mighty. Just Jeremiah. So he resisted. He remembered a line that Moses had used when God spoke to him from a burning bush. “Ah, God, look, I…uh…I don’t how to speak.”

Then for good measure he threw in a second excuse. “And the reason I don’t know how to speak is that I’m just a youth.” Now if the question were “Can I stay out late?” or “Can I use the car?” or anything like that, Jeremiah would have been protesting with all his might that, hey, he was almost an adult. But when God comes a calling and the question is “Will you save the world?” suddenly he’s just a youth.

God, who has seen this act before, is not fooled. “Look, Jerry,” God said. (They were on good terms. When you know someone before they are born you can call them by their nickname.) “Jerry, don’t say, ‘I’m just a youth,’ because it really isn’t about you. Or maybe I should say it differently. It’s ALL about you. You won’t become who you were meant to be unless you respond. The world doesn’t hear my words in your voice unless you respond. It’s all about you because YOU are the one I’m calling. But it’s not about you because it’s also ALL about what I am doing in the world. I am sending you and I am giving you the words to say and I will be with you to get you through.”

Then God does a really touching thing. Like a lover really encountering his beloved, or like a mother shushing her anxious child, God takes a finger and touches it to the lips of Jeremiah. The next words must have been spoken in a whisper. “Jeremiah, I have put my words in your mouth. I have set you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Don’t you see that the world will be transformed? It has to be if it is to be my dwelling place. And whether or not the world will change is not within your power to choose. Your choice is to look me in the eyes and see that I have given you everything you need to live this calling OR to turn away from me and feel this calling as a burning in your bones, a flame that feels like hell that you will ignore at your own peril.”

Of course, that’s exactly how it felt to Jeremiah. Later in the book he reports that he tried to resist God’s call but whenever he suppressed it…whenever he tried to hold in what God had given him to share it felt like a fire in his bones. God’s claim was powerful and it was not going something he could ignore easily.

So he spoke God’s word and it took him to the king and it took him to the pit and it took his whole life until he was dragged off by his own people into exile in Egypt. It was not an easy life. It was not an easy work that he had to do. But it was his work and in listening to what was implanted within him from his mother’s womb and in responding to this God who touched his lips with a promise he found himself and he found the purpose for which he was set apart.

God is calling you and it is not a wrong number. I have heard that calling at several significant points in my life and it has taken many different forms. Last week the Witness Committee of our church met and Kathleen Kenyon had us go around the table and share the story of how we came to hear God’s voice speaking clearly to us. For me it was first from my family that thought it important enough to have me in church every Sunday so that I could feel that place as home and that congregation as family. I can’t tell you much about the content of the sermon in those early days but I can tell you about what it felt like to be a part of something and to belong. To be a child and to know that I was in a place where people accepted me and encouraged me and talked to me about God and told me to listen because had something to say to me.

Then one summer, at the age of 11, I went to a church camp and God did speak to me. It came in the midst of all kinds of other messages. That was the week I learned about snipe hunting and the sound of bullfrogs by the pond and it was the week when I developed a crush on Faith Gheen. But it was also the week I got it. God was speaking to me…even me. And I was surrounded by adults who told me to be audacious enough to believe that an 11-year-old had things to do for God. I didn’t have to wait for adulthood. The relationship with Faith didn’t last, but that message did.

There were other callings. The people I met volunteering for two years as a high school student with a program for mentally challenged adults. The day my Uncle Bill, a minister, showed me his journal and opened up a lifetime of writing for me. The woman I met clogging one summer who didn’t know what she was getting into when she agreed to marry me but who became a partner in this calling business. A story about a weasel that called me away from a career in radio and into seminary. The day I realized God was speaking to me in Spanish and asking me to speak back to a congregation I was called to serve in a place so different from where I grew up that I wondered how in the world I had anything to offer. The day God’s voice sounded a lot like Jim Hewitt’s in calling me to a place called Franktown. All of these were moments of calling where the only correct answer was ‘Yes.’

And the most miraculous joy has been to share in the callings of others, whatever those callings might be. I never thought it was going to be my role to walk with so many young people in their journeys. It wasn’t anything I was consciously seeking. But somehow, God used a guy who was pretty socially awkward as a college student to listen other students into their own callings. Now it doesn’t surprise me so much when I get an e-mail telling me how seeds planted before have grown.

Just a few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a student who was a part of our campus ministry at UVA and who had spent a semester abroad in Zimbabwe. She quoted me back an e-mail I sent her while she was there…one that I don’t even remember. “I remember when I was in Zimbabwe,” she said, “and pretty angry with the church and you wrote me an e-mail inviting me back into a church that can perhaps still be redeemed ‘by the radical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.’…Thank you!” She remembered the moment because it was on a spiritual timeline she was developing for a school application. She’s going to seminary this fall to become ordained.

