Social Health, Holy Spirit Health, Christly Health

5 Epiphany B  February 5, 2012

Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

Lectionary Link

  I have a spray bottle of Windex here and I will be practicing the folk medicine art according to the Greco-American patriarch Gus Portakalos in the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  Just come up and I will give you spray unction with this cure-all.

  Every family has members with hypochondria tendencies.  “I may not be sick but that doesn’t mean that those germs are not out to get me.”  And so every family probably has a history of its own folk medical practice.  And I’m glad the regular practice of high colonics died out in a previous generation.

  Whether folk medicine or modern clinical medicine, health is a major issue of people of all times and all places.  Whether ancient or modern, folk or primitive, health is a universal human issue.  It is a truly catholic issue.  It should not surprise us that the Prayer for the Sick is one of the Sacraments of the church and it follows from the healing ministry of Jesus who is often called the great physician.

  When we think about the history of human health, we might cite the persons responsible for some great breakthroughs in the history of disease.  In the time of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, they had moved from blaming things on spirits but the microscopic world responsible for infection was given the name, miasma or bad air.  The discovery of the microscopic world and the development of antiseptic practices was a great development in the history of medicine.  So too was the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.  And in my time, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine.  My father had polio before the vaccine was developed and in the 1950’s I was able to take the vaccine.  How many of you remember the polio vaccine?  After Salk’s discovery, he was asked about a patent for the vaccine.  And he said he could not take a patent on the vaccine; that would be like claiming a patent on the sun.  Would that pharmaceutical companies today were a bit more generous with their products for promoting health.  (Yes, I know they have R & D expenses but universal accessibility to health solutions should be the Christian goal).

  The Gospel today is about Jesus Christ as a folk healer.  And the type of healing that was promoted by Jesus was free and it was manifold.  One might say that religion itself is all about health.  And religious health has lost out to the scientific health of modern medicine whereby the body is detached from the soul to study it like one would analyze a machine.  It has parts and we can oil it with the right chemicals to make it work better.  The human sciences of psychology and sociology have help to re-attach the inner life with the outer body and fortunately many have recovered the holistic notions of health which include faith and spirituality.

  Jesus Christ is call the Savior or in Greek, soter.   Another meaning is the preserver.   Savior is derived from the Latin root, salus.  Salus was the goddess of health and prosperity, perhaps the equivalent of the Greek goddess, Hygeia.  The message of Christ is about health, salvation and preservation.  And Jesus had a special message about health and healthiness.  And he wasn’t waiting to write a book and sell his intellectual property.  What did he say? He said, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."   Jesus was saying, my kind of health is like the sun, and you cannot have patent on the sun.  So let’s get this message out as far and wide as we can.

  Let us look more closely at the Christly notions of health.  The words “save” or “preserve” have built into them the main issue of the human dilemma.  As soon as we are born into this world, adults have secret for us that they do not tell us; they wait for us to find out in a more appropriate way.  And what is the adult secret?  “We’re all going to die!”  And if we going to die then part of the human vocation is to save and preserve life as long as we can with as much effort as possible.  Preservation is a basic instinct because we know in some way we are all swimming against the current of death.

  Jesus recognized in his time that methods of preservation were not working for lots of people.  One sign of failure was the lack of socialized medicine of his time.  Now that might sound like an anachronistic political comment but what I mean is that the social medicine of the time of Jesus ostracized lots of people.  They were left outside of the health coverage.  They were not given access to human community because they were declared unclean.  Dead bodies were declared to be impure and people with all manner of sickness were also declared unclean.  Some of those states of uncleanness seem quite trivial to us today.  Such people had no access to the community of care; they had to live quarantined lives.  This lack of socialized medicine has plagued human history for a long.  When any person or group of people are declared unfit for human society based  upon a condition for which they had no choice, then there cannot be fullness of health for those who are oppressed and also for those who do the oppressing.  The health of Jesus was social health, because he restored people to community.  When I worked as an orderly at a VA hospital, I immediately noted that the veterans who had friends and family who visited them had much shorter stays in the hospital.  The saving and preserving health of Jesus is social health.

