The service of “Holy Baptism for Children
and Others Unable to Answer for Themselves,” as we call it on p. 39 of The
Hymnal, implies an offering up of the lives of children by parents and
sponsors. It is first and foremost always an act of thanksgiving to God for
the miracle-life of each child! It implies as well the stewardship, the
trusteeship of parents, sponsors, family and church for the lives of
children. Implicit in that is our strong sense of limitation as to the
exercise of any ultimate lasting control in the lives of our children. In
effect, says the poet Gibran, “our children are not our children.” They are
like arrows from the past into the future. They pass through our lives. We
love them, keep them, care for them the very best we can. At the same time
we are forever letting them go.
In that strange, mysterious and downright
frightening way, we are linked to Isaac and his father Abraham here. His
mother Sarah does not even enter the story. How could she? How could any
mother agree to the willful self-sacrifice of her child? On any altar, no
matter how holy or how patriotic? Abraham tries to assure Isaac, who
observes, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for burnt
offering?”, that “God himself will provide the lamb for burnt offering.”
Yet and still Abraham puts his son through what can only be described as an
experience of terror. He builds an altar, lays the wood for burning, binds
his son, lays him on the wood, reaches out to take the knife to kill his
son. Only then does God intervene. Something is going on between God and
father here to exclude what we call the well-being and best interests of the
child!
Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard captures it by
the fancy phrase, “teleological suspension of the ethical!” Which seems to
be saying, sometimes the end -- such as here the unquestioning trust and
obedience of Abraham before God -- is so holy, so patriotic, so compelling
as to be justified by any means! Including the sacrifice of our children
and of the full promise to us represented by them. I think we live in a
time to question and to challenge the blind turning over of children to God,
to church or to state, to repression or to war. Listen to the child in us!
We are Abraham, we are Isaac, we are even Sarah when we can find her.
Inside each one of us lives a scary parent, a scared child, often a helpless
bystander.
Imagine the enduring trauma to Isaac in this
moment, and to Abraham as well, if and when he lets himself be touched in
his own deepest humanity here. The poet Chana Bloch captures this in our
Words for Meditation – Abraham seems so obsessed with his “manly duty,” so
divinely charged to sacrifice, it is as if Isaac serves as beast to his
father’s burden of blind obedience. Isaac on the woodpile, Bloch says,
shares the terror of women about to be taken against their wills. “He will
remember the blade’s / white silence, a lifetime, / under his father’s
eyes.”
I remember from training in chaplaincy one
of the most moving films I ever saw – the perception through a child’s eyes
of the experience of being hospitalized – where all the “good” we are trying
to do seems like one long violation to them! We are mindful at last of the
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) of combat. I note one university now
has a “Traumatology Institute.” An organization called “Green Cross” gives
free mental services to veterans. In fact, trauma happens in everyday life
as well. New so-called “treatments” include “virtual” reenactments of
violent conflict of the very same kind kids get in video games all the
time! Perhaps hidden trauma even accounts for the vital need of such
programs as “Chrysalis” here this weekend and again in two weeks – the need
for youth to be washed again with the waters of God’s unconditional love –
restored in mind, body and spirit with the full promise of God’s goodness
both in us and for us.
We have to hope the children received in
baptism today will not experience it as anything like the trauma to Isaac
here. Yet we confess the extent to which we participate in and perpetuate
the strange, the mysterious, and the downright frightening toward our
children! How do we, how can we ever know how children experience, what
children perceive and believe, and what terror they may carry in them? In
10 AM worship just last Sunday one of our children brought boldly to our
attention how deeply hurt and fearful, how full of pain and anger, our
children can sound and even can be. I appreciated how we did not seem try
to repress that disruption of worship or rush it to any premature
conclusion. We are so thankful to Gary and Pat for the life and the work
they do as foster parents. We are so thankful to this congregation for the
love and support we may offer them and all parents and children – including
what we call the parent and the child, the authority-figure and the
obedience-figure, in each and every last one of us. What kind of God
demands to be loved out of fear? What kind of God?