Somehow God, all these centuries after Jeremiah’s time, is still calling people. And some of them are still saying, “But God, you’ve got it wrong, I can’t speak.” Some of them are still saying, “But God, I’m too young.” Others are saying, “God, I’m too old.” Others are saying, “God, I have kids.” Or they’re saying, “I don’t have the talents. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the mind or the body or the spirit.” And they keep saying this…you keep saying this despite the fact that God has given you everything you need. And despite that fact that it’s not about you; it’s about what God is going to do. And despite the fact that it’s all about you and no one else is getting the call that you are meant to hear.

Sometimes the call will be to serve God in the place where you are. You don’t have to go to seminary or head off to Africa to serve. The world is transformed in small ways and large and there is plenty to do as a layperson on God’s Eastern Shore.

But don’t be surprised if the call comes with some changes attached. Don’t be surprised if it’s something large and don’t think that the large things are always meant for someone else. Sometimes we are the saints we’ve been waiting for and the word is to be a prophet to the nations.

It’s meant to be disturbing to have water in the sanctuary. There’s always the possibility that it might escape the font. We might knock over the font and that would be messy. Worse yet, we might start to take it seriously and then these pleasant mornings we spend in song and prayer and fellowship would become more than a nice way to spend a Sunday. The water might actually move us to do something more, to follow that wandering teacher from Nazareth who was always inviting others to leave the comfortable life they knew behind to discover the new thing God had for them to do.

Now I’m naïve enough to believe that you and I were born with a mission and a destiny. We were meant to live in God’s presence and to shed the delusions of this life for the reality of who we are in God’s eyes. We were meant to be God’s children. It’s very easy for us to forget that. It’s very common for us to neglect the fingerprints God has left all over us.

But every now and then God’s voice gets through. People have been hearing that voice in this place for over 200 years. And when they hear it they do incomprehensible things. Why would people do such things? Because they have been baptized into ministry…seized by a God who formed them and claimed them…who places a finger to their lips and consecrates them for service. This God of water and Spirit and the wild transformations of a world being born anew places a finger to your lips and says, “I have given you all that you need. You are mine. Won’t you come discover what my love can do?” God is calling your name and God does not have the wrong number. Never. Thanks be to God.

Good News For Nassawadox Creek

Alex in Nassawadox Creek

Luke 4:14-21 (RSV)
Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their synagogues, bring glorified by all.
He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. He began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

O.K., here’s something I learned about the gospel that I would not have learned if I had not moved to the Eastern Shore. The good news is not good news unless it is good news for Nassawadox Creek. Some of you may object. “That’s outrageous,” you might say. “That’s absurd! The good news is not good news unless it is good news for Nassawadox Creek? What’s so special about Nassawadox Creek? Why that creek instead of Occahannock Creek or Hungar’s Creek? Surely Church Creek must have some claim on the gospel?”

O.K., agreed. There’s nothing all that remarkable about Nassawadox Creek. I mean, it’s a fine little creek but I have no special fondness for it. It took my last pair of glasses in a kayak tip over. When I was trying to practice for the Crystal Beach Triathlon last fall I went to swim in it a few times and had to walk most of the way because it’s so shallow. (Don’t go swimming at low tide.) No, there’s not anything remarkable about it, but I still say: the good news is not good news unless it’s good news for Nassawadox Creek.

“But there’s a more basic problem,” you say. “The gospel is not a message of salvation for a creek. It’s a message of salvation for a people. Jesus did not come to preach God’s grace to a body of water. He came to preach good news to bodies – human bodies in need of liberation from sin and death.” I can’t disagree. Jesus did come to preach salvation to people, but there was a message for the earth as well.

It is when the deep waters of the earth (and even the shallow waters)…when the waters hear the word that even they are reflections of God’s glory then we will hear how radical God’s word is. God turns everything upside down. The waters in biblical days were representative of chaos and death and disorder. But where does Jesus begin his ministry? Under the waters of the river Jordan…passing through the waters in baptism and wading out to the banks of the river proclaiming a message that God’s kingdom was coming and was at hand. The waters could never again be claimed by beasts and monsters. Now the waters were claimed by the God who set the bounds of the sea. God was changing even the natural order. Good news for the people? You bet. But good news for the waters too.

But you didn’t come to church to hear about Nassawadox Creek today. Probably you came to hear the good news for you. “It’s been a rough week, Alex,” you’re probably saying. “My parents are being unreasonable. I’ve got exams to take. My boyfriend hasn’t IM’d me in three days and I think he may be starting to lose interest in me. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to look like or how I’m supposed to act. What’s the good news for me?”

Or maybe you’re a little older and you’re saying, “My kids are being unreasonable. I’ve got a ton of work to do. My wife is not real happy with me and hasn’t smiled at me in three days. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to do or what I’m supposed to teach my kids. What’s the good news for me?”