  The health of Jesus is expressed in others Gospels as the experience of abundant life.  In the healing stories of the Gospel, we find that the interior lives of many people are so wracked that their spirits were called unclean.  Fear and anxiety, panic, lack of self-control, envy, greed, hate, anger, wrath are just some of the names of the torturous interior states that people experience because of traumatic events in their lives or because their own genetic inheritance.  In addition to the social health of being welcome to community, Jesus offered people to experience their inner life as the life of the Holy Spirit.  This is the experience of a higher power, a force that is the great lion tamer of the interior life.  This is the abundant life; this is to know our deepest life force as an engine of bliss and peace that helps our bodies swim upstream against death.  The Holy Spirit is the evidence of abundant and eternal life in us now, even while our bodies are wasting away.

  Jesus Christ has become known as the manifestation of God as our Health, our Savior and our preserver.  Why?  Because he sought to repair human community by inviting all to community.  Our communion is a continuing witness of the invitation of Christ for all to come to the family meal of God.  Jesus Christ is also a manifestation of God as Health because he introduced us to a way to know our interior life as Holy Spirit abundant life.  And this is our ultimate preservation in the midst of things that are passing away.

  Once again today, we want to get this message of the health of Christ out to all.  It does not have a patent.  It is free to all.  Amen.

  

Jesus, the People Whisperer: A Youth Dialog Sermon

 A Youth Dialog Sermon

4 Epiphany B  January 29, 2012

Deut. 18:15-20  Ps. 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

Lectionary Link

Katie: In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Amen.

          Please be seated.

(Kalum tries to whisper something into Katie’s ear….Katie pushes him away)

Katie: Kalum, what are you doing?

Kalum: I am just trying to do a set up for learning something from the Gospel today.

Katie:  What kind of set up?  Hot air in my ear is not much of a Gospel set up, in my humble opinion.  Besides, it was my ear that you were blowing into.

Kalum:  I wasn’t blowing into your ear, I was whispering into your ear.  You’ve heard about the famous horse whisperer.  He had a gift of taming wild and spirited horses and that is what is called horse whispering.  And I thought that I would be a Katie whisperer.

Katie:  Hold it right there; don’t go any further with that metaphor.  Why would you think that I need to be whispered by you or anyone?  I’ve got a fist here that could be called a Kalum shouter!  Sometimes shouting and not whispering is called for.

Kalum: Well, I was trying to make a Gospel point about Jesus.

Katie:  Why don’t you get to the point?  Your detours may keep us at church until noon.

Kalum: Well, you know that we have not always had modern medicine.  And we’ve not always had modern psychology.

Katie:  And the entire world does not yet have modern medicine or modern psychology.  There are still many traditions of folk medicine in the world today.

Kalum:  You mean like medicine men and shaman and faith healers and gurus?

Katie:  There have been many traditions of health and healing in the history of humanity.

Kalum:  During the time of Jesus there were health and healing practices.  Just like our times people suffered with diseases of the mind and the body.  And every community has a way to deal with issues of poor health.  And even though we might think that they are primitive, rather than give into despair and defeat each community tries to find a way to treat situations of suffering.

Katie:  So are you suggesting that Jesus was more like a medicine man in his healing?

Kalum:  Maybe I am suggesting that Jesus is what we would call the ultimate people whisperer.  So now do you get my attempt to whisper into your ear?

Katie:  So you think that Jesus was the ultimate people whisperer.  He had a special way with people and that special way with people helped to calm their lives and bring them to good mental health.

Kalum:  Yes, I think that Jesus was quite a medicine man even though the health and healing of his time was understood in a different way than we do today.  The Jewish religion of which he was a part used to classify things into two categories:  things were either clean or unclean, pure or impure, permitted or restricted.

Katie:  So this man in synagogue was classified as one who had an unclean spirit.  This was a way of saying that his inner life was so troubled that it was known to the people of his community.

Kalum: How would you like to be classified by your community as a person with an “unclean spirit?”  People were probably saying, “Stay away from John; he has a real unclean spirit….he a bit temperamental…he a bit spirited….maybe a bit out of control.  I am frightened to be around him.”

Katie:  Being shunned and neglected by the community did not help his mental health one bit.

