September 27, 2009
The Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost (Year B)
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22; Psalm 124; James 5:13-20;
Mark 9:38-50
This morning we are doing a daring thing. We will baptize Elena Grace Winiarski. It is daring because we are bringing her into this incredibly complex world of Christian faith, and we are doing it on the Sunday when we hear these particular lessons that have just been read to us. The Hebrew testament lesson is one we didn’t hear on a regular basis until we started using the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) a few years ago, and it was included because it tells the story of a woman of faith. That is certainly appropriate as we baptize this young baby girl, to set a role model for her – even though it is a pretty gruesome tale!
Esther was one of the Jews in exile from the kingdom of Judah in the sixth century BCE, living in the kingdom of Persia, near modern day Iran and Iraq, I believe. Esther and her people had been there long enough to have become part of the royal family because Esther was a queen to King Ahasuerus. The story goes that Esther got wind that the king’s vizier, Haman, planned to secretly kill all of the Jews, and had been planning to hang them and their leader Mordecai on a giant gallows he was building on his property. Esther foiled his plans and Haman himself was hung from his own gallows. The king gave Esther and her people permission to kill off all those who had been part of the plot. What followed the brutal purging was a great feast, “Purim” commemorating their deliverance; it is celebrated by Jews to this day, with feasting and giving to the poor.
It’s a gory story, but it does speak of a strong woman who, because of her faith, stood up for her people and for herself. It would be my prayer that Ellie would never have to face the kind of plot that Esther faced. And in baptizing her today it is my hope that she is beginning a long and holy relationship with God that will give her the courage to stand up for her faith when she needs to, and even more than that, that that faith will be the foundation of her life. We baptize our children in recognition that we are not only inviting them into our community and promising to care for them, but that we will be providing a safe place in which to grow and to be themselves, to learn about Jesus and the stories of the bible, including this one! But because we know it is not always easy, it is daring to invite Ellie into this life of faith, a life in the line of such a woman as Esther!
And that is just the beginning of the faith story we hear today!
From James we hear of sin countered with the results of the persistence of prayer. I don’t really think someone as young as Ellie has sinned, and it is always stunning to me when I repeat the words of baptism washing little ones from their “sins.” However I do know that all humans do sin, all of us! Most of us want to think of our sins as lesser and more forgivable than other’s! But the truth is we all are at times, selfish and greedy and thoughtless. We hurt ourselves and others, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. James teaches us that the cure for such sinfulness lies in prayer. Our sin can be overturned, our mistakes and thoughtlessness forgiven through prayer. We can according to James find forgiveness, healing, and grace through prayer, prayers of our own and prayers in common without community and prayers for others. Our prayers will not be the source of grace, but they can be the means. For always grace is from God. Prayer has such power that for three whole years’ worth of Elijah’s prayers (when he was chastising the Hebrew people), there was drought. And then with one prayer asking for rain, finally it rained.
I would not wish three years of any kind of drought in Ellie’s life, and I certainly would not pray for it! But I would hope and pray that she will know the power of prayer in her life. This parish is known as a praying parish. We have a very active prayer chain that will pray for anyone who asks. We also have a prayer shawl ministry that is such a blessing for so many. (People pray as they knit the shawls, and people pray over them at the Taize service, and I pray over them again when I write out a prayer card for the specific person who is to receive the shawl) The Taize service is a service for prayer and healing through quiet music and laying on of hands that we hold once a month. We also hold healing prayers once a month on a Sunday and each Wednesday morning at the 7:30 service. We put the labyrinth out each month so people can use it as a form of meditative walking prayer. There are literally millions of ways to pray as these many ways we publicly pray would indicate. Each of us has to find our own prayer path and ways. It is a life time search. What is the right form of prayer at one point in our lives may not be at some other point. A life centered in prayer may not bring rain when asked for, but it will bring the peace that passes understanding. So we invite Ellie into this life of prayer this morning.
And then we have the daring lesson in the gospel. It speaks of cutting off hands and poking out eyes! And bringing little children into all that! But, of course, the gospel is full of hyperbole and exaggeration. God does not want anyone plucking their own eyes out or cutting off their hands literally, and God certainly doesn’t want us cutting off someone else’s hand or plucking out their eye because we know we are right, and they have done something so terrible that they deserve it!
But we do need to be mindful of recognizing the things that separate us from each other and from God. (Sin is the name of such things!) We don’t like much to think of ourselves and sin in the same breath, but there is sin in each of our lives that separates us from our whole hearted relationship with God. Following Christ is not an easy road all the time. Ellie looks so pretty in her dress, so innocent, so perfect, and yet like us she is going to have shortcomings as she grows up. But as a Christian that is not her whole story. It is not our whole story!
Each of us (and Ellie too) will at times find peace in our lives, and most certainly we will experience grace many times throughout our lives. If we are lucky, we will also know what it is to be forgiven not only by God, but by those we love. And as Christians most of us learn that it is only in serving others that we begin to know true freedom for ourselves. We learn that the measure of faith is not in what we accomplish or how many times a day we pray so that others may see us, but how many lives we can touch with love, hope and affection in anonymity.
The disciples were up in arms because people who were not with the band of followers were claiming to heal and cast out demons in Jesus’ name. They wanted “brand identity” for themselves alone. They wanted to be THE only ones. the insiders! How true that is to human nature! We all want our particular reality to be the one imposed on others.
It is the sign of a mature Christian when one can accept the reality of those who differ most radically from us as worthy of God’s love too. That is the true daring of being Christian, risking being in relationship with those who proclaim Christ in a way that makes no sense to us.
One of my favorite stories, and I have told it before (so you will likely recognize it) is of the blind men and the elephant. You remember it! They were the wisest men in the world, all blind, but they gathered together to tell the world the essence of “elephantness.” They gathered around the elephant and one of them said, “I know it! ‘Elephantness’ is something long, smooth, hard, and bare!” And another said, “No! It is like walking into a brick wall!” And another said, “No, it is a flexible hose, like muscle.” And still another said, “You are all wrong. It is a skinny rope like thing with a switch on the end.” And yet another, equally perplexed, said, “No, it is floppy and thin like a fan.”
Not one could see what the others were seeing, and, even with all their wisdom, they could not see how the pieces fit together or even that there were pieces! And so each claimed the whole truth, but all each had was a piece of it! The truth would not really be visible until they could fit the parts together. And I always wonder if they ever did! If we ever do!
The disciples were like those blind men when it came to the people who claimed to heal in Jesus’ name, but came from different places and weren’t in their band of followers. Jesus knew that their words may be different, but their intent was spot on. Jesus saw that in letting the others continue, they would eventually be brought to the bigger truth, and maybe his own disciples would be, too! The truth he knew and hoped they would learn was that they did not perform the miracles alone any more than we overcome sin alone. They were all dependent upon Jesus for that, all of them. They might go about it differently, but the bottom line was the same. The daring task for each of them was to let go of their own need for the place of distinction and glory for their miracles and step aside so that the light of Christ might shine through them.
When we dare to become followers of Christ, when we are baptized into his community, we place the gospel of Christ at the center, to be the foundation and the measure of our own lives. Our discipleship needs to grow into a commitment that we are willing to suffer, even die for. That is a daring thought, isn’t it?
We learn to do that by being strong as Esther was, prayerful as James teaches, and by learning to be at peace with one another, even with that rogue group we don’t know over there somewhere!
These are daring behaviors, daring signs of faith. And so today we welcome Elena Grace into the daring company of Jesus’ disciples. Welcome!
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd