Sermon:

[ previous | index | next ]

Forced Commitment? – The Baptism of Christ

By Charles Rush

January 11, 2009

[ Audio (mp3, 7.0Mb) ]

e opening scene in the movie ‘The Deer Hunter' takes place at a wedding in a small steel town in Pennsylvania. They are at a wedding, a Russian Orthodox wedding. The couple have exchanged their vows, they've exchanged their rings. They are standing in front of the priest, full of the lusty romantic mirth that makes couples just glow on their wedding day. The priest pours wine into a special glass. It has one stem, with two cups. It is a Russian tradition to bring you good luck. The couple looks at each other, together they put their lips to their glasses, and together they lift the glasses and gulp down the first wine they share as husband and wife. The whole congregation erupts with applause. Only the camera zooms in so that we can see a single drop of red wine that falls from the cup and stains the brides wedding dress. We don't know what it means, but we know that it is a portent of bad things to come. In the midst of smiling at their joy, you find yourself biting your lip anticipating the sadness of the future that is sure to come.

There is a pathos to this story of the baptism of Jesus at the outset because we know the end of the story. All of that tender optimism that is contained in the communication from God ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased' at the start of Jesus life… It will be answered by Jesus many years later, after an unjust trial, after 2 days of torture by the Roman guard, Jesus will be hanging on a cross, wondering aloud to a sky that is deafeningly silent, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” It is a good thing that we can't see the end from the beginning. Here we are at the beginning. The young Jesus has no idea what awaits him and how all the difficulties of his life will prepare him to deal with this most incredibly difficult personal suffering.

Baptism is like that. It is a call to commitment because commitment, Christians discovered, is key to the spiritual life. 500 years before Jesus, the philosopher Socrates, once observed that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.' Socrates was surrounded by most of the same definitions of success that we are surrounded by. There were men who had great wealth in Athens. There were men with great power. Then, as now, these seemingly obvious vehicles to success were elusive. Rich men found genuine fulfillment elusive. Powerful men found genuine meaning evanescent. Socrates explained that they had the tools for success but not the character because their lives were not committed to the pursuit of ‘excellence' or ‘virtue'. At the end of the day, he argued that wealth comes and goes, as does power. But the quest for a meaningful life is to develop our character through prosperity and adversity. At the end of our lives, we may be near wealth and we may be near power but we all go out of this earth, the way we came in, alone. We leave having only our character, only ourselves. And if we have been using our power to shield ourselves from developing our character… If we have been using our riches to divert ourselves from the task of maturing our character, then we have missed the point of living and many people do miss the point. Most people miss the point. This is why they are not internally content. This is why they come apart over small setbacks in their lives. They've never really reflected on what our life is all about in the first place. Their character is simply not strong enough.

Christians took this observation one step further. They realized, looking at the life of Jesus, that it wasn't just the unexamined life that wasn't worth living. It was also, the uncommitted life that never gets to the deeper reasons for which we were put here on earth. Authentic living, profound living, is focused on character. And what our character finds ultimately fulfilling is not simply excellence or virtue. It is excellence in love.

The life of love, it turns out, keeps unfolding at deeper levels throughout our life if we open ourselves to it. We experience the joy of emotional resonance with friends that we meet that are interesting. Perhaps we experience the blush of romance, like the wonderful scene in ‘Romeo and Juliet' when Romeo sees Juliet at the masked ball and he is so infatuated with her that he doesn't really see anyone else. He just pines for her and all of his friends find him so annoying… But he can't help it.

And if we are lucky, we will have real friendships develop where our friends really, really know us well. These are people you can trust. These are people that will be honest with you. These are people that genuinely want what is best for you. And you only access this because you are committed to each other. You don't have to say it. You just live it. You express it in what you do.

And if you are really, really lucky, you will be privileged to live with people that are so focused on fulfilling those around them that their own fulfillment comes as a by-product. Christians called this love ‘Agape'. Jesus once said, ‘Greater love hath no one than that they lay down their lives for others'. Certainly heroism is one dimension of it. But it is also part of the quiet dignity that you see every day as well.

My grandparents had that kind of love. It was very endearing to watch growing up as a child. They were so tender towards each other and united… They practiced a reciprocal, mutual love over many, many years and they were tight as a result. We tried every which way, as kids to work one against the other, to no avail.

And when they were in their late 80's my grandmother had dementia and had to be put in a nursing home after a fall. I would go visit my grandfather. Our family always wanted me to try to get him back out fishing or hunting and I would always bring gear in case. We'd wake up before the dawn as he always did. I'd give him some options. He'd say, ‘why don't we go see my girlfriend?' And on the way, he would stop and get her something that she needed and something that she didn't need- like flowers or her favorite candy.

Most of the time, she didn't know who he was. He would reach over kiss her face, fix her hair, sometimes she would even become agitated that this stranger was touching her. But when he would start talking she would get more and more relaxed, her eyes moving back and forth trying to figure out, trying to remember why the sound of this one voice was so soothing. From a distance, it looked miraculous to the staff. It looked magical. In truth, it is the deeper profundity of living that opens up through committed love in its fullest expression. It opens us to real intimacy, to real access to each other's soul.

We humans are not really given over to the life of commitment. It is not what springs to mind first. Usually we stumble into it after we try a few other paths and figure out that they don't work so well. I was reflecting on that existentially a couple weeks ago, sitting in the office of my cardiologist listening to him explain that I have a situation that needs to be monitored and will need surgery in the future- perhaps not in 6 months, perhaps not for a year or two. But in the mean-time, big guy, you could help yourself out a lot by shedding a couple layers of winter weight and laying off the eggnog for the foreseeable future.