Kalum:  Unclean was a category of classification for lots of things by the rabbis…For example if you liked pork or shrimp or any shell fish, you could not eat them because they were declared as unclean and whatever was declared unclean had to be avoided.

Katie:  Why do you think the religious leaders declared shrimp and pepperoni as “unclean?”

Kalum:  I don’t know, it could be that at a religious convention they served some rancid pork and shrimp and so in the throes of food poisoning, they declared pork and shrimp as “unclean.”  Who knows the ancient roots of lots of practices in any culture?

Katie:  I guess Jesus was concerned most about restoring this shunned man back into community.  Jesus had a way of making a once described unclean man into a man who was clean and fit for the community.

Kalum: Being a Christians does not mean that we are exempt from any potential unpleasant human condition; being a Christian means that Christ and Christians welcome all into human fellowship.

Katie:  In receiving the shunned and troubled man in the middle of the synagogue, Jesus was saying “This is what true people of faith do, they welcome all into their communion and fellowship.  There is no one who is unclean to God.”

Kalum: And so the medical and psychiatric practice of Jesus might be called “People whispering.”

Katie:  A horse whisperer is able to help a troubled horse make friends with people and not be left alone without the care and interaction with others.

Kalum: So Christ calls us to be “folk medical doctors.”  Christ calls us to be people whisperers.

Katie:  But that does not mean indiscriminate whispering into people’s ears.

Kalum:  That’s true, but God gives us a gift of being with people and God gives us people whom we are to give a special welcome into our community.  And we need to ask God to help us do good people whispering.

Kalum and Katie together whispering to the congregation: “God loves you and welcomes you and so do we in the name of Christ.”  Amen.

Gospel Puppet Show: Animal Conference

Puppet Show for January 29, 2012

4th Sunday after the Epiphany

Animal Puppets:

Too-key the toucan, Big Guy, the elephant, Rocky the Racoon, Octie, the Octopus and Harry the horse.

Too-key, the toucan:  Are you looking at me?   Why are you looking at me?  Are you laughing at my big nose?  Do you think that I’m funny?  Do you know who I am?  I am Too-key the toucan.  And I want to introduce to my friends.  First, Big Guy, the Elephant.

Big Guy: Hi, boys and and girls. Do you have some peanuts for me to eat?

Too-key: And next is Rocky the Racoon.

Rocky:  Hi boys and girls, can you show me where the garbage cans; I’m hungry.

Too-Key: And from the ocean we have Octie, the Octopus.

Octie: Hi, boys and girls.  You get to count to ten on your fingers and thumbs; I only get to count to eight.

Tou-key:  And now let us clap our hands for Harry the Horse.

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, hay….I love to eat hay!

Too-key:  Boys and girls, you see that we are all different in how we look.  I have a big nose for eating fruit and lizards.

Big Guy:  I have a big hose trunk, so I can give myself a shower.

Rocky:  I have really good eyes so I can see at night.

Octie:  I have pads on all of my legs so I can stick to rocks in the ocean.

Harry:  I have strong legs so I can run fast in the meadow.

Too-key:  So all of are different, but we are also all the same.

Big Guy:  Tou-key, I don’t look at all like you.  How are we all the same?

Too-Key: We are all the same because God created us all.  God created us different because 

God wanted more beauty in the world.  If we were all the same then that would be like having to eat broccoli at every meal.  How many of you would only want to eat broccoli? 

Rocky: That would be boring and I like lots of food in the garbage cans.

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, I like to eat hay, but I also like oats, apples and carrots.

Tou-key:  God made us all different and all of us have different problems.  Sometimes we are sad or sometimes we are sick.

Big Guy:  Catherine read a story today about a man who was really sad.  He was really sad and fearful.

Octie:  But this man found help from Jesus.  Jesus helped to make this sick man healthy and happy.

Harry:  When I am sad, my mom comes and rubs her nose on my nose.  And she whispers nice things in my ear and I feel better.

Rocky:  And even though we are all different, we can still help each other.

Tou-key:  Jesus taught us to be like doctors.  Because if we treat each other with kindness it will help us feel better.

Big Guy:  I am going ask my friends a question and I want them to raise their hands.  How many of you will be kind and help each other to feel really good?