Or maybe you’re in another life stage worrying about how you’ll pay for college or what retirement is going to look like or how you’ll get out of an emotional rut or how you can trust others when you can’t trust yourself. The last thing on your mind when you came in here was Nassawadox Creek. What’s that got to do with the good news, Alex?

Well, listen to the words of the gospel today. They don’t mention Nassawadox Creek, but they do challenge us to hear something new. Jesus was walking through the area around Galilee following his baptism and a time of testing in the wilderness. He had quickly become a well-known teacher. The Spirit of the Lord was upon him. Luke tells us that right at the beginning. He spoke with authority and power and word spread throughout the synagogues.

Finally he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. It was the Sabbath and he went up to the synagogue because that was his custom. There must have been great anticipation in the congregation. Here was the carpenter’s son who had made good. Of course, it was a test. The people who remembered Jesus as a child were reluctant to let him grow up. “Don’t get above your raising,” was just as much of a saying in Jesus’ day as it is in our own.

But they were watching attentively and with great interest as Jesus stood up to read. They handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He opened it and looked for a passage. He put his finger to the scroll and began to read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” Isaiah had written these words centuries before him to describe his own appointment as God’s messenger, but we hear them differently now because Luke has already told us that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus, too. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then he closed the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. That sounds to us like he was trying to take the attention off of him, but teachers in the synagogue would often sit. It was the teaching position and Luke tells us that the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he starts to talk. “Today,” he says, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now you can imagine the confusion in the room. As long as Isaiah’s words were about their ancestors back then, waiting to hear good news from the midst of their oppression, things were all right. As long as Jesus was using this poetic language to deliver a nostalgic message that did not challenge them, it was O.K. As long as he didn’t challenge the way things were, well fine.

But then he says this thing. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Fulfilled? In our hearing? In our hearing?! Did something change while Jesus was speaking? Did these words take on new meaning while they were sitting there admiring the fine way that Joseph’s son had grown up? Fulfilled? Was God really preaching good news to the poor? Was God really freeing the prisoners, letting blind people see and liberating the downtrodden? What had changed in the reading except that Jesus had said the words?

I have to tell you that things did not end well in Nazareth that day. The crowd finally realized that Jesus was talking about himself. He was saying that a new day had come and he was its embodiment. He had come and nothing was ever going to be the same. They saw a local boy done well, but they couldn’t see a savior.

So they almost kill him. If he hadn’t slipped away mysteriously at the last minute he might have been tossed from a high cliff at the edge of town and have to test out one of those things that the devil had tempted him with –jumping off a high place and proving his worth by having angels come to rescue him. But Jesus was not about the show, he was about the message, the Word, and the Word was that God was turning the world upside down.

So the message for Nazareth and for all was the same. The gospel was not a message meant to give more comfort to the comfortable; it was a call to see what God was doing beyond the bounds. Outside the walls of the synagogue, God was at work. And the people who would not be on anybody’s list of premier individuals, at the top of the social ladder, were the first to hear. It wasn’t Bill Gates or Paris Hilton who would hear God’s good news, it was the poor. It wasn’t the prince but the prisoner. It wasn’t the bishop but the blind. It wasn’t Donald Trump it was the refugee. These were the folks who would hear the good news and it was not good news unless they heard it. And who was bringing the news? Jesus.

So what does that mean? It means that the gospel will not be contained. It will not be packaged in such a way that we can easily digest it or assume that we know what it means. It will not be imprisoned by any walls, even the walls of the church. And when we come to hear the word of God spoken to me, just me…when I need the word after the week I’ve just had…when I am at a loss to explain what God is doing in this messed-up jumble that my life often becomes…God points somewhere else. You want good news? Go talk to the poor, go talk to the prisoner, go talk to the oppressed.

I have this feeling that sometimes the most important things that we do as human beings are often the most frustrating. Tonight when we gather in this sanctuary with the people of Shorter’s Chapel for a worship service, I know that it’s going to be a joyful time. I know that we are going to watch the youth dance and hear the choirs sing and hear the word proclaimed by my friend Earl Morris and it is going to be a wonderful time. We are going to say, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.” And we will eat together and wonder why on earth we don’t do this more often.

I sense God’s movement in all of this because it is something that could easily NOT happen. Last week at the Community Unity Day Breakfast at Northampton High School, Gordon Evans, who was the keynote speaker, reminded us of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s observation that the most segregated hour of the week is 11 AM on Sunday morning. We pay lip service to overcoming racial barriers in the church, but we so rarely live it out. And I have to admit that the journey we have been on as clergy working together in our clergy schools group has not been an easy one. It’s been one of the most frustrating things I’ve done since I’ve come here.
We are white and black. We have great ideas. But we have struggled to keep ourselves together and to work together. But God is there in the midst of the frustrations. God is there in the new friendships and partnerships being formed. And so last year we set up a series of cottage meetings, one of which we co-hosted with Bethel Baptist Church. Then Pastor Earl came and was minister-in-residence at Camp Occohannock with me for a whole week last summer. Then he invited me to preach and our choir to sing at a special service last September. Then our youth went and sang at a service in December. Now they are coming to be with us. This is very unusual. It’s not the ordinary thing. It’s not the easy thing to do. It takes a willingness to move beyond the bounds and to see the new things that God is doing. It takes a willingness to see that sometimes to hear the good news for us we have to hear the good news for others.

