Sermon

January 7, 2007

“Marked By Love”

Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22

January 7, 2006

The voice of God ---- Have you heard it?  The voice that affirms you are marked by love?  The voice that affirms you have chosen the right path?  Done the right thing?  “Have you not known?  Have you not heard?” asks Isaiah.  “Those with ears to hear, let them hear,” says Jesus.  “Day to day pours forth speech,” says the psalmist.  But God’s speech, God’s voice, seems to be pitched in a kind of register that many of us cannot distinguish from silence. 

Luke tells us that the people were expecting a Messiah.  John had been baptizing them, so they asked, “Are you the Messiah?”  John said, “I baptize you with water.  The one who is more powerful than I is coming and will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” 

 So when all the people had been baptized, Jesus was baptized, and as he prayed, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.  And a VOICE came from heaven saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

 Parents who have stood at this baptismal font with their child can readily hear this because they, too, are well pleased with their children, and they have come to hear this love ratified.  But everyone knows that the two situations are different.  For Jesus the voice was audible.  How do you think this happened?  We say that God is not a person.  Could a disembodied God have caused waves of sound to form in the air?  Or placed a thought in the minds of everyone present, in such a way that they knew it was not their own voice?  It’s a great mystery – God using a voice. 

 A medical doctor tells of his fight against the idea of a personal God who intervened in human life.  He sought refuge instead in music; Bach particularly appealed to him because of the mathematical precision of the fugues.  Meanwhile, his life was falling apart.  His first wife left him; he started drinking too much.  One day as he was driving, he pounded the steering wheel with his open palms and cried out, “God, if you’re really there, you’re going to have to say something!  And you know what kind of man I am!  No screwing around, now – none of those “signs!”  You’re going to have to talk my language!”  Just then on the radio came, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”  He cried, and laughed, at what an idiotic but wonderful word this was to him.  And just in case he might try to explain away the moment, and say that Bach was often played on that radio station (which was actually a nonclassical music station), the next song to come on was “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega.   

God does speak to us in uncanny moments.  Just this week, someone told me of such a moment, a moment when God tells us we are marked by love, when God uses our names.  Perhaps we’re not accustomed to recognizing the voice of God.  We may seem to be on a different wavelength from God.  The problem is -  if we cannot hear God, then we will not trust God to do anything of consequence.  We will believe only in a remote, ineffectual, impersonal process, rather than a powerful, demanding, loving force.

If we want to hear something more direct, we need to come to these baptismal waters, dip our hands in and awaken our senses!!

Just touching something grounds our faith and keeps it personal.  The psalms, for example, declares, “The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over mighty waters.”  In fact, in this Psalm 29, God works entirely through speech; when God says a thing, it is accomplished.

 The parents who stand here at the baptismal font can hear it.  Their eyes glisten as they hold their beloved children.  The rest of the congregation, having waited for all their prayers to be answered, hears something else instead.  God says, “You are my beloved.”  And when God says a thing, it is accomplished.  From that point on, you are marked by love. 

Of course, it is not easy.  It doesn’t mean that from the moment we are marked by love, life will be beautiful.  It doesn’t mean there won’t be depression, or illness, or grief or sorrow, or infidelity, or 11-year-olds getting sick, or 12 and 13-year olds getting addicted to drugs, or 15-year-olds committing suicide, or people going hungry.  It does mean that, having been marked by love, we are called – no - obligated, to encourage others, to nurture others, in what a group of leaders at the Planning Retreat called “Christian Living.”

 The Pursuit of Happyness is a new movie about real life Chris Gardner, a once-homeless man in the 1980’s who came to be a multi-millionaire.  Gardner is played in the movie by actor Will Smith.  The theme, according to Gardner is, “The cavalry ain’t coming.  You’ve got to do this yourself.”  Yet Gardner continues to keep his membership in Glide Memorial UMC in San Francisco, and he returns there four or five times a year to help out in the soup kitchen that kept him and his young son alive when they were homeless.  He says that his determination to succeed should encourage all church members who work on behalf of the homeless.  “The work that Methodists do,” he said, “makes so much of a difference in someone either making it or breaking it.  A lot of times they don’t get to see that immediately.”  

And so it is up to us to demonstrate the transformation that has occurred within us as the result of an absolute, paramount commitment to Jesus.  The doctor who heard Bach decided in middle age to become a disciple of Christ.  He says, “I spent a lot of years running after someone’s love.  I didn’t find it in my work, and I didn’t find it in my marriage.  It is a miracle I even walked through the doors of a church, because it sure wasn’t a big part of my life before.  The nearest thing I had ever experienced to hearing God’s voice was music, which has beauty and rapture, but this new thing is personal.  It’s love.  I am marked by love.” 

Every congregation can do ministry “in crescendo.”  It is within every congregation’s ability to employ 21^st century knowledge and techniques to fulfill the 1^st century missional mandate in ways that are both relevant to the biblical text and appropriate to our culture.  What better way to show that we are thankful for our own baptism than to become involved in the mission of our church – to let others know that they are marked by love?  Yesterday at our planning retreat, we had 81 leaders who showed up to plan ways in which we could witness to the love of God who became flesh and dwelt among us. Within their committees they took on the focus for 2007 to get every member involved – EMI.  I invite you today, as you receive Holy Communion, to dip your hands into the baptismal waters, remember your baptism, nurture others and encourage them to hear that they are marked by God’s love.  Amen.