Harry:  Is everyone raising their hands?

Tou-key:  Yes, they are and just like Jesus made a sick man feel better, we too can help each feel better with kindness.  Do you agree?    If you agree say, Amen!

Harry:  Hay, hay, hay, Father Phil can you get this show moving….why don’t you start the children’s creed.

Father Phil:  Okay, Harry, hold your horses……the Children’s Creed starts on page 3. 

Jesus, Ultimate People Whisperer?

4 Epiphany B  January 29, 2012

Deut. 18:15-20  Ps. 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13   Mark 1:21-28

Lectionary Link

   In the Gospel of Mark, the first act of public ministry by Jesus is when he commands an “unclean spirit” to come out of man who was at the synagogue in Capernaum.  As we attempt to evoke some meaning for us today from this text required as lectionary reading, we come with many pre-conceptions about unclean spirits, many of which are perpetuated through film and television.   Part of modern entertainment includes ghost whisperers and ghost busters and the ancient religious psychiatry of exorcism gets portrayed in extreme forms in the cinema.  One wonders if our fascination with such things is a protest against the certitude of modern science in purporting to explain everything, even while in the lives of most people, the unexplainable dynamics of the invisible interior world seems to influence what happens in our external world.

  For the purposes of a sermon we can but selectively offer some cursory reflections knowing that limitation of time requires that we exit this sermon with the relevant good news for our lives today.

  We begin like archaeologists who have collected shards of knowledge about the topic of the Gospel texts.  Such knowledge comes from many historical contexts and so we set a surface taxonomical grid into which we place the shards of knowledge.  And then we analyze and move to formation of cogent meaning.

  In one box we have unclean spirit, the unclean being particularly Judaic since Judaism had a classification system designating what was pure and impure.  This system was meant to keep them pure from “outsiders” since they had a vocation to be a “holy” or “pure” people because God is a Holy God.  States of disease were designated as impure and people who had such diseases had to be quarantined from society until they attained ritual purification.   In another box, we have the ancient Greek notion of the demon or “daimon.”  In the Greek culture such a daimon was neutral or could be used to refer to a spirit guide or even a god or demi-god.  But as a foreign concept to Judaism, the word demon became synonymous with “unclean” spirit and the Gospels seem to use, demon, unclean spirit and evil spirit in interchangeable ways.  In another box we have the knowledge of the holistic approach to the understanding of health.  Spirits were involved in being unhealthy; spirit/body causal connections were believed to exist.  Often physical disease was given spiritual causal explanation.  So healing and the expulsion of an unclean spirit were co-extensive events.  Another box on our taxonomical grid: In early Christian baptismal practice, exorcisms were normative practices as each convert from a “pagan” religion had to make sure that residue spirits of other religions were expelled before baptism.  Finally, another prominent grid of Christian knowledge is the Christian designation for one of the persons of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit.  What is more contrasting with unclean spirit than the Holy Spirit?

  Now where do we go for Gospel meanings for our lives?  When we are ill what do we do?  We look for a physician.  We want someone who has knowledge that can effect a powerful intervention over the force of our disease.  In our own experience with disease we settle for a gradual process of a return to health; rarely is the cure instantaneous.   In our lives we also know that we can have disturbed interior states.  We can feel helpless to addictive impulses that dominate and disrupt the quality of our lives.  We can also be socially stigmatized by our weakness, disability, disease or addiction.  And if any portion of society defines our existence as “impure” or “unacceptable” to full inclusion, we can feel our life is devalued because of who we are.

  What I would like for us to take from the Gospel reading today is this:  Jesus was able to reintegrate a man who was known as the one with the unclean spirit into the synagogue community.  Let us embrace the holistic health of Jesus that is also community health.  The worst sickness of all is to be alone and without the possibility of community.  We can bear all sorts of conditions in life if we can do it within a caring community.  Jesus was not a ghost whisperer, he was a people whisperer.  He was able to make the man presentable to the community and he was able to change the community’s designation of the man to be one who was included, and therefore worthy of care and support.

