Come Fail With Us!

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas
January 7, 2007; Feast of the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, Year C
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 3:15-17, 21-22) -- As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize youwith the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased."
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"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"

"I will, with God's help."


That's one of the questions of the Baptismal Covenant. In the midst of this unique sacrament of Baptism -- full of idealism, promise, and hope -- when we imagine the heavens opening and the voice of God declaring to each baptized person, "This is my beloved child!" In the midst of this glorious sacrament we concede a crucial expectation. We will fail. "Whenever you fall into sin," the Prayer Book says. You will fall into sin. So make your promise now, that when you do, you will repent and return.

That is why we make provision for confession regularly available in our worship and prayer. If you pray the Daily Office, there is the opportunity to confess each day. During most Eucharists we share a corporate confession of sin. The Sacrament of Confession itself is available by appointment at any time, over and over, whenever and as often as you need it. Tradition holds that one of the gifts of receiving communion is the gift of forgiveness. Each time you leave the communion rail, you leave forgiven, loved, and free, and we celebrate the Sacrament of the Eucharist every Sunday, as well as other times during the week.

But you can be baptized only once. Baptism is permanent, unrepeatable and indelible. In baptism you are marked as Christ's own forever, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can choose to live into your baptismal identity, or you can choose to renounce and deny it. But God in Christ always lays claim to you and accepts you as God's own child. There are good Christians and there are bad Christians; there are angelic Christians and there are hellish Christians; but if you are baptized you are a Christian; and you belong -- forever.
him in

Have you heard the one about the man rescued after 20 years on a desert island? A rescuer appears and is astonished to find that the castaway has built several imposing structures.

“Wow!” the rescuer says. “What’s that beautiful stone building overlooking the bay?”
“That is my home,” the castaway says.
“And what about that building over there, with the spires?”
“That,” the castaway says, “is my church.”
“But wait!” the rescuer says. “That building over there, with the bell tower. What is that?”
“That’s the church I used to belong to.” [from Bill Tully's sermon, noted below]

We live in a competitive consumerist culture. We expect to be able to choose from many brands of the same product. Well that works just fine when buying a car or selecting an entertainment. But for the deepest experiences of relationship, there is great value in the permanence of commitment. It seems that we are wired in such a way that we get to the deepest core of relational truth through consistent practice, over time, within community.

We have been given the Sacrament of Marriage as a school for love. There are deep lessons of love that can be only learned when we commit ourselves personally, permanently to one other person. Marriage is one of the containers for that unique practice of love.

We have been given the Sacrament of Baptism as a school for growing into our full humanity. There are things about being human that we can only learn when we commit ourselves personally, permanently to the community of God's people. I have long treasured this insight from Anthony Bloom: You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek him elsewhere, that he is here, and if you do not find him here it is useless to go and search for him elsewhere because it is not he that is absent from us, it is we who are absent from him.

We experience the presence and activity of God in community with other human beings. We learn the love of God through love of neighbor.

Baptism is our gateway. Baptism is a ritual drowning. It is a way of concretely enacting our intention to deny ourselves. In the waters of baptism we die to the illusion of our own self-sufficiency. When we emerge from the baptismal waters we are no longer our own, we are Christ's. We give up going it alone and ask for help. We are promised that help forever, for we are God's own children. The context for the experience of the present help of God and of our own growth into the fullness of human life with God is uniquely accomplished when we live as members of Christ's Body, the Church.

I picked up this from an acquaintance, Bill Tully of St. Bartholomew's Church in New York:
In February 2003, Christianity Today featured Bono, lead singer for the rock group U2, and his campaign for churches around the world to become more involved in the fight against AIDS. Bono emerged as a star example of the unchurched Christian doing good.

Having once been involved in a loosely structured Irish fellowship, Bono now seldom goes to church. He does pray. He likes to say grace at meals. He has a favorite Bible translation. But he doesn’t want to be pinned down.

"I just go where the life is, you know? Where I feel the Holy Spirit," Bono said. "If it’s in the back of a Roman Catholic cathedral, in the quietness and the incense, which suggest the mystery of God, of God’s presence, or in the bright lights of the revival tent, I just go where I find life. I don’t see denomination. I generally think religion gets in the way of God."

You don’t have to be Bono to say that. A lot of people say that. That's a script that I have heard almost word for word from a variety of people.

In an editorial, the magazine appreciated Bono’s thirst for social justice, yet criticized his lack of churchly commitment. "Any person can stand outside the church and critique its obedience to the gospel. Part of God’s call on a Christian’s life is to walk inside and die to self by relating to other human beings, both in their fallenness and in their redeemed glory." That’s a wonderful definition of the church. That's what we’re really good at offering -- difficult people who are both fallen and glorious. Want experience with that? We can provide it. That's what happens in community. As Parker Palmer says, "Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. ...And when that person moves away, someone else arrives immediately to take his or her place.

[Continuing from Bill Tully] Christianity Today reports that it got a flood of letters defending Bono's staying away from church, most of them arguing, as one reader did, that not attending church doesn't take away a person's beliefs or salvation, because "Jesus Christ is more fair than that."

Fairness is not really the point. The point is whether one can maintain balance, solidarity or any real staying power of faith and practice without having others along the way.

The magazine concludes, "Clearly, Bono has chosen to keep his distance from the church, or at least to stay in the shallow margins of the pond, where he can dash for the shore at need. He has plenty of company." (Sermon, Belonging & Staying, stbarts.org/sermons/ser010905.htm)

Today what we want to is to drown some people in the deep waters of God's life. And if you want to risk going deep, and experiencing love and human life to its fullest, you'll have to do it committed to a group other human beings. There is a dimension of depth which is only available when you commit yourself to the particularity of permanent relationships. Our way of offering that in the Church is the unrepeatable Sacrament of Baptism. Because once you have been baptized, you can't get away from God. You belong.

So if you want to be real -- really real -- stay. Come fail with us! And whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord. That's the way we all learn how to be whole.