Month: January 2007

Epiphany 3, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Have you been watching the NBC show Heroes?  The premise is this:  All of a sudden, a small percentage of “normal” human beings discover they have superpowers.  The high school cheerleader Claire learns that her body heals instantly after being wounded.  The politician Nathan discovers, much to his chagrin, that he can fly.  The artist Isaac discovers he can paint the future.  Matt, the police officer, can read minds.  The office worker Hiro, can travel through time.  Most interesting, perhaps, is Peter, who can pick up the superpower of whomever he is around.  When he is around Claire, his body can regenerate.  When he’s around Nathan, he can fly, and so on.

The first part of the season has been about each of these characters discovering their superpowers.  Some, like Hiro, are thrilled, and can’t wait to fulfill his superhero duties. Some, like Claire the cheerleader are really scared about being different.  And some, like Nathan, are just angry because they are afraid their superpower will diminish their political or social power.  All of them are confused about why they have been given these powers and for what purpose they should use them.

I suspect over the rest of the series some will use their power for good, some for evil, but ultimately these individual heroes will have to come together as a team to vanquish some as of yet unknown evil.

None of these heroes have the power to defeat much of anything on their own, but together they will make an incredible team.

Does any of this sound familiar?  If you change superpowers to spiritual gifts, you’ve got our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today!

The church at Corinth, like all churches in Paul’s time, was just a few years old.  People from all walks of life, all different backgrounds found themselves thrown together by their common faith in Christ.  Like any group of people trying to come together in a community, they faced bickering, power plays, and mistrust.  In this part of his letter to them, Paul is trying to convey what it means to be a community rooted in Christ.

No matter how different the members-some were Greek, some were Jewish, some were free and some were slaves-they all had the same standing in Paul’s eyes.  And success as a community was rooted in its members ability to see each other as important equals.

For Paul, any Christian community represents the body of Christ.  We represent Christ, manifest Christ in the world.  Because we are all part of this body, there are no unimportant parts. 

We all have different gifts.  Some of us are great at hospitality.  Others are wonderful listeners.  Some are gifted in financial management.  Some are gifted in prayer.  Some are gifted in leadership.  Some are gifted in teaching. Some are gifted in inspiring speech. 

Some of us know our gifts, and some of us, like the characters in Heroes, need to spend some time discerning what our gifts are and how we can best use them.

Even when we do each know our gifts, none of these gifts are enough on their own.  Paul’s point is, that, like a group of superheroes, each member of the Body of Christ needs the other.  Being a Christian means being a part of a community.  And there are no unimportant parts of the community.

Many Christians, women in particular struggle, with doubt that they have any gifts worth contributing to the Church.  We all have days where we feel more like a hang nail than a heart, more appendix than brain.  But Paul reminds us that every part of the Body of Christ is just as important as any other.

Remember, all Christians are the body of Christ-and that is an amazing, powerful image.  When Christ was on this earth, people followed him around for days just to get a glimpse of that body, or to touch a hand or the hem of his garment.  Christ’s body was incredibly powerful.  It embodied God. 

Together, we can embody Christ to each other and to the community around us. 

Today, as we meet together as a congregation during our annual meeting, we make decisions together about how we want to embody Christ.  Each of us are important both to the ministries of our church and in our decision making as a church body.

We may not be tasked with saving the world, like the characters on Heroes.  But we are tasked to the wonderful privilege of being in community together.  Sometimes that looks like bountiful potlucks, sometimes it looks like worshipping together, and sometimes it looks like the rather unglamorous, but important task of meeting together as a decision making body.

I look forward to seeing you at the annual meeting.

Baptism of our Lord, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

I don’t know how many of you are former evangelicals, but I spent most of my later adolescence as a hand clapping, power point watching, profoundly guilt-ridden modern American conservative evangelical.  It was good times. 