I was a little numb, not really hearing everything he said. When he asked me if I had any questions, the one I wanted to ask was ‘How about a little Christmas bon-bon?' But the answer would be ‘No'. ‘How about a little fruit cake- it has fruit in it?' ‘No' again.

I had a little pity party for myself, moped around about how there is no more fun in ‘funtown' anymore. I got angry at the Universe for being so cruel as to present me with this hardship. Eventually, I fell asleep and had an anxiety dream that I was in a big, dark house and I couldn't find the doors to get out, woke up at 4 in the morning. I'm sitting out there in the dark of the den and finally I was grateful for this insightful medical diagnosis because I remembered that, actually, I still can't afford to die-- and I really, really don't want to die either…

So … I put on the coffee pot, picked up the broken pieces of my life, and started figuring out how to live a new chapter, a different chapter. This situation is new, it is going to be different and I'm going to be different…

Those earlier chapters were great, I loved them, would stay in them… and… they are over. I had a visit from one of the Saints. Not one of the dead Saints but a living one. I could see the face of an old friend of mine, D. J. Matschiga, from South Africa. I could see his beaming smile and brown face saying to me, ‘Chuck, God is not done with you yet'.

Does that sound familiar? I bet it does. I bet you've been padding around in the living room of your mind recently, wondering what is going on. Your old world suddenly started shifting, cracking, sliding- and boom you were dizzy with change. Your old assumptions about what you would be doing, where you would be working, how much you would have- they just vanished with astonishing alacrity. Your world, your future, your identity is suddenly under threat. You don't have the resources that you thought you were going to have. This is not fun. You did not choose this but it is just here.

You are going to have to do something quite different than what you anticipated. You are going to have to change with different resources than you thought you would have. This is not really what you want to do- that is somewhat beside the point. Your issues are just here- period. What are you going to do?

You are going to find a different set of virtues. You are going to adjust your expectations. You are going to find new disciplines. This, in fact, is the real meaning of Lent, which is still a few weeks away. But Christians, from the earliest days, realized that we needed to build into the year, some time to practice ‘denial' so that we can develop the spiritual discipline of doing without, the spiritual discipline of sacrifice because during our life, we will all have to go through this. And some of us will have to face true tragedy and genuinely ignominious suffering. It is simply a given in this life.

We don't get to have things always fall our way. We are not exempt from hardship, illness. All of us will have to prepare for our own death. The spiritual objective of our life is not to avoid these things, but to live through them with maturity and profundity. This is simply part of the human experience.

I got a note from one of my Harvard friends this week, comparing notes on what will likely be the best movie of the year, “Slumdog Millionaire”. We were talking about the spiritual message of the movie, particularly relevant in times like these. He said, ‘it reminds us of what many fairy tales also teach, that every experience we've ever had has equipped us somehow for the adventure that is ahead of us. And the heroes among us are those who live confidently as they plumb their life for the random word that is already within them, and that was (seemingly) planted there just for this moment of trial.”

You may not want to be in this trial. Most of the significant trials of our lives we don't choose. But here you are… What is within you that has been planted there for just this moment of trial? Open your eyes; even though this is difficult, even though you don't have enough resources, you are on an adventure. Your life is a great and wonderful life. You are God's child in whom God is well pleased. What is it within you that is what you need for a time such as this?

Christians have a saying to draw upon your deeper strength in times of great trial, indecision, and difficulty. They say, “remember your baptism.” My grandmother used to say to me, “Remember who you are and whose you are.”

When you were just a baby, your parents poured water over your head, and promised that you would follow in the spiritual path of your ancestors. The Church was full of people who also promised to support you as you go. And in Confirmation, we actually got you to stand in front of the congregation and pledge yourself that you would follow in this way. Bright eyed, young teenagers, full of conviction- you had precious little idea of what you were actually committing yourself to… and isn't that largely the point?

Because almost all of us have these critical points in our lives where the going gets particularly difficult… We become confused and disoriented. We know that we have a big problem. We reach that point described by Dante in the opening stanza's of The Divine Comedy:

“In the middle of the journey of my life,
I found myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost.
Oh, it is hard to speak of what I saw there,
Which even in recall renews my fear.”

He feels like he can't find his way back out of this foreboding tangle of overgrown wilderness that has become his life. This is the characteristic experience of our adult lives. It is not an ‘if' but a ‘when' that this will happen to us. We are genuinely confused and afraid, no longer sure how much of this is of our making, how much of it is a seemingly hostile world that will do us harm, but we know we are ill-equipped and in danger.

These are the moments when we wish more than anything to find the stream that leads us out of the tangle. This is when we need to splash our faces with the renewing waters of our baptism, to remember again to ourselves the spiritual direction that we have lost. We need to hear for ourselves, sometimes we need to hear from our loved one and our friends, ‘You are a beloved child of God in whom God is well pleased.' You need to remember who you are and whose you are.

For better and for worse, what you need for just this moment of trial is already within you. This is the challenge for you. This is the particular spiritual shape of what this wilderness means for you. You are a beloved Child and God wants you to find what is authentic and true within you as you recover the ‘straight way' again. And all of these people around you are with you and for you as you re-member.

Rev. Julie is going to invite you to come forward and touch again your baptismal waters. My brothers and sisters, touch and remember, be blessed and strengthened with God's courage in the midst of difficulty, open yourselves to what God wants you to learn within through this next challenging chapter in the adventure of your life. Amen.