Here’s what I believe God is doing in Franktown Church. God has blessed us with one of the most remarkable places of ministry in the whole Virginia Conference. This is a church that has a long history of strong education, mission, and making disciples dating back to the 1700s. It’s also a church that has made a great statement of faith in the future by expanding the physical facility and starting new programs. But God is not blessing this church because it is building a monument to what we can do. God is blessing us to be a blessing, to the hard and difficult work of creating new partnerships with new people…to reaching out to welcome others with the good news of how salvation has come in Jesus Christ…to stretching across boundaries of race and class to model the kingdom God is building in this place…to listening not only to the voices that are here, but also to those who aren’t who need to hear that good news, too. Even Nassawadox Creek, because I know that when I have been in those waters that I have heard God speaking there as well. If the heavens are telling the glory of God, then surely the waters are, too.

God is calling us to go out from this place because the Spirit of the Lord is upon us. God is calling us to see that our salvation is tied up with the salvation of our entire community. And God will not be satisfied until all the earth proclaims the good news and the acceptable year of the Lord.

You don’t know how proud I am to be your pastor when I hear people say to me, “You’re the pastor at Franktown Church? You have a lot of loving, active people there.” People know us because we reach out with the arts and with the food bank and with missions and with leadership in the community. I love being the pastor of a church where people are seeing the good news enacted and feeling welcomed to join. I would hate for us to grow complacent and turn inward and forget that the good news calls us to follow Jesus out the doors and into the world.

So, yes, there is good news for you today. There is a word of hope and life. But there is also a word of challenge. Who do you know that needs to hear good news? What places and people in our community are crying out for a new word of hope and life? What is it that we are called to do to meet the needs of the world? Where are you going to start? Let’s be doers of the word and not hearers only. Thanks be to God.

From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary

John 2:1-11
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been called to the wedding. The wine supply waned and the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
Jesus said to her, "What is that to me and you, woman? My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Whatever he tells you to do, do it."
Now there were stone jars of water standing there for the Jewish rite of purification, each holding two or three measures. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." They filled them up to capacity. He said to them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast." So they took it.
When the master of the feast tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from, (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called out to the groom and said to him, "Everybody lays out the good wine first and when the crowd becomes drunk pulls out the lesser wine. But you have held back the good wine until now!"
This, the first of the signs, Jesus did in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory. So his disciples believed in him.

So there was this wedding. Not such an unusual event in the grand scheme of things. People are getting married all the time. In our day we talk about love and the attraction between two people as the cause of it. In Jesus' day there were other factors – family bonds, economic realities, arranged marriages – but marriages were still a natural part of life. So it's not so surprising that we should find Jesus and Mary and the disciples at a wedding. Which is where they were – at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.

Mary was the main invitee, but Jesus and his disciples had gotten the call, too. It would have been a grand affair, lasting several days. Families would go all out to provide a major feast. There would be music and dancing and wine. That's where the problem arose. The wine ran out.

Mary is the first to be aware of the problem and she goes to her son, Jesus, and says, “They have no wine.” She doesn't ask him to do anything about it, but there must have something in her tone of voice...something Jesus recognized. Both of them knew that Jesus had an extraordinary mission, that he was no ordinary person, that he would eventually be revealed as the one John the Baptist knew as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So for this extraordinary person to do something miraculous to keep an ordinary wedding feast going? That seems very doable.

But Jesus resists what his mother implies. “Woman,” he says, (which sounds harsh to our ears, but it was probably a term of affection. Remember that John reports that when Jesus was dying on the cross he looked at his mother and the disciple that he loved and he said to her, “Woman, behold your son.” It was a sign then of his continuing care for her.) “Woman,” he says, “What is it to you and me if the wine has run out. My hour has not yet come.”

My hour has not yet come. Jesus will talk a lot about his hour coming. When the cross is looming before him, when he washes the disciples’ feet, when it all comes to a head in Jerusalem – then he will say, the hour has come. Now, at a wedding in a backwater Galilean town, the time is not right.

Here Mary seems to do a very strange thing. She seems to ignore Jesus completely. She turns to the servants who are standing nearby and says, “Do whatever he says to do.” Is she saying that she knows, better than Jesus, what hour it is? Is she pulling rank on him? I don't think so. I think she is responding to Jesus' concern by taking the attention off of him.

