Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from September 25, 2005

“New Life”

Rev. Thomas Ratmeyer

Scriptures:

Exodus 17:1-7

Philippians 2:1-3

Annelise, today is the day that you are baptized into the body of Christ.  This means, first of all, that we celebrate with your family—your parents, grandparents and all members of your family.  You are a gift from God.  You are a new life in our midst, a little person in the likeness of God endowed with the breath of life that, in the languages of our Holy Scriptures, is called by the same name as the Holy Spirit.

Today then is also the day that we, as a congregation, take on the responsibility to surround you, Annelise, with the care of the Christian community.  We have pledged to accompany your journey in the Christian faith as we ourselves are on this journey.  We have pledged to be examples for you when you need an example for what it means to live as Christians.  This means that we pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit for ourselves just as much, if not more, as we invoke it for you.

Annelise, you have made it easy for us to take on this responsibility for you have already made yourself a home in our pews.  You have already found out that the organ has the ability to calm an anxious mind and bring us into the grace of God and ways that words often cannot.  You have lifted your voice to offer some feedback during the sermon on a couple of Sundays.  We only love you more because of it.  You even have attended, rather vicariously but, nevertheless, a search committee and found for the church, to which you now belong, a Senior Pastor.  Your mother has very appropriately pointed out that, on the day that we ask for the Holy Spirit to be poured out on you, we ask for it to be with me as well.  The day of your baptism is the day of my installation.  You and I, Annelise, are both new at this but we both have all the help we need.

Appropriate also are the scriptures that mark this Sunday.  Now that you have found at the font of baptismal water that you have life in Christ, we read about God giving water of life to God’s people.  Paul later on will help the congregation in Phillipi understand what it really means to live in Christ and will remind them of what it is at the center of our faith.

The more I read in Exodus, the more I agree with those who say that it is the story of all people of faith in our Judeo-Christian tradition. The story of faith is the story of liberation from exile—liberation to be more fully ourselves rather than in the captivity of anything or anybody that want us to be less than ourselves or less worthy than another or less than equal.  Liberation from exile is not a one-time event and not an event of the past, for if our faith has brought us out of any exile—whether imposed by society or by the stance we have adopted for ourselves—then we become the ones to offer the promise of God to others that are captive.  God said to Moses, the very reluctant liberator of his kin, “I will send you to bring my people out of Egypt.”

After the exile, of course, comes the journey of the wilderness.  We all have come to know the desert moments.  We might think of the faith journey that takes us on a meandering path from doubt to assurance and back, into and out of churches, through times of utter questioning what in the world these people are doing every week, to the realization that what happens in church may fill an emptiness inside that we can neither name nor otherwise satisfy.  Or we might think of that bigger wilderness excursion yet—life—from the relative certainty of what life is like as we are children to the astounding realization that others live completely different lives that are just as right and true, to the daunting task to define and decline who we are and who we may become.

Moses, in his wilderness, called to be the leader of God’s people, cries out to his God in agony, yet not on behalf of his people who are thirsting and have no water, but on his own behalf, “What shall I do with these people?  They are about ready to stone me.”  The Lord does not answer with regard to Moses’ fear for his life, but God does show Moses how he can give water to his people.  “I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb,” says God.  By virtue of God standing in front of Moses, the leader of God’s people can offer the life-giving water from the rock.  What a God, who is faithful enough to walk in front of us day by day and by night, even if it takes forty years and longer, in spite of the times we want to turn away to look for the easier path or the more tangible object of worship that turns out to be an illusion!

Most generations seem to think that what comes after them is a little more wilderness and a little less promise than what they have experienced themselves, as if life got perpetually more confusing and complicated and perpetually less guarded against what threatens our well-being.  I am not so sure.  Every generation has managed to find its own compass and draw up its own maps and has come up with an OnStar button is case they get really lost.

What Paul writes to the Phillipians becomes the roadmap for our congregation.  It is all based on the same essential fact of our identity that Annelise has encountered in her baptism today.  We are, by virtue of our baptism, “in Christ”.  We are all part of the one body of Christ and, individually, members of it.  Paul talks about unity, unselfishness, humility (which means regarding others as better than ourselves), and service.

We might take issue with all of the above besides, maybe, service.  That all be of one mind, in unity—how is that every going to work?  This is a congregational church.  Besides, what if the body of Christ were all people who proclaimed the Christian faith?  There are people on one end of Christianity who are ashamed to be identified by the same faith and the same Lord as those on the other end; and vice versa.  How much of who we are would we have to surrender to all be of the same mind?  No,  says Paul, don’t think that way.  It’s the other way around.  This is not about surrendering who you are for the sake of unity.  This is about claiming that you all are in Christ—for you can love your brother and sister in Christ with whom you passionately disagree. This is not a unity of opinion, but a unity of identity and belonging.

Being unselfish and humble?  We warn each other if an attitude of unselfishness and humility seems to take away from who we are, if it diminishes our identity, our hopes, our promise.  Rightly so.  But if the attitude of unselfishness and humility comes out of the deepest root of our identity, the fact that we are in Christ, that we are children of God and so are those toward whom we show humility, disciples of Christ, members of the church, then we have fulfilled the call to a life in Christ that Paul uttered to the believers in Philippi.

Paul goes on to describe, “Who is the Christ that we proclaim ?  What is at the core of our Christian faith?”  The answer is:  Christ is divine and was with God, but took it upon himself to bridge the divide between the human and the divine so that God may not be distant as the farthest star, but may be close to us and may be known.  Christ lived as human and died as human.  In the ultimate act of grace, he went before us, even until death, so that, even in the loneliest moment of suffering, we would not have to be alone.  He overcame death and was resurrected to eternal life so that we may have eternal life, so that the promise that God made to Noah would be fulfilled—an everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on earth.

Such is the faith to which we have welcomed you, Annelise Carlson McGee, today.

In Jesus Christ,

Amen.

mjl