On the Feast of Pentecost, May 19, I had the extraordinary honor of baptizing my first grandson, Julian, at All Saints Church in Worcester. The full manuscript for my sermon can be found here.
Below are some excerpts from that sermon about what it means to be the Baptized Community oriented toward hope. I hope that it might be helpful during the summer months, when vestry agendas are a little lighter, to spend some time reflecting on these themes. Use what is below as you find it helpful.
Please note: we take a break from 21st Century Congregations in July and August. We will be back in September.
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The waters of Holy Baptism and the Holy Spirit’s presence among us today creates an extended household means that we are called (with God’s help) to care for one another and to love one another into faith. It means, to be very blunt, that we are bound together in faith not only with those to whom we are bound by blood, but with all the little children of the world to whom we are bound by water and the Spirit.
Baptism is not fire insurance. It calls upon us to move beyond familial and tribal ties to human ties across the boundaries of language, creed, or race. I know this is hard – but those kids in Gaza and Israel and Ukraine and living in poverty around the world and in this city of Worcester are also somebody’s child and grandchild, and we will renew our promises today to treat them all with dignity and respect. I want Julian to grow up knowing that and it’s our responsibility to teach him that not only by words but by our actions as he grows into the full stature of Christ, one day at a time.
You likely already know the story told by Luke in Acts of the coming of the Holy Spirit. And you may also know the story that unfolds in the Gospel reading. So today I want to focus on those dry bones from the 37th chapter of the prophet, Ezekiel. It’s a vision – a kind of dream. It’s not some zombie apocalypse. It’s an extended metaphor that comes at a terrible time in Israel’s history, the Babylonian exile. But it crosses time and space. You don’t need a theological degree to know what it feels like to be dried up and burned out and as good as dead and then cry out in desperation: can these bones live? Maybe some of us are feeling that way right now.
Christian hope is not denial. I see a lot of denial in the Church and try not to judge it too harshly because let’s face it, life is hard and the world is a mess in so many ways, and there is so much hurt and injustice. Sometimes just turning it off is necessary for survival and I get that. But Christian hope is not denial.
Nor is Christian hope wishful thinking. Wishful thinking keeps us from engaging, it keeps us spiritually immature. We pray for God to make things better, we say that it’s in God’s hands, and everything will be just fine. But Christian hope is not the same thing as wishful thinking. It’s not even a synonym for optimism, which as Seamus Heaney has put it, expects that things will just turn out well. Rather, Heaney says that hope is rooted in the conviction that there is something good worth working for. Hope is about learning to lay claim to our call to be Christ’s hands and feet in this world.
Or as Pope Francis has put it: “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”
That short creed sums it up, I think. Today Julian is being welcomed into a house of prayer, a community that prays in the quiet of our own hearts and when we gather at our tables for a shared meal and in the grandeur of places like All Saints. We pray on our own and we pray in community. We meditate in silence and we sing out with joy so that in our music, God is glorified. All of our prayers are shaped by two great commandments: love God, love neighbor.
That’s our mission statement, friends. That is the work God gives us to do. To love God whom we cannot see and to love our neighbor who is right before our eyes.
It’s easy to love humankind, generically. Right? It’s a lot harder to love that neighbor who just cut us off on the Mass Pike and flipped us the bird. Trust me, and I have some family here today, I’m preaching to myself here since I live a lot of my life on the Mass Pike and I see a lot of crazy birds out there. It’s easy to love humankind in general. It’s a lot harder to love our neighbor who has a political sign in their yard that makes us angry.
It’s easy for us to make people we don’t like or understand invisible. But the work of the Church is that when we pray to God for the hungry, we feed them. We participate in God’s work in the world because we believe it’s worth it. It’s not magic. It can be transformative and miraculous, but it’s not magic. We pray for the hungry and then we feed them. We pray for the sick and then we make a casserole or go visit them in the hospital. We pray for racial reconciliation, for full inclusion of all God’s children regardless of their sexual orientation. And then we go out and do what we need to do to make that more real. We listen and learn and grow. That’s how prayer works. And when we participate in God’s world in this way, we plant seeds of hope. We cannot control outcomes or the speed of outcomes. But by sharing in the work, we cultivate hope in our own lives and in the lives of others.
Can these bones live?
The work to which the baptized are called is to be salt, and light, and yeast in a world that has always needed, and still needs, some salt, and light, and yeast. It doesn’t take a lot of either to change things. The late Bishop, Krister Stendahl, said the work of the Church isn’t to make the whole world into a salt mine. From generation to generation we cannot control the world or even our own lives. But we can love God and we can love our neighbor today and then again tomorrow. And we can live in such a way that when people see us they might love Jesus and not hate the Church.
Can these bones live?
You bet they can. They live as the Spirit of the Living God falls afresh on all of us, as we recommit ourselves to do the work God has given us to do, work we never do alone.
