[Please note the Reconciling Ministries Network materials in the bulletin.
Please respond if you can and will – by using the offering plate today or
sending in on your own. This is not an official United Methodist offering. In
fact, official UM monies cannot be used for GLBT ministries! So this ministry
depends upon our contributions.]
I greet you still as the first and so far the only Reconciling Congregation
in the state of Nevada – but God is not done with us yet – you bet! Mark
Bowman said at the first convocation of Reconciling Congregations in Chicago
some 20 years ago, “Every congregation is reconciling – we cannot help it,
that is who we are! Some of us know it already, some are just learning,
others will take their time.” Just to remind you of my good taste and
better judgment --I invited Bob Olmstead (pastor here in the 80s, now
retired nearby) to preach today. He is otherwise occupied, so I am the next
best thing – once again! (My special thanks to all those who have covered
for me in so many ways – This is my first time preaching since the Sunday
before Christmas!) For moral support, I do possess Bob’s sermon of three
years ago this Sunday, First UMC, Palo Alto, entitled, “A Reconciling
Church: What Other Kind Is There?”
Bob cites Paul’s claim that God reconciles us to “Godself through Christ”
and gives us “the ministry of reconciliation,” then begins the sermon –
Reconciliation is the work of God. It’s what God does. Because
reconciliation is the defining work of God, reconciliation is the
primary work of the Church. And we are the Church – we are the Church –
so reconciliation is our primary work. God entrusted it to us. God’s
work: now our work.
Sin, in the Bible, means separation –separation from God, separation
from each other. This is the condition known as sin. Separation is the
opposite of reconciliation. So we are against it.
For reconciliation. Against sin (separation). That’s about it.
That’s as good a definition of the work of the Church as I know. . . .
Being a Christian means taking on the work God entrusts to us, doing the
work that God began in Jesus Christ: the work of reconciliation.
Overcoming separation (sin). Bringing people together, with each other
and with God.
For reconciliation. Against separation.
We don’t expect Morgan Adam, on this day of his infant baptism, to get all
of this at once. (Remember what Mark Twain said when asked if he believed
in infant baptism? “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it!”) But your grasp of
Bob’s message begins today, Morgan Adam, -- and with the help of your
brother, your parents, your grandparents and your godparents – in the
context of this and even other congregations – you will get where Bob is
headed. By the grace of God, we all will get where Bob is headed. It can
be a long scary road.
Baptism from the beginning is filled with such trials and tribulations that
Jesus uses it as an image for his own death. [In the spirit of Nelson
Mandela, surely one of the Christ-like figures of our time, the first
Indigenous head of state in Latin America will takes office in Bolivia this
week – Bolivia where the people just stopped privatization of their water by
a transnational corporation! Last week the first Woman heads of state in
either Africa or Latin America took office in Liberia and in Chile! All
have arisen from the costly struggles of their people.] Baptism and the
story of Jonah make the me think of the Children’s Defense Fund slogan
applied to all of our lives at some points – “Help me, dear Lord, the sea is
so wide, and my boat is so small!” Jesse Jackson likes to say, about
Jonah’s boat and ours, “We may have come over on different boats, but we’re
all in the same boat now!” Even our collective boat is so small, and the
sea we all face so wide.
Morgan Adam, this is your world, our world, and welcome to it! I’m not
going into all its threats and dangers and the special messes we of its
youngest species are making of it. You will learn all that soon enough.
[Imagine a world, a universe so vast, that we can launch a rocket this week,
capable of going 36,000 miles an hour – yet it has to travel more than nine
years just to reach the outermost planet -- known to us thus far! And a
universe so vital, that in the caves of mountains surrounding you alone,
mountains as old as forever, in recent years 27 new species of life have
been found in caves! Is that amazing, or what?] This is your world, this is
your God – who creates all the world and loves it so much! God whose Spirit
in Christ gives us care and responsibility – response ability – for and with
the whole world – in all her intricacy, enormity, complexity, and diversity!
Beginning this week John Emerson is offering a six-week class on Thursday
mornings at 10 – “From Jesus to Christ.” That is where the church year
takes us – from the life of Jesus in events of Christmas, Epiphany, Lent,
Passion, Easter, and Pentecost Day – to the birth of Church, the Body of
Christ – in all the ways affirmed in our baptismal and our membership vows –
to the ends of the earth and of time. Morgan Adam, this is your
down-payment, your investment in that promise. We who witness to your
baptism, your “second birthday” into God’s life for the world, renew that
promise in our own lives today – To pray for all the world! To express our
opinions for all the world! To serve those in need in all the world! And
to work for just and peaceful changes in all the world!