  Any physical or mental health condition includes the social threat of being feared or excluded by the community.  And we need to proclaim Gospel health.  We need to preach release to the captives and preach health to the quarantined.  This is the holistic Gospel health of Jesus Christ, a people whisperer who introduces us to the Holy Spirit as the higher power within us to integrate us within a community of health and be a part of a community that proclaims salvation or health to all. 

  May God lead us to the people who can whisper each of us to optimal health and may God use each of us to be people who whisper others to their optimal health, for the sake of Christ, the ultimate people whisperer.  Amen. 

The Transforming Call of Christ

3 Epiphany B  January 22, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Psalm 62:6-14

1 Corinthians 7:29-31 Mark 1:14-20

Lectionary Link

   Jesus said to the fishermen, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

What if Jesus walked onto the football field at Candlestick today about 3:30 p.m. and said to the professional football players, “Follow me and I will make you score touchdowns for all people.”  What do you think that they would say?  Perhaps, one would say, “Jesus could I have the same deal that the Denver quarterback, Tim Tebow has?  He gets to keep his day job and moonlight as a Jesus representative; could I do that too?”

  For the fisherfolk of Galilee, the call of Jesus meant that they left their day jobs to follow the itinerant Rabbi Jesus on the road.  You really can’t do too much fishing on the road and so one wonders about how those disciples and Jesus were fed and clothed.  If their message was successful, then their audience probably fed them.

  The call of God in Christ has as many scenarios as it does people who have actually heard the call of Christ and who have responded to it.  Historically, we have given a distinction to the call of Christ for those who enter the priestly or pastoral professions.  The contexts of the call of Christ have changed as well.  The years around the time of Jesus of Nazareth were apocalyptic times; that is, many people believed that the end of the world was drawing near.  And they believed God’s great interventionist, the Son of Man and Messiah would appear to establish a different kind of order in this world.

  If this catastrophic intervention was about to happened, then who needed families?  Why have children if the world order was going to drastically interdict all personal and family lifestyle.

  The method of the call was to recruit an itinerate group of on-the-road preachers to get the message out as quickly as possible and to cover as much territory as possible.

  And now about 2000 years later we can say that the catastrophic intervention did not happened but the Gospel message of Jesus Christ catastrophically intervened in the entire history of humanity.  The Gospel message and the call of Jesus Christ has become much more than what was intended by the apocalyptic preachers who surrounded the itinerate Rabbi Jesus.

  The direct and catastrophic intervention of God has turned out to be the imaginations of deliverance by peoples who faced incredible suffering and needed intervention narratives of hope as a way of coping with their dire circumstances.  There was no catastrophic ending of the world in the years after Jesus appeared but the life and the call of Christ has had a catastrophic effect upon the peoples of this world.  That little seemingly insignificant mustard seed of Jesus of Nazareth is now seen as a towering tree that has taken over people and cultures.  The intervention of God has not been a catastrophic ending, it has been the consistent and gentle call of God as the Holy Spirit active in the hearts and lives of people.

  And this inside job of the Holy Spirit of God in the world is the universal call of God to all people.  This universal call sounded most clearly in the life of Jesus Christ whom we know to be God with us in human experience.

  And what does the call of God in Christ offer to us today?  The call of God in Christ is a baptismal call.  It offers us the process of burying in death all that is past and a resurrection to a new moment and a new future where we can surpass ourselves.  This death/life process that is ritualized in the baptismal event is the process of the continual renewal of our lives through repentance: Leaving old states of mind to take up new ones with attending behavioral consequences for our lives.  Repentance and renewal is also what we call transformation.

  The promise of the call of Jesus Christ is to transform our lives.

  The early suffering apocalyptic people of the Jesus movement desired a catastrophic transformation of life as they knew it.  What actually happened has not been a one event catastrophic intervention; it has been a subtle and drawn out process of the call of God at work in this world.  Transformation has not been sudden and dramatic, it has been subtle because it involves the Godly lure to humanity to choose what is good and better and not be forced into some catastrophic outcome that did not involve genuine freedom in the world.

