Year C, Ordinary 33
What is true faith? It’s a worthy question to ponder this Sunday as we celebrate the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Baptism is a sign that God the Holy Spirit has given the gift of faith to the one who passes through its waters into Christ’s body, the Church.
Two of our ancestors in faith, residents of the German city of Heidelberg in the 16th century, once wrote a catechism for their congregations. A catechism is a statement of Christian beliefs in question and answer format. This is their answer to that question:
(True faith) is not only a certain knowledge by which I accept as true all that God has revealed to us in his Word, but also a wholehearted trust which the Holy Spirit creates in me through the gospel, that, not only to others, but to me also God has given the forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation, out of sheer grace solely for the sake of Christ’s saving work.
So we see that faith is not only making up our minds about the truth of certain doctrines, but it is also a matter of the gut. It is a willingness to put our lives in God’s hands because we have found God to be trustworthy. The prophet Isaiah stresses this dimension of faith as trust in God in today’s Old Testament lesson:
Surely, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid, for the Lord is my strength and my might, and he has become my salvation.
For Isaiah, the opposite of faith is not doubt; it is fear. There is room for doubt even among the baptized, because baptism is not the end but the beginning of our intellectual development as Christians. Baptism does not mark people as those who’ve had all their questions answered, all their doubts erased, and who now stand in cocksure certainty about everything. In fact, good answers to important questions often lead us to pose still new questions for further study.
That said, there’s less and less room for fear as we grow in faith. The baptized are those who are assured that since God has bought us with the blood of God’s only Son Jesus, we can confidently put our lives and our questions in God’s hands. Despite all the dangers and uncertainties in life, the baptized believe that all things work together for good for those who love God. That is true faith.
The invitation to trust God and fear not is not a private invitation only. It has implications for our common life. Isaiah 12 closes a section of the book that has to do with a crisis of faith that Jerusalem experienced in a war with Syria and Ephraim in the 8th century B.C. In that crisis, the king and his court in Jerusalem lost their faith. In fear they turned from God, and put their trust in alliances with foreign kingdoms. When those alliances failed, king and commoner alike despaired.
We live in similar times. Fearful times. Faithless times. There’s literally no end to the number of things that can keep us awake at night. Somewhere, out there, a terrorist is plotting to blow us up. Somewhere, out there, a sex offender has his eye on your children. Somewhere, out there, the next killer bug is mutating. Bird flu. Ebola. Brain eating amoeba. Yes, there is such a thing!
Now, among our politicians these days, it is fashionable to wear your faith on your sleeve. But among our politicians it is also fashionable to pander to the fears of the public. That relentless fear-mongering, aided and abetted by a breathless, sensationalistic media, is the opposite of true faith. Fanning the flames of fear is what’s gotten us into the mess we’re in. And as bad as it is, it could get even worse. Fear-mongering leads to despair.
Living by faith does not mean being a Pollyanna. Rather, it’s a matter of defining your center of gravity, and living in this dangerous world out of that center. Isaiah lived in a dangerous world, a world of disease, of violent crime within the walls of Jerusalem, and bloodthirsty enemies just outside her walls, yet Isaiah turned to God in quiet, confident trust rather than giving himself over to manmade solutions to the anxieties that might have kept him awake at night. He invites the baptized, whether they occupy high public office or worship in small churches in small towns, to do the same today.
“With joy you will draw water from the well of salvation,” says Isaiah. Indeed, baptism is a well of salvation, a sign that God the Holy Spirit has opened in the believer’s heart a inexhaustible fountain of living water. And if you break down the poetry that follows that statement, you get a virtual catalogue of the good fruit that the human heart bears when it is watered from that life-giving well. The life of the baptized is a life of gratitude, intercession, testimony and worship.
Gratitude. Twice in this passage Isaiah summons his readers to give thanks to the Lord. Now, ‘tis the season for giving thanks, but we live in a culture that would squash any sprig of gratitude before it gets a chance to grow out of our hearts. Despite the great material abundance that we enjoy, we’re told in subtle ways that it’s not enough. Your teeth aren’t white enough. Your cell phone isn’t thin enough. Your TV isn’t wide enough. Your house isn’t big enough. Your clothes aren’t cool enough. Your car isn’t fast enough.
But, we’re also told, For $39.99, or for $249 per month, or for no money down and no interest until July 2008, or with this handy-dandy interest-only mortgage, we can fix that for you! So despite all that we have, we work harder and harder to make more money to pay for that one extra thing we think we need to live a whole life. It’s a treadmill a lot of us are on, one that’s hard to get off of.
