January 10, 2010 - Epiphany 1, Year C (RCL)
Recently, babies have been on my mind.
I’ve been waiting for the birth of my new nephew, Gus, who arrived safely on Thursday.
And I’m not alone - here at church we’ve prayed for the safe arrival of grandsons to the Bastin and Kreglers,
and a number of others have new grandchildren.
We’re getting used to baby Maggie crawling around or waving her spatula.
Last week she was baptized along with Keira,
and this week we’ve had more inquiries about baptism than I think we’ve had in the last year.
And when you spend time with babies, you discover
that they know things
that many of us
have somehow forgotten.
They know when they are hungry
and how much to eat.
They know when they are tired,
and how to sleep.
And they know that they are loved,
and love us in return.
There is nothing more important for us as human beings,
I think,
than to be loved.
I remember once seeing a story on TV about a woman
who realized how human beings need to be loved
to grow up healthy. Even though we’re not entirely sure how it works,
love is essential for very part of our development, physically, intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually.
And so she started a program for orphaned children in China,
where volunteers would come in
just to love those children,
to play with them, to hug them,
to let them know
that they are loved.
We all need to be loved.
It’s not one of those things you hear about so often in church, though.
In sermons,
we preachers tend to focus on what you all have to do.
“Love one another,” we say.
Be gentle and kind, listen to ane another, care for those in need, be generous, love one another.”
But there’s a piece we sometimes forget.
We talk about what to do. We forget
who we are.
When I was in high school, I had a friend
who used to say to me fairly often,
“I’m a Christian. I do good for other people. I’m a loving person.”
There was a piece of me that wanted to say yes, that’s right, and yet
there was a piece of me
that felt something wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t quite know how to put it into words.
Because there are lots of people
who do good, there are lots of people who are loving,
but a whole bunch of them
would not call themselves Christian, would not even want to be called Christian. Some of them belong to other religions,
some of them
have no particular faith at all.
But they just happen to think it is important to be loving.
What I didn’t know how to say to my friend
is what is in our Old Testament reading, and in a bunch of other places in the Bible. Being Christian is not first of all
about loving others,
but that we are loved.
We are loved
by a God who is passionate,
a God who is so over-the-top in love
that he came to us
God incarnate,
in Jesus Christ.
We are loved,
loved beyond all measure.
And that is the gospel, the absolute core of Christianity,
we are loved.
In the book of Isaiah, we hear the voice of God speaking:
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior . . .
you are precious in my sight and honored
and I love you.”
It’s not so often
that we hear those words,
“I love you,”
and even less often
that we hear them from the lips of God.
Not this clearly, anyway.
And they were first words spoken to the people of Israel, something a little over two and a half thousand years ago, at a time in their history
when everything seemed in a mess. They were afraid; they were not sure
that their nation would survive,
and all they could see around them were enemies.
And then comes God.
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior . . .
you are precious in my sight and honored
and I love you.”
God reassures them, God tells them that no matter what else happens
they are loved.
But there is a second piece to what God says. God puts a vision in front of them, a vision of people
being gathered from across the whole of the earth. From north and south, from east and west, from the very ends of the earth
they are gathered, all those created
and loved
by God.
And that includes us.
We may not be able to trace our ancestors
to that original band of Jews
two and a half thousand years ago,
but we got adopted in,
when Jesus came to this earth of ours,
we got adopted in
and now we belong to God
just as much as those people did way back
when God first spoke those words,
“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior . . .
you are precious in my sight and honored
and I love you.”
Whatever else happens, God loves us.
And the way we are adopted in
is through baptism. Just as Jesus was baptized,
and heard those words of Jesus,
“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased,”
so we hear
“You are mine
and I love you.”
From the moment of our baptism, whether it’s as a baby or later,
we are formally part of the family of God -
all of us.
We don’t have to do anything to earn God’s love,
we don’t have to be anyone special.
God has given us the breath of life, God
knows us and calls us by name.
Through the waters of baptism, God is with us,
and in all our lives, through hard times and good times, through pain and through blessing,
God is with us.
In baptism we are signed Christ’s own, marked as God’s dear children.
And nothing can ever change that.
And when we were baptized,
we became part of something that is much bigger than ourselves,
part of the community
that is formed by the love of God.
We are all bound together
by the love of God.
We belong together
because of the love of God.
And because God loves us so much,
we can’t help loving one another,
if we just let that love of God flow out through us.
Sometimes we talk about what to do, and forget
who we are. But in the end, they should belong together. The fact is
that who we are
is people who are loved, loved beyond all measure
by our God,
and what we do,
all we can do
in response to that love,
is to love.
In the things we say,
in the thins we do,
sharing the passionate, even overwhelming love of God
with a world
that is desperate
to be loved.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010