  How do you and I approach the call God in our lives today?  How is God seductively luring us into the gradual transformation of our lives?  How are the interior sweet spots of our lives being touched and registering what is sublime in our lives?  The call of God is everywhere and can become evident at any moment; a laughing, playful child, a sleeping baby, a sunset, falling rain, pride in the achievement of one’s child, the discovery of friendship and the endurance of a friendship, the joy of creativity and the sense of being useful to the lives of others, the looking back in gratitude at events, and wondering, “How did I get through that?”   On and on the events of the call of God in Christ break into our lives, if we are but ready to switch our method of reading the events of lives and begin to interpret God’s loving involvement with us.

  And what is outcome of the call of Christ?  Our lives get transformed and God takes our natural gifts and makes them supernatural when complemented by the Holy Spirit who gives us a different kind of motive for living our lives.

  Transformation means that a football player can have a calling from Christ and still play football.  So too a banker, a lawyer, a teacher, a mason, a builder and a hedge fund manager.  Once we perceive the call of Christ we begin the transformation of our lives into the Gospel motives and Gospel purposes of life.

  Learning to understand that all that we do is ministry is the result of God’s call being successful in our lives.  Often the call of God is promoted as great sacrifice and giving up lots of things in life.  Seeing and understanding life differently may at first seem like a sacrifice, but once we are converted by the call of God and once the Gospel motive comes to our lives, the transforming effects of God’s Spirit pay us great reward.  There is a great relief and peace that comes when we adopt the Gospel motive for everything that we do in our lives.  Saying “yes” to God’s call makes us wonder why we ever wanted to ignore God in our lives.  God is going to accompany us in our lives whether we want God to or not, so it is much better to just surrender to the fact of God’s call.

  We can indeed change our lives by taking on the Christ-motive, the Gospel motive for everything that we do.  And the end result is that we will enjoy what we have and are in a more appreciative way.

  I would invite each of us to listen closely for how the call of God in Christ has been given to us.  Let us not fret about what we might have to give up; let us with hope look to how the call of Christ will work transformations of our lives to our own benefit and for the benefit of the people in our lives.  Amen. 

The Call of all Callings

2 Epiphany B  January 15,2012

1 Samuel 3:1-10  Psalm 63:1-8

1 Corinthians 6:11b-20  John 1:43-51

Lectionary Link 

  The lessons that we have read today from the first book of Samuel and from John’s Gospel are about what is often referred to in religious terms, a call from God.

  The young boy Samuel heard God speak to him at night.  Philip heard the call of Jesus and shared it with his skeptical friend Nathaniel.  And Philip was not sure how to convince him so he simply offered an invitation, “come and see for yourself.”  And Nathaniel went and showed his skepticism to Jesus and Jesus was impressed with how he spoke his mind and Nathaniel became impressed with Jesus.

  In the religious world sometimes a call from God is used to refer only to those who go into the official ordained ministries.  And so priests, bishops and pastors have callings from God.  But that is truly a very limited notion of calling, since the call of God is available to everyone and obedience to the call of God must mean more than the ordained ministry of the church, since if all people became ordained, it would be like joining an all tuba band; lots of bass without any variation.

  What can the call of God mean for you and me today?

  I would suggest that our lives are made up of many callings.  Those callings arise from the circumstances of our lives.  I did not have any choice to be a son.  That happened as soon as I was born.  And since I have an older brother and sister, I did not have any choice in being a brother.  The circumstances of our lives provide us our social definitions and in many ways we find ourselves to have as many callings as we have roles in life.  In the household division of labor, one gets the call to be the cook, the dishwasher and the one who gathers and takes out the trash.  Our situations and the requirements of each social obligation in some way define the various calls of our lives because as social beings, whether we want it or not, we have obligations to other people.  And since we are not islands, there are people who are called into our lives who have responsibility to us.  Indeed, we have some freedom in where we live and with whom we live, but all of the details of the roles that we play in life are not always completely pleasant or inspiring; in fact lots of our roles require tolerating or even enjoying a certain amount routine drudgery. 

  We don’t usually see our roles as citizen, spouse, brother, sister, son or daughter as callings in life but we know that to be successful in life requires a certain amount of multi-tasking shifting in and out of the time that we must give to the fulfillment of the various roles in our lives.

  What we normally refer to as our life’s calling is the profession for which we have trained and from which we earn our livelihood.  Hopefully our professions are chosen because we have discovered and developed our personal gifts and then can express those gifts in a vocation that can provide for us the means of livelihood.  And even our professions are not always completely satisfying.  We may feel burned out because we are forced to earn a higher standard of living and end up taking positions that do not really express our true life passion.  Sometimes we earn a living in a job and express our life passion in a hobby or avocation.

  Whatever our relation is with our life work, our life work is very important.  After we say hello, what is your name, how are you, we ask, “What do you do?”  What we do is a very important identity question in our lives.

  I would suggest to you that we do many things in our lives based upon the roles that define in our place.  Spouse, parent, sibling, student, citizen, pet owner….all of these are callings in our life.  They require our time and each role require a degree of proficiency or even excellence in order to satisfy and be satisfied.  I would also suggest that we spend our entire lives dancing with all of the various callings in our lives, and we know success and disappointments in all of our various callings of life.

  And since you and I are caught in a web of life callings, we need a Calling of callings.  And that is place for the call of God in our lives.  We can disappoint people in our lives because the way we execute our life role may not please the people who are most effected by us.  And other people can disappoint us even when they have important roles in our lives.  We can also know great joy and success in the various roles of our lives but if we try to place all of our expectation upon a particular role, we are bound to be disappointed.  That is why we need a Calling of callings.

  The call of God is the Call of callings.  We believe the call of callings is what is expressed in our baptism.  We are primarily called to be sons and daughters of God and the realization of this is to become aware of the call of God to us in our lives.

  And if we can hear and heed the call of God in our lives, then we can find the wisdom to do the balancing act which is required by all of the other calls that come to us in our life roles.

  The call of God tells that we are made first and foremost for God and that we should try to please God first, in all that we do.

  If we learn how to perform all of the roles and callings in our lives as unto God, then we will be able to weather the uncertainty that all of us have to face in all of the roles that we must fulfill in this life.

  You and I through prayer and worship are invited to attend to this call from God, a call that is universal, but unheard, if not attended to.  If we can attend to the call of God, we can find an inner place of love, peace and joy, and from this inner place of peace and joy, we can execute the requirements that meet us each day in our circumstances.

  Today, you and I have many roles and many callings, but one call from God.  And if we can hear and heed the call of God, we can find the wisdom and the ability in all of our life’s callings.  We should not expect equal success or disappointments in all of the callings of our lives; but we can expect God to be equally presence with us in all of the times and places in our lives and we can know that God is a success in our lives even when we don’t seem to be.  The call of God can make us know a kind of equalizing success in all that we do.

  I wish each of us many great adventures in the callings of our lives; but I hope that each of finds the call of God in Christ, at all times and places in our lives.  Amen. 

Baptism: Cosmic and Particular Identity

1 Epiphany B  January 8, 2012

Genesis 1:1-5   Ps. 29

Acts 9:1-7   Mark 1:4-11

Lectionary Link 

  Did you ever really wonder about the meaning of Baptism?  Historically, the church has argued about baptism a lot.  Should a person be immersed?  Sprinkled?  Stand in water to the waist and have water poured down one’s head?  Should authentic baptism only be done in the Jordan River?  Should it be done in any river or natural body of water?  Should baptism be preceded by forty days of fasting with some salt sprinkled on the candidates and some exorcisms performed?  Should only adults who can fully and rationally choose baptism be the legitimate candidates for baptism?  Is baptism only a public testimony of a personal profession of faith?  Is baptism a supernatural infusion of God’s grace whereby one is made a Christian once and for all?  Can one lose baptismal grace?  We are told that the Emperor Constantine did not become baptized until his death bed because he was sure that he was going to have some post-baptismal sins, and some in the early church were very concerned about post-baptismal sins.

  What is baptism for us today?  A cute little rite of passage for baby and family with an opportunity to make little baby boys don white dresses so that the pictures can be brought out later to make their faces red?

  There is some meaning of baptism found in all of the baptismal practices of Christians.  I guess today, I am more interested in what baptism means to me and to you and to our lives as a community who call ourselves the body of Christ.

  Might I suggest that baptism is very much a belief about our creation by God and the type of good stuff of which our human lives and the life of the world are made?  In the creation, we are told that God looked at all that had been created and God said, “It is good.”

