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"God's Ragtag,
Tatooed Band" Andrew Lowrie, one of our pre-schoolers, was walking through the sanctuary one weekday with his mom and they stopped to notice that things had been rearranged up front in the sanctuary. His mother, Dawn, never one to let a teachable moment go by, asked Andrew why he thought it was. Andrew, who was familiar with what went on in church on Sunday mornings, proudly suggested that maybe it meant that we were going have a baby advertised that coming Sunday! He wasn't that far off you know. Certainly, there is a little bit of that at work as parents come into the church with their newborns and offer them before God. They are advertising this blessing that has come into their lives, this gift of God that has stolen their heart from the moment they found out that new life was growing inside her mother. There is little bit of that parental pride at work - this is our child, the most precious, gifted, beautiful child in the world (not to take anything away from your child or grandchild...but that's just how parents see their own children!). But it is much more than that. It is advertising to the world that this child is now marked by God, claimed by God, belongs to God. This is no sentimental act, but a radical, prophetic statement. A parent is offering a child to God, to the community of faith...in desperate hope that this child will come to own this faith one day for themselves. No guarantees - just a promise to walk alongside and surround with love until it might happen. When Jesus comes to be baptized by John at the Jordan, it is not much different. It is an advertisement of sorts, a movie trailer that tells you what is coming on the horizon. With Mark's Gospel this is how we jump into the story of Jesus. There is no nice Christmas narrative with shepherds and angels and mangers and stars to ease us into things. Rather we are thrust immediately into the life of Jesus around age 30, ready to launch out on what he feels like he must do. But before the preaching and healing, the teaching and touching, the welcoming and inviting, the barrier breaking and pain-taking, the suffering and dying and rising - before any of this - there is business to attend to at the River Jordan. In typical fashion, Mark narrates the event fairly succinctly. Whereas Matthew has John resist on the grounds that they've got the roles reversed, and John can't even bring himself to say that Jesus was actually baptized by John - just identified as the coming one by him - Mark simply says that this fiery preacher John dunked Jesus just like any of the others who had come to him. What was different was the voice: This is my Beloved Son. If the others had been urged to turn away from the lives they had been living, it seems like Jesus is being affirmed to turn toward the life that he has been called for. You are my beloved son. I don't know if anyone has reminded you lately, but that's who you are, too. The whisper from your baptism those many years ago may seem so faint and the voices that have come in the intervening years so loud or at least more dominant - the ones that have said you are not smart enough, or pretty enough, or thin enough, or successful enough, or gifted enough, or this enough or that enough. They are the voices real and imagined that we have lived with, voices of parents and peers, anonymous voices in our culture, voices of our own making. Sometimes these lying voices are so much in the foreground and the heavenly voice seems so far off that we begin to doubt our sacred worth, our true identities. And then we live everyday trapped and frightened as if though we have to earn our worth or work for the approval of God or others. Your baptism, my baptism is a radical affirmation, a moment of unconditional love: You are is my beloved Son; You are my beloved daughter. Can you hear the power of that? Are you willing to trust that voice? But our baptisms mean more than that - just as it did for Jesus, our baptism means that we are claimed by God, called by God, sent by God for service and mission in the world. To live not for ourselves but for God, to live a new kind of life in a new kind of kingdom. Mark Yaconelli, one of the speakers at the Princeton Forum on Youth Ministry that Amee & I were attending this past week in California, said something that reminded me of what it means to be part of the community of the baptized. He said that coming to church, ought to be a cross-cultural experience. That is, when someone comes in contact with this community of faith, through our worship or our serving, our teaching or in our day-to-day living, it ought to be clear that we are not just nicer people, but that we are different people. It ought to be apparent that we are marked by God and that we are resisting Babylon, the dominant values of our culture that tell us worth comes from power, or success or image or possessions. Coming into church ought to be a cross-cultural experience. He went on to remind all of us at the conference that when young people in the church come to us, the adults, the primary question that they are asking whether verbally or implicitly is this: "Do you know a way to live? Because I don't want to just end up in a cubicle." What are we teaching our children, our youth about what it means to be the community of the baptized?? Are we offering them an alternative, distinctive way to live...or just a nicer version of Babylon? You are loved, you are called to love, and...you are a work in process. For some of us, it might suffice to say that we are simply a piece of work. But we are God's work, God's own ongoing project in love and patience. In her poem, "Getting It Across," U.A. Fanthorpe writes imaginatively about those who call themselves followers of God. Jesus is speaking somewhat wistfully about his task in comparison to that of Moses and the prophets: I envy Moses, who could choose The diuturnity of stone for waymarks Between man and Me. He broke the tablets, Of course. I too know the easy messages Are the ones not worth transmitting; But he could at least carve. The prophets too, however luckless Their lives and instructions, inscribed on wood, Papyrus, walls, their jaundiced oracles. I alone must write on flesh. Not even The congenial face of my Baptist cousin, My crooked affinity Judas, who understands, Men who would give me separately to the unborn As if I were something simple, like bread. But Pete, with his headband stuffed with fishhooks, His gift for rushing in where angels wouldn't, Tom, for whom metaphor is anathema, And James and John, who want the room at the top - These numbskulls are my medium. I called them. I am tatooing God on their makeshift lives. My Keystone Cops of disciples, always Running absurdly away, or lying ineptly, Cutting off ears and falling into water, These Sancho Panzas must tread my Quixote life, Dying ridiculous and undignified, Flayed and stoned and crucified upside down. They are the dear, the human, the dense, for whom My message is. That might, had I not touched them, Have died decent and respectable upright deaths in bed. “I am tatooing God on their makeshift lives...”You have been marked by God in your baptism, tatooed to show that you are part of God’s makeshift, ragtag band of disciples. Remember your baptism and be thankful. Remember your baptism and Who it is you are advertising. Amen.
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