So we are deeply into the “Jesus” time of the year – his own baptism, his
temptation, his calling of disciples, his healing, his exorcising, his
forgiving of sins and starting to get himself in trouble. One of our Sunday
School students who is a particular fan of horses told Julie she is putting
Jesus into all her “horse play” – She just loves Jesus so much! Three
year-old Samantha used to come to church with her dad in San Rafael. Once
in speaking of me she told her dad, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! All John ever
does is talk about Jesus!” “Jesus loves me, this I know.” (Karl Barth says
that’s the gospel in miniature!) “O, how I love Jesus!” “Jesus loves the
little children.” “Jesus is the rock of my salvation.” “What a friend we
have in Jesus.” “J-e-s-u-s!” Morgan Adam, Jesus has such faith in us –
such faith in you! Mark is just fourteen verses into his gospel, and Jesus
is already calling disciples. No questions, no qualifications, no
credentials, no references – Only, the time is fulfilled! The kingdom of
God (God’s revolution, God’s “freedom movement!”) is at hand! Repent,
believe, -- and follow me!
I don’t care who you are, Jesus says in effect. Just follow me! You don’t
have to prove yourself to me. Just follow me! Nobody is too young or too
old to follow, too strong or too feeble to follow, too rich or too poor to
follow (though being poor does make it easier!), too ugly or too
good-looking to follow (Thank God!), too pale or too much of color to
follow, too gay or too straight to follow, too hip or too old-fashioned to
follow – Just drop everything you ever had! Just say good-bye to everyone
you ever knew! Just forget everything you ever learned! And follow me –
one step at a time, one foot after the other, baby steps, Morgan Adam! – in
bits and pieces, fits and starts, stumbles and falls. With nothing but your
baptisms, the gifts of your very own lives, I will make you fishers of
people!
The disciples in Mark never quite get it, never quite grasp what Jesus is
saying and doing, from start to finish. Yet Jesus has no other plan but
them – no other plan but us! We are it, for better, for worse – Jesus lives
or dies in this world according to us whom he so entrusts with his life and
his work! Surely we cannot prove to be more resistant, more reluctant, more
recalcitrant, more deadly to God’s call and purpose, than Jonah! No way
these folks are repenting, God – Find some other sucker to preach to them!
Even if they do repent, you’ll just change your mind and forgive them. Go
on, get it over with, and I’m out of here! Not so fast, says God, looking
suspiciously like this big fish on the bulletin cover – I have no other plan
to save this great city but you! Either you preach, or you’re blubber
forever. Morgan Adam, innocent as you are you remind us we do not choose
God. God chooses us! (2x) No way to escape that huge mystery.
[Bishop William Willimon puts it, “Every time we baptize, no matter the age
of the person being baptized, as we initiate this one into the Christian
life, in effect we say to that person, ‘The life you live is not your own.
You are named, claimed, and commandeered. God has plans for you. God has a
job for you. This is good news because the saddest of all sad things, in
this world, is an uncalled and unclaimed life. Now, go live out your
calling.”]
We do not have to know any more about who this baby is, or about how this
baby will grow, and who this baby will become – what kind of person, with
what kind of identity, in what kind of vocation, any baby will become. All
that remains wondrous unfolding mystery. All we know is this baby is
God’s. All babies are God’s! We are God’s now, we are God’s forever – no
matter how long that is. We are loveable, callable, claimable, baptizable
just as we are. And if we are baptizable, we are communicable (capable of
communion!) and confirmable. We are marriageable. We are consecratable.
We are ordainable. The radical love of God for each of us and for all of us
is just as simple as that!
God, give me the sense to go back to Bob Olmstead, then to shut up –
Some years ago a young man stopped me in the aisle of the church at
the conclusion of the worship service. He had a wild look in his eyes
and he didn’t bother to introduce himself. He said, “I want you to
baptize me, I want you to baptize me right now!” I tried to get him to
slow down and catch his breath, but he was very agitated and kept
repeating, “Baptize me now, baptize me in the name of Jesus Christ, my
name is not important.” I said, “I’m not going to do that. You have to
come into my office and talk to me first.” With reluctance he agreed.
We went into my office and to make a long story short, he said that the
Devil was torturing him with the terrible sinful homosexual desires, and
if I would just baptize him in the name of Jesus Christ he wouldn’t be
gay anymore.
I remember trying to calm him down. I remember trying to put into
words the good news that his sexuality was a gift from God, that God
made him the way he was and God loved him the way he was. He literally
screamed when I said that. He screamed, “Nooo!” I tried again to say
that God loved him as he was, but he leaped up and ran out of the room
and out of the church. I never saw him again.
What made him hate himself like that? I worry that it was the
Church. . . It’s a dream of mind that the Church – this church – could
be a place where anyone can leave self-hate at the door, can leave
self-doubt, misunderstanding, genuine brokenness at the door. A place
where we experience and practice reconciliation: reconciliation with
God, reconciliation with each other, and reconciliation with the hidden
or rejected parts of ourselves.
“. . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself, . . . and
entrusting the message of reconciliation to US.”
We are a reconciling church; what other kind is there?
Thanks, Bob. Thanks, God. Amen.