We have to ask ourselves, with Monika
Hellwig, also in our Words for Meditation, what keeps us locked into “the
patterns of this self-maintaining cycle of human suffering”? How do we get
such a sense of ourselves as “unvalued, unappreciated and goalless”?
That’s a special question for Nevada, according to this week’s Reno News and
Review. An article entitled “Why is life in Nevada so lousy?”, says we seem
to end up “at the wrong end” of so many state rankings about issues of
quality and of care four our own lives and life together. The writer puts
it flatly, “The lives of some Nevadans are happy, but life in Nevada
isn’t!” I’m sure the thesis is arguable – I have not been here long. But
let us not deny facts where they may apply in ways to help us do better – by
our children as well as ourselves. What may help us -- as congregation,
community, state -- become, in Hellwig’s words, more “capable of generosity
and appreciation of others,” “of empathy and concern with their hunger and
their need”?
In the strictest sense, she adds, when we
are incapable of such perception through the eyes and lives of others --
when we are incapable of such feeling for them, such welcoming and
hospitality to them, no questions asked but assuming our common humanity
with them – then we are as much “in sin” (as we say) -- much in need to be
“rescued, redeemed, or saved” -- as “the starving person whose quality of
life is shriveled and brutalized.” In other words, we are all in this
together! All of us -- each in our way -- may be “living a life that is
unfree, less than human, and marred by needless suffering.” What we all
need and probably long for, at least in our hearts, is what Hellwig calls
“that redemption of the love-starved which consists of a radical conversion
from self-centeredness to engagement with and for others.” What else is
Jesus speaking of here, and throughout the gospels, but the call to
creative, life-giving engagement?
I got the words for this title, “Beyond Mere
Obedience,” from the name of a book by theologian Dorothee Soelle. (Next
week, Independence Sunday, we’ll try to flesh that out in terms of “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!”) When we find that the orders of
those in authority of whatever kind -- those whom we learn to obey --
conflict with the full promise of God for us -- such promise as we know in
terms of goodness and love, justice and peace -- then we are called to go
“beyond mere obedience.” Then it is not enough just to do what we always
have done -- what has been handed down to us through generations of
obedience -- as if obedience were an end in itself, rather than a means of
receiving, embodying and enjoying the full promise of God for others and for
us.
We are called beyond mere obedience even by
those words we say, or are said for us, in our baptismal vows. Not only do
we “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness,” reject the powers and
principalities in high places, and repent of our own sin – which may include
tolerance of sin done in our names. But also we “accept the freedom and
power God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever
forms they present themselves!” That is what it means “to confess Christ as
our Savior, put our whole trust in his grace [emphasis: grace!], and promise
to serve him as our Lord” are all about! Jesus himself is all about a
brand-new kind of obedience, which each one of us has to work out for
ourselves -- with proverbial “fear and trembling” -- as response-ability --
as the God-given, Christ-embodied, and Spirit-led ability to respond, in new
and changing, creative and life-giving ways, to our own lives and to life
all around us!
Paul calls us beyond mere obedience here.
Our orders, our authority and our appointment to serve in the name and the
manner of Jesus, come not from the sin that controls us but from the grace
that saves us and sets us free! Heals us and makes us whole! We are not
under law but under grace, the very fulfillment of law. ”Thanks be to God,”
proclaims Paul. Once we were slaves of sin, which may require the law to
make known to us. But now, with Jesus -- not only crucified under law – his
execution was perfectly “legal!” – but also raised to new life by grace – we
have the chance to go beyond mere obedience to that “obedience from the
heart” that leads us from sin – domination, intimidation, fear and control –
to righteousness! Righteousness is no less demanding than sin, as gospel is
no less demanding than law, and peace is no less demanding than war.
We remember the promise of Jeremiah 31 --
God will not write law on stone, outside us, any longer. Rather, God will
write God’s very own life directly on the heart of every believer! Each one
of us may come to know and to name, to respond and to follow God for
ourselves! Each one of us may become expert both on our own identity –
which often takes a lot more work than we even dream of –and on the
integrity of our relationships with any and with all others. All of each
one of us is in all of this all together with all of the others of us in all
of this world. Let me say that one more time . . . And the church (even
without understanding that last line!) dared to say, amen!