The incarnation is all about God revealing the divine presence in human form. The miraculous thing about the baby in the manger is not that new life comes into the world but that a particular new life comes into the world. The god who made the cosmos submits to being found among the creatures God has made. The god who formed a people from slavery and made them a nation and took their name, the God of Israel, had now been born as one of them.

The story of the gospels, the story of Jesus, is all about how that revelation takes place. Jesus has come to be revealed in glory. Jesus has come to show us that God walks among us. Jesus has come so that, as he tells Nicodemus only one chapter later in John's gospel, whosoever believes in him may have life everlasting. But the revelations come quietly. Nicodemus comes under the cover of darkness to see Jesus. A chapter later, Jesus is revealing his true nature to a woman by a well in a foreign land. Here, in this story, no one at the party knows what Jesus is doing except a select few. For most of them, the only thing they know is that the party is going on and that the wine is very good.

Of course, the wine is very good. What Jesus tells the servants to do is to fill up six huge water jars that were used for the Jewish rites of purification. Those rites were on the minds of those who went to the river Jordan to see John the Baptist. It was baptismal water, in a sense, that Jesus was using to do this miraculous thing.

Jesus says to the servants, “Take some water out and take it to the steward of the party.” They do this and the steward of the party is amazed. He goes to the bridegroom and says, “Dude,”...(it's in the NRSV, I believe)...”Dude, everybody else serves the best wine first and then, when people get drunk, they pull out the bad stuff. You got it the wrong way around! This is great wine!”

He's confused, you see. He thinks the bridegroom has pulled off this unusual feat of great wine. We don't know how the bridegroom responds but he probably thinks the steward has been partaking a little too freely himself. The only ones who know that a miracle has occurred are the servants, the disciples and Jesus' mother. As the next verse says, it is a sign. The first of Jesus' signs that reveal his glory. It is not a full revelation. It's not known in its completeness yet. But it’s coming. Soon everyone will know that wherever there is fullness, goodness, and life, Christ is there.

So what is this story about? What does it mean for us? It would be easy to think that this is a story about the wine. After all, it is the wine that is the miracle here, right? But the wine is only important if we're hung up on wine to begin with. And we are.

We live in an alcohol-confused culture and alcohol has the power to fascinate us more than Jesus. We’d like to get a message here to either justify our view of alcohol or to challenge it. You know how deeply we are impacted by alcohol. Our media and culture celebrate alcohol abuse. On college campuses it’s a major issue, even at a place like UVA where I served, alcohol haunts every gathering. Binge drinking there and here puts people in the hospital every weekend. Alcohol abuse contributes to car accidents, violence and rape. Many if not most of us have faced the effects of alcoholism in our own families and perhaps in our own lives. You know we need some guidance here.

It’s because of the dangers of alcohol abuse that Methodists historically have advocated temperance or abstinence. Temperanceville gets its name, according to Kirk Mariner, from folks who established the town in the middle of the temperance movement pledging never to sell whiskey there. Seems to me things might have changed up there. It was easy for Methodists to get blinded by their anti-alcohol stance, too, and not be able to see Jesus for the booze, but they were erring on the right side. They knew how dangerous it was.

But this passage is not an object lesson for us on whether or not we ought to have a drink at a wedding. This passage takes it as a given, in the days when water was a more dangerous drink, that people would be drinking wine. It’s not a question.

What the passage is meant to be pointing us towards is Jesus. It’s meant to be telling us about the most important capacity that Jesus has – his ability to take the ordinary stuff of this world and to turn it into something extraordinary. It’s meant to be reminding us that the world is still a miraculous place and it is so because God is still present in it turning water into wine.

Now you think that sounds like an unusual occurrence – water turning into wine – but I tell you that I don’t think it’s that unusual at all. I think most of us have had the experience of something transforming before our eyes. I remember a night camping with Suzanne by the Rio Grande. When we went into our tent the land around our tent was dry, dusty desert with a few tall cottonwood trees lining the river, which, for being a river called the Great River, really didn’t look like much more than a muddy stream. The campsite was not much to look at but in the middle of the night a sandstorm kicked up and at one point I poked my head out of the tent and looked up to see a river of sand rushing over my head. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. Talk about transformation!

Or perhaps you’ve had the experience of coming to church on a Sunday morning, recognizing the same familiar faces, sitting in the same familiar pew. It’s just the way it’s always been but then somehow its not. Maybe it’s a Bible passage you’ve never heard, I mean really heard, before. Maybe it’s a song from the choir. Maybe it’s the way the light strikes the communion table. Maybe it’s a word the preacher says (it can happen!). But suddenly it’s not just any other Sunday and it’s not the same familiar place. And you find yourself moved to the altar rail or moved to tears. Talk about transformation!

