Please pray with me this morning. Gracious Lord, bless the speaking and bless the hearing, that your Word may take root in our hearts and bear fruit in our lives, for the healing of the world you so love, and to the glory of your holy name. Amen.
How many of you journal? Maybe many of you are ashamed to answer yes, since journaling sounds a bit like keeping a diary, and that somehow sounds like it’s only for little girls. I know journaling has recently grown in popularity in the last decades, for all types of arena of our lives. One of my college classmates started a dream journal, and she commented recently that she was amused at all the interesting things going on in her head at night. There are journals for diet and exercise, some of my friends’ journals are full of sketches and poetry, there are even spiritual journals. Ron Klug wrote a book called, “how to keep a spiritual journal,” and he outlines the benefits of journaling, including emotional release and clarity. The primary effect of journaling in my opinion is that it connects us to the stories of our own lives. In the process of writing down the patterns of our days, we begin to notice who we are: what we care about, what we are afraid of, what still hurts in our past, and where we want to go in the future. We become more connected to our own story.
One of the most empowering things I have had to do as someone who desires to become a Pastor is write about my life. I’m acutely aware of this as the time to write my final reports on this internship year approaches, but way back at the beginning of my decision to walk down this path, before I even went to seminary, I had to write a lot about my own life. In order to enter the candidacy process, it is required to write a seven-page spiritual biography. It takes a lot of gut-wrenching hours to write about your life with honesty, and a lot of guts, too. But when you have those words in front of you, and you look back at the canvas of your life, you start to notice patterns, like trails of brightly colored paint that connect over the years and pathways, activities that gave you life, people who have been treasured companions, doorways that opened and some that closed. For me, the experience of writing about my own life in my preparation for this work helped me to see not only that my life had a certain trajectory, but that God’s hand had been painting away, too, even when I least expected it.
The pattern that God paints in the life of every Baptized child of God is the rhythm of dying and rising: of death and new life in the waters of Baptism. I’ve heard that Martin Luther would wake up every morning and splash water on his face and remind himself of his baptism. He trusted that God had claimed him as a beloved child, and that God was making him into a new creation, there every morning calling new life out of death. In the readings today, we see that both Jesus in the Gospel and Elijah in the reading from First Kings raise people from the dead. Jesus and Elijah are said to be great prophets of God by the people, because the power to raise from the dead is seen as God’s work. We know that the way the Gospel story ends is with Jesus’ own death and resurrection, and in Baptism, we hear a promise that we have been united with Christ in that death, and will rise with him, too. The promise to rise with Christ is both for the end of our days, but also for the pattern of our lives while our hearts still beat.
The readings we heard today are both cases of great prophets raising the sons of widows from the dead. In the days before pensions and retirement funds, people relied on their families for sustenance, and so when we hear in the Gospel lesson that this woman was a widow and her only son had died, not only does she have the grief of losing a child, which is a sorrow words cannot describe, she is also facing a situation where she will not be able to provide for herself. She now stands on the edge of survival. When Jesus saw her, it says in Luke, “his heart went out to her.” And he walks into the middle of the funeral procession, he touches the bier on which they carry her son, and everyone stops to look at him. Jesus makes a scene, and tells the young man to rise. You can imagine that fear did seize the people when they saw the young man sit up of his own accord, and watch Jesus put him in his mother’s arms. If we can’t depend on dead people staying dead, what can we expect in the world? After the young man sits up, having been raised from the dead, he begins to speak, and I wonder what in the world does he say? And what is running through the head of his mother, who suddenly has her hope restored, and holds it in her unbelieving arms?
This story and many other healing stories in the Bible point us to the fact that this dying and rising, this activity of God in our lives can be very disruptive. St. Paul mentions his own story in the second reading, how he went from being a persecutor of those following Christ to the greatest proclaimer of Christ. God did a wonder on Paul, his life of persecution was drowned and he rose to live as someone blazing like a flame with passion for including all people in God’s story of redemption. Like Jesus walking into the middle of that funeral procession and looking upon the widow with love, Christ came to Paul and disrupted everything he thought he was, turning the course of his life in a new direction.
For most of us, these interventions are not quite so dramatic, but when we do look back, either in our journals or in conversations with friends, we see holy moments or relationships that caused everything to shift. A friend of mine at seminary, in the process of his own story telling, experienced a moment of resurrection when he finally could tell himself after 55 years that he was a good person. He embraced God’s own love for him, God’s own claiming of him as a beloved child. He died to a certain understanding of himself, and with it rose to a life that was more compassionate. Death has a way of taking hold of us in the form of fear and hatred, like my friend’s own rejection of his inner goodness, and Paul’s zeal to hunt down the early followers of Jesus. We can do all sorts of things out of fear and anxiety over our lives, but in the waters of Baptism, fear loses its choke hold on us and gives ways to love, to steadfast kindness and a self-giving love that seeks the common good. This is God’s enduring work: to release people from the clutches of death into a life of freedom.
Today, just after we sing the hymn after this sermon, we will baptize Brooklyn Greenway into the body of Christ. As we stand at the font, you, Ryan and Shannon, will make promises to raise your daughter in the faith, the sponsors will make promises to do the same, and this congregation will promise, too, to support her on her journey. But the biggest promise today comes from God, who in these waters will claim Brooklyn as God’s own beloved child. When Pastor Julie marks her forehead with holy oil after the Baptism, she will be sealed with the Holy Spirit. In other words, she will be marked as someone with a relationship with God that is dynamic and living and will have an effect on her life. God makes a promise in this moment to paint the canvas of Brooklyn’s life with God’s own brushstrokes, to invite her each and every day to remember her Baptism- to die to the things that draw her away from God and to rise into life following Christ’s way of compassion and justice.
And by the presence of her family and this community at Luther Memorial, we promise to pray and support Brooklyn in her life of faith, as it unfolds in miraculous and unique ways. We pray that she will learn to trust God, proclaim Christ in word and deed, care for others and the world God made, and work for justice and peace in all the world. This is again no light and easy task. Trusting God, following Christ, working for justice and peace can be overwhelming when the world seems so full of chaos, violence and injustice. I was blessed last week by the comment of another member here as we kneeled outside, digging weeds from the front garden. After working for what felt like half an hour, I got up to have a look at the greater picture. I discovered I had only covered about a four foot radius of a long patch of 2 foot tall weeds. Noticeably discouraged, this baptized child of God looked over at me and said, “now, don’t let it overwhelm you.” Don’t let it overwhelm you are the words we say to one another in this life of faith when we become discouraged and disheartened, words that will strengthen Brooklyn, and words she will at times use to remind us, too, of God’s power over death.
Today we celebrate that God is still at work in the world, calling the Baptized out from death into new life. God’s brushstrokes are still emerging on the canvas of our lives, painting patterns of dying and rising, turning us from ways that promote death to ways that give life, inviting us to claim our lives as beloved children of God and participate in God’s mission to redeem the world. May we be reminded as Brooklyn is baptized, that all of us are called by this holy rhythm into God’s resurrection promises, for each one of us personally and for the whole creation. For the gift of dying and rising in Christ, thanks be to God. Amen.
0 Comments