I know you have every right to expect me to
preach twice as long as usual. I will try to disappoint you. Really, I
have not preached here in three weeks, out of respect to the storms of our
lives. Last week we did not even meet at all – how weird is that? Thank
you for letting us save the costs of the bulletins. Two weeks ago, gripped
with snowy uncertainty, I largely read poems of the magi. Even three weeks
ago, Christmas Sunday, before we grasped the magnitude of the tsunami,
before our brother Sam Song died, as we were mourning Dee Johnson, we were
fairly laid back, personally reflective, in our time together. Perhaps now
the real world comes crashing back in. We know that worship is work of all
the people of God for the life of all of God’s world.
First, God’s promise to us is cosmic! God
has been working on it for billions of years! God is so much more creative,
so much more imaginative, -- and the promise of life is so much grander, so
much richer, so much more complex and diverse, -- than anything we can
imagine! Though we stand in awe and anguish at the tsunami, -- and many
already have started to do what we can to respond, and there are other ways
we can work on together – kits of supplies – plans to join work teams --
still God’s cosmic promise of life can be overpowering to us, --
intimidating, even immobilizing, -- as to Job when God addresses Job’s
questions out of the whirlwind! For the voice of God thunders upon the
waters, cries the psalmist! God shakes the wilderness and strips the
forests! Yet God is always enthroned in the midst of the flood, giving
strength to the people.
And that is at least some small part of what
we are invited to experience as we pass through the waters of cosmic baptism
this morning. As parents in Africa say when they lift up their new-born
children to vast skies in the middle of night: “Behold the only power
greater than your own!” The scandal of baptism is, we play a part in the
cosmic promise and power of God! We reap the earthquakes, we ride the
waves. We stand before devastations in life, even in our own lives. In the
promise of baptism, God stands with us, always! In all ways, in all
things. God even goes before us, making a way out of no way for us. This
every same God, Isaiah proclaims, who stretches out heavens and spreads out
the earth, gives breath and spirit to all peoples, all creatures, who walk
on the earth.
The question comes round again in our crazy
culture about how to connect scriptural stories of God’s creation with
evolutionary facts of our own creatednesses! It is the lead article by our
friend Deidre Pike in this week’s Reno News & Reviews. The executive
director of the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie Scott, is
speaking this Thursday at UNR School of Nursing, 4 PM, on “The Evolution of
Creationism.” We are invited. For me evolution enhances and enriches all
the mysteries of God’s creativity. Everything and all peoples come from a
single source in the spark of God in the beginning. Yet everything and all
peoples still surprise us with fresh experience and exploration, discernment
and discovery, yet today! We are still finding new galaxies of the stars
God has made, and thousands of species of ocean life we never knew existed!
Evolution is God’s way of saying to us, I have been at this, for you, for
billions of years, -- and still, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Surely, we have seen little or nothing of
our own nature. When we fully absorb the impact of our armed camp of a
world today, and the threats of all kinds to our children, our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren to all generations, we had better hope we as a
species are still evolving! Still moving from reckless adolescence, as the
last-created among all the wonders of God, to a much more reflective,
embracive, inclusive adulthood. Surely every other species on the planet is
hoping and praying each day that our species is still evolving! That God is
not done with us humans yet! But we cannot remain so sinful, so
self-centered, in the sense of human-self-centered. The point God keeps
making to Job and to us is that creation is not anthropocentric! The earth
does not revolve around us! Though once we were certain it did, and we
still act as if it did.
That is the second point of baptism: We are
connected as covenant people to the cosmic promise and power of God. For
Isaiah goes on to say, this very same God who creates the heavens and earth
also takes each by the hand and calls each and all of us in “righteousness,”
-- in compassion for and solidarity with one another, in communion with and
struggle for one another, -- even as Jesus, so clearly divine in origin,
today embraces our every human condition and circumstance in his baptism and
call to the mission and to the ministries of his everyday life. In Jesus,
for us, the graceful embraces the sinful and offers us life and liberation
in the midst of everyday death and oppression, -- light to the nations,
Isaiah calls it, -- sight to the blind, freedom to the imprisoned.
The story of this divine Jesus, and our very
human story, are so simple, according to first preacher Peter: God is no
respecter of, shows no partiality to, any particular person or people, --
which we may interpret in Jesus to mean as well, God respects and is partial
to every person, to every people! No matter the nation, the color, the
class, the creed, the gender, the language, the lifestyle, or anything else
about us, all God asks is that we honor our own createdness (as we will be
doing again in Reconciling Sunday next week), which is, our own
unfinishedness, -- not to flatter ourselves that we’ve found final answers,
-- liberal or conservative, Christian or other tradition, -- but rather just
stay on the course, stay in the creation, with God, -- depend upon the
continuing revelation, the unveiling and unfolding of God’s promise and
power in our lives and in the lives of all beings, -- and just try to do the
right thing as we see it each step of the way!
We are called, the best ways we can, to
witness our whole lives to Jesus, “who went about doing good [not
necessarily well but good!] and healing all who were oppressed by the
devil,” -- for God is with us, now and forever! The season that begins with
the waters of baptism and calling concludes (in just a few short weeks) with
the oils of transfiguration and healing, for the facing of all things in
life, -- even the powers that serve to put us to death, as Jesus is put to
death. For the dead are no less a part of God and God’s creation than are
the temporarily-living! In God’s hands, our bodies are infinitely
recyclable, even as our lives are uniquely unrepeatable. The defining
paradox of each of our lives: infinitely recyclable, yet uniquely
unrepeatable. The amazing promise of our baptisms is, nothing created ever
is lost to God! Nothing created ever is lost. Like Jesus, we are God’s
“delight” and “beloved” to God from the very beginning! No matter what
anyone else may call us, no matter even what we call ourselves, in God’s
sight each one of our names is, “My Delight! My Beloved!” Before we do
anything with our gifts of life at all. Just because we are!
Coming back to the waters we are to pass
through, -- to touch, to splash and exult in as we speak or shout out the
names by which we are known to God and in all of creation, -- coming back to
the context of snows and tsunamis, -- God’s word, to us is like the waters:
We cannot live with them, we cannot live without them. Yet they are always
there for us, drop by drop. Every drop of water that ever falls anywhere on
this earth has been here from the beginning. Every particle, every part of
anything or anybody who makes up our lives has been around, and will be
around, in some form, forever! There is no getting away from life! Where
else does anything, anyone have to go? Where else do we have to go? But to
the living word of a living God for a living people of a living faith by the
living Spirit of a living Christ? Come, let us live, let us love life,
together! Amen.
Rev. John Auer