Or maybe it’s a baby. They’re born every day. Go up to the 2nd floor of Shore Memorial and you’ll see the newborns and their moms. But when it’s your child or your grandchild and you take that infant and he seizes the initiative from you. She takes you with her uncomprehending eyes. That’s not just a baby you’re holding. Talk about transformation!

No, I think water is changing into wine every day. I don’t think we human beings have lost our capacity to see that the world is a miraculous place. I don’t think we are unable to behold transformation. I think we hunger for it and long for it. I think those moments happen far less often than we want them to. But I don’t think we’re beyond wonder.

What I think we have lost is the language to talk about it with. There are lots of people out there who are more than ready to admit that there is something miraculous, something mind-blowing, something transcendent about the world, but they are not sure what name to give to this experience. Standing in front of a redwood tree or on the Atlantic shore of Cobb Island most of us will admit to feeling something; but what it is it?

Science gropes its way toward new language to explain the wonder of the cosmos, and we learn so, so much as it does, but it will never be able to access the question of purpose – of why. Most Americans will admit to feeling a strong pull toward spirituality but they resist putting any more labels than that on it. Or we invent our own new labels to fit the things we value. Some of us even believe that the whole of our earthly lives is some experiment begun by an alien race -- Somewhat like the worlds created by Slarty Bartfast in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. (Now that’s a book that will make you think.)

But what is it that gives a name to this feeling within us? What is it that tells us who we are in the universe? Three hundred odd years of secular thinking have not managed to purge us of our sense of the holy, but they have left us absolutely confused. Transcendence is now a lot like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it,” but don’t ask me to define it any more than that.

But really we Christians shouldn’t be settling for that should we? We know what lies behind the feelings we get in the face of awe and wonder – it’s the love at the heart of the universe. It’s Jesus. We know what has the power to lift us from our sin and to set us on a new course – it’s Jesus. We know what to call that undeserved, surprising, overwhelming love that is there at our birth, that waits for us to respond, that moves us to respond and the propels us into eternal life – it is grace, God’s prevenient grace that we know in Jesus.

But somehow that’s not what seekers and those who are looking for God hear when we talk about Jesus. I’ve been doing some reading this week about the emerging church, partly for this Wednesday night course that we’re doing and partly because it is a fascinating new Christian movement. The emerging church is not a theology – it is a new way of being church that emphasizes belonging before believing. It is Christ-centered, no doubt, but it is welcoming people to join new communities where Christ can be approached through many different forms – through music and art and meditation and silence and community service. One group in Pittsburgh even has a Bible Fight Club on Friday nights where the goal is not a literal fight, but total involvement – everyone who comes must participate and it ends with every one sharing one thing that someone else said that made them think.

But another thing that I’m finding out about this movement is that it uses technology in some very creative ways. There are hundreds and hundreds of blogs out there, which are kind of like online public diaries, some by Christians and others by seekers, all asking what it is about this ancient language of the church and claims about Jesus that make sense. One blog I read this week, called Black Pheobe, challenged Christians to speak to this new age. “Please note,” the writer, who is a young woman, said, “please note, Christians, that Modernism and Post-Modernism are over. We are now in the Digital Age. Please develop a new quack theology to drool over, or, even better, just go back to your First Love and focus on Jesus. P.s. In the meantime, Faith, Hope, Love, and a whole lotta humor.”[i]

I hear in this something that comes through from so many young people. “We want to believe in something redemptive, something that will lift us up out of the dead ends that the world and our lives have come to. We want to hear more about life and less about what divides us. And we suspect that if Christianity has the answer, it’s in Jesus.”

What’s going to change the world? Jesus. And how will the world know that it is being transformed? If people like you and me begin to form communities that look different from the world around us. If we can see a child being baptized with water and recognize that God is claiming that child for a purpose that will go through her life and beyond. If we can help a person find food and clothing and work and comfort and dignity and recognize that Christ has called us to meet him in the poor and that our salvation is tied up in serving these whom the world calls the least. If we can gather around a table where bread is broken and wine is poured and look into one another’s faces and see that Christ is present just as he promised. If we can raise the cross, even in the face of suffering and death, and see in it the way that Christ has overcome the world. If we can look at each new sunrise as the promise of Christ’s coming again. If we can do all these things, brothers and sisters, and share this life with the world around us, then this language that we use every Sunday morning will not be an ordinary thing…but something extraordinary.

There were some folks who left that wedding in Cana never knowing that they had been present at the first of Jesus’ signs. They may have commented to a friend on the quality of the wine, but Jesus’ name never passed their lips. But there were others on that day, some servants and some disciples, who left that wedding with a whole new perspective on life. There was more than wine on their minds. They were beginning to see the transformation of the entire universe and, perhaps as importantly, the transformation of their lives. And behind it all was Jesus.

Where is it happening for you? What’s the ordinary thing that you want to give over to Christ to become something new? What’s the extraordinary thing that Jesus is doing in your life and in this world? Thanks be to God.