It’s not good for us. Anxiety and depression are mental illnesses with a biological, chemical foundation, as real as the plaque that causes heart disease or the deficit of insulin that causes diabetes. But I suspect that a lot of the low-grade anxiety and depression many of us live with each day is due in some degree to this relentless drumbeat of “You’ve gotta have more.”
But when we pause to give thanks, we begin to acknowledge how much God has already blessed us with. And that’s an important step to take if we want to clear our minds of the anxious, depressing fog that descends whenever the advertisers or the pressure of our peer group makes us feel inadequate. Or, to paraphrase Cheryl Crow, “It’s not about having what you want, it’s about wanting and being grateful for what you’ve got.”
“Call on his name,” says Isaiah. We are blessed. We are rich in so many ways. And yet we are in need, only, our greatest needs cannot be supplied by Wal Mart. We need to be washed. We need to be made clean. In some respects, we aren’t any different than those shore birds in the San Francisco Bay who became coated in oil this week. It’s just that, in our case, the pollution is of our own making. Our sins against God and neighbor have stained us, and those stains threaten our ability to take flight. Indeed, they threaten our ability to live. Who can face the Living God, in whom there is no darkness or shadow of sin and death, in these sooty, spotted garments of clay?
But we are cleansed. We are washed clean. The blood of Jesus purifies us of every sin. The waters of baptism are a sign that in Christ our lives are bleached white. And when we do sin again, our baptism permits us to return again to the font of living water to seek pardon and purification.
“Make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.” Water is on our minds these days, not only the water in the font, but the lack of water that’s fallen from the skies in recent months. The governors of Georgia, Alabama and Florida are fighting over the dwindling flow of water in the Chattahoochee River. There’s just not enough to quench the thirst of the four million people who live in Atlanta, and irrigate the fields in south Alabama, and maintain the proper salinity in the oyster beds of the Apalachicola Bay.
And sometimes I wonder if we baptized Presbyterians aren’t similarly stingy with the waters of baptism. There’s no reluctance on our part to put our faith into deeds, but as for words, well, sometimes words fail us. Perhaps we are reluctant to give our testimony out of fear that newcomers might change our congregation and make us feel like strangers in a place where everyone once knew our name. Maybe there won’t be enough love and fellowship to go around. Or maybe we are reluctant to talk about our faith out of a desire not to impose our convictions on other people. We don’t want to argue over religion, or browbeat people into coming to church.
But there is enough to go around. The love of God springs from a fountain whose depths can never be exhausted. We have tasted those sweet waters and they have quenched our thirst. How could we not tell our parched, thirsty fellow travelers through the desert of this life where they can find living water? That’s all it means to make your testimony. It’s a gift, not an argument.
And lastly says Isaiah, “Sing praises to the Lord… Shout aloud and sing for joy.” The Christian life is a singing life. I don’t think it matters much what one sings, whether it’s The Old Rugged Cross or Shine, Jesus, Shine, Handel’s Messiah, Gregorian chant, or African-American spiritual. Nor does it matter much which instruments are used: pipe organ or Hammond organ, guitar or Orff instruments, jazz ensemble or concert piano. As long as we’re singing for God, and singing with the best of our God-given abilities, that will do.
And as long as we’re singing together. Some of us do sing alone, in the shower, or in the car on the way to work, or in tune with our IPod while out on a walk in the park, but singing is first and foremost a corporate activity. Altos need sopranos, sopranos need altos, and we tenors? Well, we need all the help that we can get. So we gather together on a weekly basis to sing God’s praise.
In a time in which there is great mistrust of organized religion, much of it well-deserved, the baptized still make time to get together with other members of the body of Christ to unite hearts and voices in praise of the One who has freed us from sin and death. Baptism doesn’t just make one a Christian; it makes one a member of the Church. And the most important New Testament metaphor for the Church is that of a body composed of many organs and members. A Christian without the Church is like an arm or leg cut off from the body. Sooner or later it will atrophy and die. But together, we make beautiful music.
And so this is the life that the sacrament of baptism is calling Matt to embrace today: a life of trust rather than fear, a life of gratitude not greed or anxiety, a cleansed life, a life of testimony and worship. To a great extent Matt has already embraced this life. We’re grateful today for his mother who took him to Church as a body, and to his friends for sustaining him in this life, and to Vanda, who has become a kind of grandmother or great aunt to Matt in our new member classes. Today the Spirit seals this life on Matt’s heart. And the Spirit invites each of us to recommit ourselves to this life into which we’ve been baptized.
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