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‘B’ // Baptism of the Lord // 1-11-09 // Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scriptures Genesis 1:1-5 Psalm 29 Mark 1:4-11
Named, Claimed, and Called
Dedicated to the Ordination and Installation of Kristin Klevering,
and the Installation of Debra Davies, Bruce Westlake, and Donald Wilson,
as Elders on the Northside Session
It appears at this moment that, after an excruciatingly painstaking recount, the final person elected to the United States Senate in the most recent elections is a man by the name of Al Franken.
It’s a wonder that more politicians on the national stage do not arrive there in the manner of this presumptive junior Senator from the State of Minnesota. For as many of you know, Mr. Franken’s entire adult life has been spent in the comedic arts.
Much of it satire. Whether it be the more political variety or more broadly cultural fare.
Take Franken’s invention of a Twelve Step-addicted ne’er-do-well daily affirmations specialist named Stuart Smalley. Replete with his treasured motto, “I’m good enough … I’m smart enough … and – doggone it – people like me!” Franken’s character returned frequently as a Saturday Night Live skit for many years.
It sometimes seemed that Stuart Smalley never met a piece of psychobabble he didn’t like. My personal favorite is his counsel on dealing with regrettable moments in one’s life: “Name It … Claim It … and Erase It!”
Let’s pitch our tent at that cultural campsite for a moment: “Name It … Claim It … and Erase It!” For most of us are taught, I believe, that naming and laying claim to and even erasing and starting over are just about the most redemptive things we can do with our lives. In other words: We attempt to define and redefine ourselves primarily, if not wholly, by our choices.
More often than we may be willing to admit, our self-naming and –claiming turns out to be delusional. Even the term so redemptive to so many of our society’s would-be child bearers – pro-choice – comes with its cost in irony.
United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon laments the fact that women who have chosen abortion often feel as if they had no other choice. While he was the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, Willimon encountered a graduate student who had researched the reasons local women had aborted their children. The student recalled, “The number one reason given for having an abortion was, ‘I had no other alternative given my situation.’”1
In the broadest sense: how “pro-choice” is our lives? How general is our delusion – how false is our sense of reality – when we attempt to define our lives primarily, if not wholly, by our seeming power of choice?
We overhear a friend extol a “self-made man” who “pulled himself up by his own bootstraps”, and we smile our approval of that Alpha-male. Cliches of entitlement such as “he got what he deserved”, “he reaped what he sowed”, and “she’s got another thing coming” pass our way, and we nod our head accordingly.
And then we congratulate ourselves for hitting a triple – forgetting that we were probably born on life’s third base, to begin with!
I’m going to go out on a countercultural limb here, and assert that – more often than not, and regardless of our external trappings – we do not choose our good fortune or fate, either way. Any more than we choose our family of origin. Any more than we choose our upbringing.
For more often than not, we do less of the naming. We are more often the named. We do less of the claiming. We are more often the claimed.
Our lives are lived more reflexively – and less proactively – than we would admit to ourselves. And that’s not a bad thing!
Does all this sound fatalistic?
How about … providential?
“Name It … Claim It … and Erase It?”
How about, Being Named … Being Claimed … and Being Called?
What a grateful, grace-full, and wonder-full way to live! If we could just believe – we could truly believe – that the voice of God the Psalmist extols today is good … and all the time!
Hear again three phrases, found in the opening five verses of all of scripture:
A) “In the beginning when God created …”
B) “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.”
C) “And God saw that it was good.”
And hear, in response to such a beneficent God, the way of our discipleship, even more than the words, as expressed in today’s story of John the Baptizer.
Theologian Joan Taylor puts it well, I think, when she writes of John’s exemplary “lifestyle of total dependence on what God provided, a movement to simplicity and reliance on God’s providence.”2
And yet, let us not rush out and lay claim to John’s prophetic calling out, for once – as if we were the saviors of God’s world. But let us, by living in trust more like John, be named and claimed by our God, and by doing so open our ears to hear our prophetic call into being.
Our naming. Our being claimed. Our call.
Out of our baptism. Into ordained and installed service in this church.
And into whatever servant leadership God may call us.
For God’s naming and God’s claiming of us may differ in function and/or degree. But certainly: not in kind! To use a contemporary metaphor: Could it be that Jesus is our template, here? For you, God’s son – and you, God’s daughter: You are called beloved. You – God’s holy creation – are also the one with whom God is well pleased.
If only our sisters and brothers on all sides of the struggle in the Middle East today – beginning with all concerned in our own country – could embrace this Good News. If only that equal name, that equal claim, and that equal call of God to every individual could be communicated to all of the suffering there; most especially, to each of the suffering there.
For that’s all we need to encounter – one suffering face, as those who have worked the shelter this past week can understand – to understand that our lives are not our chosen conceit. Our lives are God’s conceit of choosing us.
Each and every one of us. Regardless.
As if we could draw a circle around who is chosen and who is not. An effort in fear and futility for every American exceptionalist or Zionist – Christian or otherwise – to spurn these days.
Alas! If only we Americans would stop subsidizing massacres such as the one in Gaza these past two weeks – doling out without condition three billion dollars a year in military aid to the fourth most powerful military in the world to kill a hundred enemies for every single one the enemy kills …
Alas! If only the Israeli government would pause and reflect – simply pause and reflect – that half of the 1.4 million faces of its current enemy are under the age of 15 (who could then say that these children are not the Chosen?) …
And, alas! If only the Israeli government would simply let the doctors and the medicines into Gaza …
If only. How ironic, that those who so poignantly bear such a powerfully historic story of being chosen by their God, rather than choosing their God, have suddenly developed amnesia for the other half of their original covenant of chosenness to Abram: “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”3
For contrary to how our government may portray matters – and with Hamas’ own belligerence duly noted – the Israeli government is not doing the naming of what is human and humane here, it is not doing the claiming of what is human and humane here, and it certainly is not being called by the God who has so marked and self-identified with us all to respond to ground-base missile launchers and rocks with F-16 jets and depleted uranium.
This is not how “the chosen” are called to treat “the blessed”!
Whether the marks of God’s own choosing be our circumcision or our baptism: Let us know that the journey begins but does not end with these marks. Let us who are Christians hear – really hear – these consummating words from John today: “I have baptized us with water, but (Jesus) will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Words of wisdom channeled to us twenty centuries later by a valium-addled prophet named Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner’s play and film Angels in America. Surveying the skyline of Brooklyn – and I don’t mean Brooklyn, MI – Harper Pitt reflects the following to her estranged Mormon husband: a gay man who nevertheless wants her back:
Water won’t ever accomplish the end, no matter how much you cry. A flood’s not the answer. People just float … Fire’s the answer. The great and terrible day at last.4
The fire of the Holy Spirit. “Great and terrible”, to our ego … because we are rendered helpless before the Spirit’s gracious power. “Great and terrible”, to our ego … because all our naming and all our claiming and all our blaming are suddenly melted away.
“Great and terrible”, to our ego … because that Spirit-fire in turn names us, and claims us, and calls us, beyond our long-forgotten baptismal moment. To a promise and a place that may forge us, yet one which we can never erase.
“Name it … Claim it … and Erase it”: No more!
For in our baptism – by the water, and by the Spirit – we are named, and we are claimed, and we are called … forevermore.
Regardless.
World without end. Amen.
2Quoted in Suzanne Mayer, “Pastoral Implications: Baptism of the Lord”, in Lectionary Homiletics, Volume XX, Number 1, p. 50.
3Genesis 12:4, New Revised Standard Version.
4Quote taken from the film version (2004, Home Box Office, Inc.)
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