[i] “Personally, I am Panmillenialist,” 12/27/2006, Black Pheobe blog, http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/archives/fun_stuff/.

Deep Waters 1

Isaiah 43:1-7 (RSV)
But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
"Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior,
I give Egypt as your ransom,
Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you.
Because you are precious in my eyes,
and honored, and I love you,
I give human beings in exchange for you,
peoples in exchange for your life.
Fear not, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, Give up,
and to the south, Do not withhold;
bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made."

There is no glory in old family photos…especially the ones that are pictures of me. We have just passed the Christmas season and a lot of us have gathered together with family and one of the things that tend to happen on such occasions is the traditional bringing out of the old pictures. There's something about looking at pictures of myself as a child, or even pictures from younger days that makes me cringe. It's not that I was a horrible-looking child; it's just that those pictures remind me of the child that is still a part of me, the child that I try to hide from the world.

You know you're really committed to a long-term relationship with someone when you allow them to see these pictures of yourself. I remember when the folks first pulled out the old photos and home movies to show Suzanne when we were still dating. It was a terrifying experience. There was me at the age of 10 with hair (!) hanging down to my eyes, mugging for the camera. There was me dancing around the living room floor. There was me in that awful picture that every parent has to take of their child - the nude baby in the bathtub picture. How embarrassing!

What is it about those pictures that make me feel so uncomfortable? Why are we now taking pictures of Joel and Rachel that we can inflict on their future loves sometime down the road? The problem with those pictures, when they are pictures of us, is that they show us at a stage in our lives we like to think we’ve past. In old pictures I look so…immature, so foolish, so vulnerable. I've spent years trying to grow up. As an adult there's always been a part of me that tries to live up to an adult ideal and seeing pictures of yourself with cake all over your face just kind of blows that all right out the window. You can't be dignified and suave when you're elbow deep in frosting. Part of us runs from that image of vulnerability and child-likeness. But we don’t escape. That child is still here as well.

We don't like to be reminded that we have a vulnerable side. In a world where we must compete to survive and where strength means having no weaknesses - in a culture that says to us "Suck it up and go" and "Never let 'em see you cry" it is not fashionable or wise to let that childlike side show. Yet how different our perception of the world would be if we recognized the children still within us, if we realized that who we really are are creatures still growing and never outgrowing our need for others or God. How different our leaders would look! You know, I'll bet that Barbara Bush has a nude baby in the bathtub picture of George W.

Garrison Keillor tells a wonderful story of one of the rites of passage in his fictional village of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. He talks about how, in the middle of the great snowstorms of winter, the teenagers would get a garbage can lid and tie it to the back of a car. (Don’t try this, by the way, if it should ever decide to snow again.) But in this tradition they would take turns riding on the garbage lid down the snow-covered streets. He said that when you got up to 30 miles an hour it stopped being fun. Since your legs had to hang over the side snow would get up your pants legs and fill your britches with snow. The great fun was taking a turn riding in the back seat of the car, looking out the rear window at the victim being pulled along behind, watching him or her lose any dignity they might have had, bouncing up and down helpless behind the car, their pants filling with snow.

Keillor says that it was a way of reminding them of who they were. You couldn't have any pretensions to superiority after riding on the garbage can lid because everyone had seen you at your most foolish and most vulnerable. There's a certain kind of comfort in that. You cannot be other than who you are after such an experience.

Old family photos and garbage can lids are as good a place as any to begin when we talk about an experience like baptism. Today is the day in the church calendar when we recall the baptism of Jesus by John in the river Jordan. It's a day when we celebrate God's gift of baptism which Jesus prepared us for by leading the way through the waters. Yet it is so hard for us to grasp what baptism really means and how we should approach it. Most of the time we don't spend a lot of energy thinking about baptism and yet, along with communion, it is one of the two major sacraments of the church.

It is interesting to me that the Old Testament passage chosen to be read along with the story of Jesus' baptism today has nothing to do with the sacrament of baptism, though it does mention passing through the waters. Isaiah chapter 43 is not talking about our baptism or even Jesus' baptism - it is talking about coming home.

The people who are coming home are the Jews who have been scattered throughout the world due to the Exile. It is 500 years before the coming of Jesus and the Jewish nation has been utterly defeated. The Northern kingdom had fallen first and then later the nation of Judah fell to the Babylonians and the people of the land had been dragged off to Babylon and Egypt. The temple had been destroyed; the king of the line of David was taken from the throne.

The people faced a great theological crisis. God had released them from slavery telling them that they would be given a land that was to be theirs. God had blessed David and told him that his descendents would rule forever. Now there was no land and there was no king and some were beginning to wonder if God had forgotten them.