   I believe that baptism is a public rite of celebration that affirms that the creation of the life of the baptized, is good, very good.  And it is good and filled with dignity. . Even while we don’t attain full goodness at any moment of our lives,  baptism is the invitation to actualize our full human potential.

  And what might that potential be?  I would liken the human life to be lived on a continuum between particular experience and cosmic experience.  We are very much made of dust in that we have a body and each body has a location in time and space.  And there are detailed descriptions of the particulars of our existence; our families, languages, cultures, societies and countries.  Yet we are made of mysterious stuff that we call spirit and so we have godly-potential.  We have cosmic potential.  So we live our lives in the dynamic between the particulars of our physical location and our cosmic spiritual locations.  And we need both to live up to our human potential.  In our baptism, we celebrate our cosmic potential because if we are only determined by our material, physical and historical circumstances, then we may find ourselves trapped; trapped by the imperfections that we find in us and around us.  We can get so burdened by the imperfections in us and around us that we can believe that we are negatively determined toward death, entropy and despair.

  But the experience of hope and joy and the sublime cannot allow such imperfection to define our destiny in an absolute sense.  So, we have our cosmic side, our cosmic identity, our birthright, not just into flesh and blood families, but our birthright as children of God.  And

that is what is celebrated in our baptism.  We celebrate our cosmic birthright so that we might rise above mere material determination.   And how often do we need to rise above mere material determination.  The experience of pain and losses of all kinds shout out to us to be what is powerful to determine our lives and our fate and that is where we need to turn to our cosmic destiny so that we do not get buried in the despair of any particular state of imperfection.

  At the baptism of Jesus, the heavenly dove descended and the heavenly voice declared, “You are my Son, the beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”  Isn’t that what God said after creation.  “With you I am well pleased.”

  Mozart got more than the average or above average share of cosmic musical ability at an age that baffles our ability to understand, so we declare him a musical genius.  Jesus of Nazareth was so much overwhelmed with the realization and actualization of the cosmic dimension in his life, we have had no other human language to use except to say that Jesus was extra-human, supra-human, even divinized.

   He was divinized more than any other human being, yet we undertake baptism too, because Jesus did not keep likeness to God or divinization to himself; he shared it fully.  He told his friends and disciples to go and baptize.  And as God abided in Jesus, Jesus promised to abide with his friends until we could not longer speak of time in the way that we do.

  We baptize, not because we will ever be as cosmic as Jesus was, but because the risen and cosmic Christ is shared with us to awaken the cosmic dimensions of our own souls.

  And we need to experience our cosmic dimension to help us to rise above our mere material existence and to have our vale of tears touched with the sublime of love, friendship, joy, beauty and insights that move and inspire us to keep on keeping on, because in the end our lives will be determined by love, faith, hope and resurrection and not by demise, loss, despair and death.

  And so we baptize and have been baptized into our cosmic identities as son and daughters of God and our lives are changed if we can but hear the whisper of God behind the scenes of our lives say, “You are my beloved child; you are good, you are no mistake, you are wonderfully put together, and I am pleased with you.”

  We baptize in order to be a baptismal community to baptize others.  Why?  Because the people of this world need to discover their cosmic identities as sons and daughters of God.  This is the way to world peace; to rise to our cosmic identity beyond our oft pitiful worlds of material determination.

    Today you and I are invited to live in this dynamic between our particular identity and our cosmic identity.  We need a balance of both; we cannot be purely spiritual or cosmic beings; if we try, we become world denying, dreamy, cosmic space cadets.  And take the “s” out of cosmic and we become “comic space cadets” living in escapism.

  But if we deny the cosmic and live only a reductionist material existence then we will live solely at the whim of happenstance.  If we’re lucky, all is well.  If were unlucky, all is ill.  We need our experience of the cosmic to help us rise above the particulars of our happenstance so that we can tap into a source of wisdom that helps us have the creative freedom to choose our particular futures with wisdom.

  Baptism invites us to our cosmic identity as sons and daughters of God, so that we can not just survive our particular circumstance but live with some inspired actions.  Jesus was baptized and his true cosmic identity was known.  You and I have been baptized and we are part of a baptismal community to share the knowledge of the cosmic family of God with this world.  In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.