Though now I prefer Anglican chant, complicated motets and authentic gospel music, at the time I loved praise music.  My favorite praise song was based on our passage from Isaiah today.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.
The wind and the waves shall not over come you.
Do not fear, for I will be with you.

and so on and so forth. 

For a nerve-wracked college student trying to figure out what to do with her life, the comforting idea of God’s omnipresence in difficult times was very reassuring.  In fact, I still love an image of a God who is with us, even in our most difficult experiences. 

In the passage from Isaiah today, God is responding to the people of Judah who have been complaining that God has abandoned them because Jerusalem has been destroyed. He reassures them that, despite appearances, He is, in fact, with them.  And no matter what deep waters or hot fires might try to consume them, God will not leave them.

How poignant then, in our Gospel passage today, to see Jesus joining the throng as they are baptized by John the Baptist.  While in many ways, this scene of Jesus’ baptism is familiar to us, there is one key difference between Luke’s account of the baptism and the account of other Gospel writers.

While the authors of the Gospel of Mark, Matthew and John remember Jesus’ baptism as an individual event, independent from the baptisms of the crowds that gathered to hear John the Baptist, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is one of many who are baptized.

But why did Jesus even need to be baptized?  The baptism that John the Baptist performed was a baptism for the remission of sins.  Why in the world would God need to repent of sins?

Imagine with me the setting:  John has set up shop on the banks of a river and hundreds of people of every shape and size are crowded around, waiting eagerly to be baptized.  They enter the water one by one or perhaps as a crowd.  As they are each baptized and washed clean, the water around them gets less clean. The dirt that collected on each person’s feet as they made the long trek to the wilderness, drifts into the water.  The sweat from the heat, joins the dirt.  The sin that has built up over a life time of being human, pollutes the water.

Jesus enters into this murky water, embodying Isaiah’s words.  God is not only figuratively with us when we’re in deep water.  In this case, Jesus actually stands shoulder to shoulder with every sinner who wants to be washed clean.  Jesus does not shy away from the messy, literally dirty parts of these people.  Jesus bathes in them and seeks baptism himself.

Instead of washing himself from sins, in that dark water, maybe Jesus was taking on our sins.  Perhaps he was embodying what he would go on to do his whole life-living as a God completely committed to being human, in all of humanity’s strength and weakness.

We all know that when we experience our baptisms, we become one with Christ.  We change our identity.  We become “marked as Christ’s own forever”.  Perhaps when Jesus was baptized by John in the wilderness, he became marked as our own forever. 

And this is what God blesses.  For just as in all the other Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism, a dove from heaven descends, alights upon Jesus and the onlookers hear the words, “You are my Son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”

At this moment of utter humility-the moment when Jesus enters a body of water to be baptized for the remission of sins, this moment when Jesus is incredibly vulnerable and human-this is when God chooses to make a public declaration of Jesus’ identity as God’s Son. 

Frederick Buechner, the great Presbyterian novelist and autobiographical author knows this aspect of God’s closeness to us well.  The deep waters he waded through were his father’s suicide when he was a child and his daughter’s anorexia when he was an adult.  At the height of her illness, she became so sick she was hospitalized.  Though Buechner was terrified, He writes,

“I have never felt God’s presence more strongly than when my wife and I visited that distant hospital where our daughter was.  Walking down the corridor to the room that had her name taped to the door, I felt that presence surrounding me like air-God in his very stillness, holding his breath, loving her, loving us all, the only way he can without destroying us.  One night we went to compline in an Episcopal Cathedral, and in the coolness and near emptiness of that great vaulted place, in the remoteness of the choir’s voices chanting plainsong, in the grayness of the stone, I felt it again-the passionate restraint and hush of God.”

Buechner sensed Jesus standing shoulder to shoulder with him.  Buechner knew God was in the deep water with him and would not abandon him.

So, it turns out that the words to that praise song I sang as an adolescent are as true now as they were a decade ago.  God will be with us when we pass through deep water.  God will be with us when we walk through fire.  Our God really is Emmanuel-God with us.  Thanks be to God.