To put it very simply, the Jews were at the lowest point in their long history. They were weak and vulnerable and unable to help themselves. They could not point to any strength that they had or any achievement they had accomplished. They were far from independent; they were utterly dependent. It was at this time that God came to them with a word of hope.

"Don't be afraid," God said, "for I have redeemed you." Redeemed here means "I have paid the ransom to release you. I have bought you back from slavery." Then God throws in the astounding word of good news. The same God who had warned the people about straying from God. The same God who had sent the prophets to tell them about a coming disaster. This same God now tells them, "I have called you by name and you are mine."

I have called you by name and you are mine. Mine, all mine! The people of God couldn't hear that word while they still had a kingdom. In their moments of strength and power they couldn't or wouldn't hear God offering to be with them or telling them not to be afraid. It was only when they recognized their own vulnerability that God could come to them with a note of grace or hope.

That is what makes this passage appropriate to talking about baptism. Not because it prophetically told about what Jesus would do, but because it reminds us that Christ's work in baptism is to offer that same good news of hope and grace to us - the real us behind all of our masks and facades.

A lot of folks wonder why it is that the United Methodist Church baptizes even young infants. Why is it that we don’t, like some other denominations, wait until a child is “of age,” when they can claim for themselves the gift of salvation that God offers in Jesus Christ? Why do we open the door to baptism so widely? Don’t we cheapen what this water means when we place it on the heads of infants? Wouldn’t it be far more effective to do it when it could “mean something” to the child?

But what is it that we’re saying when we say these things? Even when we baptize adults is it the fully-formed mature person who can comprehend all that the mystery means who receives God’s grace, or is it still really the young infant, the vulnerable soul of a person that God touches. There is nothing we can do to earn the gift that is given to us - the gift symbolized by this water. We can't succeed in some great test, we can't know all that there is to know. We can't say some magic words that will prove we understand, because we can never understand the magnitude of this gift of water. The young infant is just as prepared as the learned adult to receive the gift of God's love.

It is a gift that can only be received in weakness and vulnerability, when our neediness is clear. It is a gift that cuts through all of the pretensions we have and all of the professions we make to strength and competence. We are all incompetent when it comes to entering the kingdom. We are all beggars at the banquet. We are all children once more, and what is it that children do? They laugh ferociously and cry pitifully as if life, as if every moment of life, really mattered.

That's the real rub in this baptism story. We don't think about it and we don't regard it much because we're not really sure life does matter. It doesn't need to matter when we're at the top of our game. It doesn't need to matter if we feel secure. But when it all falls apart, as it does for every one of us in the midst of our tragedies and trials, life really matters and it takes a kind of spiritual poverty to appreciate the abundance of life God offers.

There’s also a message of courage and endurance in the baptismal water. Isaiah, in talking to the exiles, reminds them that they had been here before. They had been threatened with destruction before, but they had passed through deep waters and God was with them. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but now they were servants of Yahweh. They may have been no people, but now they were God’s people. They could cling to this God who had brought them through deep waters before and had promised to do so again.

If you have been baptized, you have passed through deep waters as well. The ancients were terrified of deep water because to them it represented the chaos that threatens all life. Deep water symbolized the forces of darkness that always hover on the margins, ready to break forth in death and destruction. That fear still remains. When I am kayaking I still have an irrational moment of terror when I realize that I am traveling over a deep channel. Whether the water is 7 feet deep or 70 feet deep doesn’t really make a difference because I couldn’t stand in either one, but somehow the murky depths of the 70 foot water are much more threatening. Deep water, our minds tell us, is dangerous.

But Christians look at water differently. Paul says in Romans that when we are baptized, yes, we are baptized into a death like Christ’s death. When we pass under the waters we are passing into that death. But we are also raised with Christ into a new life. We share, not only Jesus’ death, but also his resurrection. What God intends is for these waters to represent life.

That’s why Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, when he was fighting his own demons would yell at them, “I am baptized. I am baptized!” It was his way of reminding them, and himself, that no power in the universe was stronger than the love that had claimed him in Christ Jesus. Our baptism was not meant to be a one-time event but something we claim every day, reminding us of God’s claim on our lives, of God’s promise to forgive our sins and God’s promise of eternal life. It’s also the thing that makes us part of a family – God’s family which we know in the church.

So today we come to the baptismal font once more, a broken and hurting people - intoxicated with our own independence and alienated from each other and God. We see this water which once cascaded over our brother Jesus, opening the door for our own salvation through following him. Here God meets us where we most need to be met - not in the place of our greatest strengths, but in our weaknesses. Not in the Olan Mills studio portrait, but in the nude baby in the bathtub.

God says, "I have called you by name and you are mine...You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you. I will give people in exchange for you and nations in exchange for your life." And what does God ask in return? That we accept that we are accepted. That we refuse the lies that the world tells us about who we are and what we are meant to be. And that we follow our brother Jesus through the waters and beyond. Thanks be to God.