|
|
Last week I
discovered a picture of my 4-year-old self with some of my friends
in our Vacation Bible School Class. Looking across 56 years, I saw
myself and a group of half-forgotten playmates sitting, as only
children can, cross-legged on the floor, in a little room in the old
church in my hometown. Our pose is compliant, but personalities peek
through the years: Ralph grins slyly, his head thrown back, as he
looks up from the floor and, at the same time, down his nose at the
photographer; Robert stands behind the group, awkwardly out of focus
and pulling his right earlobe as he looks into the class as if
trying to be accepted. I wonder how difficult it was for him, the
son of the man who had only recently sent by the bishop be the
preacher at our little church. There, too, is Bootsie, sitting on
the back row, barely visible behind some boy I don’t recognize. Did
she somehow arrange to hide back there, so that the camera records
her hair and her nose, but not the scars on her face from an earlier
fire that nearly took her life?
Forever frozen now in that moment in 1953, nineteen preschoolers
gaze at the camera. It must be morning, not only because the
sunlight streams in a side window, but because we wear clean shorts
and cotton shirts; some of the shirts look pressed. Robert’s shirt
has a pocket. How cute, and innocent.
Innocent, too, is the kid I don’t recognize in the front row,
forever caught scratching an embarrassing place. He is surely
forgiven, though, because we’re in church: Baptists, Methodists, and
Pentecostals. David is also in the picture: David, my Jewish friend
who, though two years older, is one of my closest friends in high
school and who, still a friend, lives less than twenty miles from
where the photo was taken, and who’s still my mom’s dentist, wears
his happiest face.
As try to recall names around the room, our invisible innocence is
what I notice; that, and the bright eyes of hope, the promise of the
moment. None of us has yet tasted the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Korea is remote to us children, and
Vietnam is as yet unimagined. We still must face the ‘60’s, and the
‘70’s. Those who survive will deal with life’s joys and defeats.
Marriages, jobs, our own children, divorces and death are part of a
future that has yet to wound us. So we sit there compliant and
happily frozen in childhood, none of us anxious for anything more
than who will be the first to finish coloring the picture of Goliath
and that other David, the hero shepherd who becomes a king, and who
was also a Jewish boy. We sit there in innocent bliss, eager to play
outside and later to drink our Kool-Aid, a name not yet laced with
Jonestown’s dreadful irony.
From today’s vantage, honesty demands that I note that missing from
that picture are the faces of any of our African-American neighbors,
who, by the way, outnumbered us nine to one. Their absence from the
room didn’t seem unusual or disturbing. We were innocent, and so was
our world, at that early instant. All we knew was what
four-year-olds need to know: that our teachers and our parents cared
for us, had time to let us play together, and wanted us to remember
this time for, among other things, its fleeting simplicity.
Since then, our lives have grown increasingly complicated. All of us
in that photo made it, you might say, into adulthood and into
complex lives. We followed our dreams, fulfilling a few of them and
either surrendering or burying a few others. We learned, some of us
sooner, and others later, the truth that all too often life falls
all too short of its promise. Trusting smiles turned to knowing
glances. We became adults, and in growing up we lost our childish
innocence.
And yet, some of us, including me, kept something of our faith from
that time. In the blurry background of that photo from my church’s
kindergarten class are pictures some teachers somewhere hoped might
give us children the stories of our faith. One of those stories is
the one we heard today in our lesson from Luke’s gospel: the story
of Jesus at his baptism. It begins in hope, of course, with the
dreams of a broken nation, subjects of a foreign Caesar: “As the
people were filled with expectation…” they asked John the Baptist if
he “might be the messiah.” (Luke 3:15, New Revised Standard Version)
And then Jesus appears, fully grown but still filled with the fire
and the hope of God’s own dream for him. And baptized among a group
of his friends, Jesus hears a voice of blessing: “You are my Son,
the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22, New Revised
Standard Version) Maybe Luke’s words give us the only picture of
that Jesus among that little crowd.
Having just seen that picture from my childhood, I hear Luke’s story
as a call to you and to me to remember our own formation, our own
blessing, as children of God. Yes, we’ve discovered a more complex
world. Yes, we’ve given up on the innocent literally reading of
those stories. But we haven’t given up on the truth that today’s
lessons convey. That truth is still true: God loves us, and that
same loving God invites us to live in the fuller world of God’s own
realm, a reality that is eternally hopeful, innocent, just and
merciful.
The Isaiah lesson, like so much of our scripture, proclaims a
similar theme. Isaiah would have us know that God’s love follows us
from our innocence. God’s love, says Isaiah, is constant, in spite
of the terrors of life’s losses (which, by the way, Isaiah’s people
knew all too well, as children of an enslaved people). Listen to the
hope being reborn in Isaiah’s word from God: “But now thus says the
LORD, he who created you… he who formed you: Do not fear, for I have
redeemed you; I have called you by name, and you are mine.” (Isaiah
43:1, New Revised Standard Version) Like my kindergarten class
gathered on that worn linoleum floor in that dusty, high-ceilinged
room in that insignificant little church long ago, Isaiah’s readers
know that we are loved, from the beginning to the end. God calls us
by name, and loves us.
We know, not because we are lovable, or even notable. We know that
God’s love supports us because, when our innocence fell away, we
felt God there. When no one else seemed to care, God sent friends
who stood by us. We know, not because we were strong, and not even
because our faith is always strong, but because God’s faith in us
has been unshakable, constant, and true. God has called us by name;
God has said to you and to me, “You are mine. You are my child. With
you I am pleased.”
Just when has God said that? Likely many, many times, there is a
scrapbook of pictures, some surviving only in my own heart, when I
flip through its pages I know that God, if no one else, has held my
hand and lifted me up. And this, too: God said that to me and to you
when we were baptized. “You are mine. Do not fear. I have redeemed
you. I have called you by name.” I heard once that when Martin
Luther felt himself shaken by the power of Rome and the doubts so
strong he ascribed them to demons, he would look in the mirror and
remind himself, “Martin, you are baptized.”
Today, we have the privilege of remembering that same graceful
truth. Today, we the baptized have the joy of glimpsing that grainy,
cracked old photo in the scrapbook God has been holding for each of
us.
Since we don’t have an actual child being baptized in our worship
today, we get to remember, really remember, our baptisms. As Pastor
Sabrina and I walk around, hear the words of the ritual as a call to
both prayer and memory: “Remember your baptism,” we will say.
“Remember your baptism and be thankful.”
As we say those words and as we cast a bit of water your way, see
yourself as the gift that God knows that you are. Remember yourself
as the jewel of God’s family, for that’s how God knows you. Not
because you’re good, but because God’s love is both perfect and
perfecting.
And during the ritual we’ll sing words that we sometimes sing when
we introduce a baptized child to this family of faith. Today, let’s
serenade each other, with lullabies to the child that is your
neighbor. No matter how old your neighbor looks, no matter how many
wrinkles some of us have, in our hearts we are really just children.
Today, we recall ourselves as children of a living, faithful God.
Today, we remember with gratitude our own baptisms into this
mysterious and wonderful life of faith.
This is the last verse of our hymn:
“Child of God your loving Parent,
learn to know whose child you are.
Grow to laugh and sing and worship,
Trust and love God more than all.”
(Ronald S. Cole-Turner, “Child of Blessing, Child of Promise,” The
United Methodist Hymnal, page 611.)
That’s our deepest prayer, isn’t it, for all who are baptized? And
it is our prayer, this day, for each other, and maybe even for
ourselves.
Amen.
Mamaroneck United Methodist, January 10, 2009.
|
