(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 28, 2016, Lent III)
-----
Sacraments Unseen
Water sprays up from the sprinkler, arcing back and forth under the hot sun. The individual drops capture the light in an unreal way. They give the illusion of light shooting up from the ground, of streams of brightness born from some subterranean furnace. Shouts of glee pierce the air. A boy, no more than thirteen, dashes through the sprinkler. The sunlit water breaks on his thirsty skin, splashing its shine in a halo about him, anointing him with joy.
He is a refugee recently arrived from God knows where, God knows what. Until now, no one has seen a smile on his face. But today is a party, a party for all the refugee children in the area, and so for the first time he is around others his age; for the first time in God knows how long, he is playing. For the first time, he can taste new life.
When the sun sets, the sprinklers are turned off. All achatter, the children stumble into the rec center, where plastic tables are lined with boxes of pizza and pitchers of lemonade. Still dripping, the boy takes a seat with several others and they dig in. To say the pizza tasted good, or the lemonade just perfect, would not do justice to the boy’s experience. What happened at that plastic table reached far beyond his stomach.
That night, life itself tasted good. Those moments in the sprinkler, those moments around the table would live on inside the boy for the rest of his life; they were nothing less than an oasis in the wilderness.[1]
“All Were Baptized…and Ate…and Drank”
Indeed, that sprinkler may have been nothing less than the waters of baptism, that table of pizza and lemonade nothing less than the table of our Lord. If that sounds outrageous, take it up with the Paul who wrote today’s scripture. It’s his idea more than mine. I must confess that I myself was surprised when I sat down with today’s text, when I read Paul’s incredible claim. If it weren’t crazy enough that he begins by calling the Jewish people the “ancestors” of the Corinthians, who were a primarily gentile (that is, non-Jewish) audience, what follows was sure to raise a few eyebrows. “All” of the Israelites delivered from Egypt, he says—and he uses this word “all” five times, to emphasize his point—all of them passed through the baptismal waters of the Red Sea into new life. All of them ate manna from the sky and drank water from the rock, which were but the equivalents of the bread and cup we eat at the Lord’s Supper.
This alone is a lesson worth remembering: that the baptismal waters and the table are God’s, not ours, that they are open to all, and that many indeed have already visited them outside the boundaries that we have prescribed.
The church has formalized the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, into a science. In more traditional churches than ours, the same words are recited every week before the same actions are performed in exactly the same way. All of which suggests that you must do certain things to qualify for God’s grace. But according to Paul, that’s not the case. No one sat the Israelites down and explained the mechanics of this baptism and this eucharist, these good gifts of God. They didn’t recite the catechism or go through communion class or confirmation class in order to receive their baptism into new life, in order to eat and drink from God’s own hand.
I don’t mean to water down baptism, or to dilute the Lord’s Supper, into some universal experience. And I don’t think Paul does either. For us Christ-followers, water and the bread and the cup will always captivate us in a special way, will always proclaim the foolishness and weakness of the cross, which is the upside-down wisdom and power of God. To say that all of Israel was baptized, or that an unsuspecting orphan may partake at the table, is only to say that God’s grace overflows the formal boundaries we draw in retrospect. It’s to say that the God who lives inside the church also lives outside these walls. It’s to say—as Jesus does in one of his parables—that sometimes the insiders miss the whole point and therefore miss out on the feast; and that when this happens, God is like a great dinner host who goes to the streets, inviting anyone with ears to join the feast.
“Once Saved, Always Saved”?
In the ivory towers where scholars with long robes and even longer titles sit together and theorize about God, and in not a few churches where folks like to debate the finer points of faith, there is a phrase bandied about that good Protestants such as ourselves might sometimes use: “Once saved, always saved.” In other words, just as you cannot earn your salvation, so too you cannot lose it. Either God’s grace swings low and carries you home. Or it doesn’t.
Far be it from me to add a word to the longstanding debate about salvation. All I’d like to do is point out what Paul says in today’s scripture. Unlike many Christians today, Paul does not appear interested with systematizing salvation. He knows that sin and salvation are the stuff of one’s own experience and circumstance, not the stuff of science. Trying to draw a line that determines who’s in and out is like trying to draw a line in the water.[2]
And so Paul directs his audience’s attention to Exhibit A as proof of how a person can slip from salvation. All the Israelites were baptized into a new life, he says. All the Israelites received nourishment from God. Nevertheless, “most of them,” he points out, “were struck down in the wilderness.” He could have been more pointed. He could have said, “Out of the thousands who were baptized and who partook of God’s grace, only two—two!—entered the promised land.”[3]
And so Paul says, “Take care! Watch out! It could happen to anyone.” And that’s the sad truth. Of all the Hebrews whom God had delivered from Egypt, of all who entered the baptismal waters of new life and shared in the restoring food and drink of God—all but two of them sought their own way in the wilderness rather than God’s way. All but two of them followed their own inclinations, preferring to settle into their old, stale selves rather than to become something new. And it could happen to any of us, Paul practically shouts. The orphan who for a brief moment stepped through the sprinkler into new life, could just as easily step back, could just as easily lapse into the daily bread of this world: its selfish creeds, its belief in quick-fixes and cheap happiness, its dogma of easy living. The temptation is real. It’s as real as that orphan’s first job and first paycheck, as real as the first time you taste success, as real as the long-sought achievement that secures a person’s status in his or her own sphere of life.
The Lenten Journey
There is a thread, then, that unifies Paul’s message today, and it is a Lenten thread, a thread common to our Lenten journey. Deep within each word that Paul speaks today is the warning, “Don’t presume.” You have baptism and the Lord’s Supper? They are no privilege: they are God’s grace, the same grace common to everyone, given to all of the ancient Israelites in the wilderness. And if the ancient Israelites’ example is anything to go by, then, again, I say, “Don’t presume.” See what happened to them? They were saved one day. But the next, they decided they didn’t need saving. They decided they were just as happy becoming who they already were, rather than becoming a new creation under God.[4] It’s a temptation, he says, “common to everyone.”
And it’s common to everyone, I think, because everyone is a bit like the people of Israel: each of us is on a journey in the wilderness, a land full of dangers and full of grace.[5] Lent is the time when we acknowledge this officially. But its truth echoes in the other seasons of our life. Whatever the time or place, we are always faced with the dangers of the wilderness—the dangers that are visited upon us by the selfish deeds of others, and the dangers that tempt us to secure and strengthen ourselves. But the good news is that, as Paul says, “God is faithful.” The good news is that there is always a sprinkler for us to step through, a table lined with pizza and lemonade and smiling faces. The good news is that God’s grace dwells all around us. And if we would but embrace it and step outside of ourselves, we can be made anew.
Prayer
O God who is faithful,
Who travels with us in the wilderness:
You cleanse us in waters of new life when our lives have grown old and crusted,
You invite us to dinner when we are starving for a life outside our own.
When presumption washes over us,
When we eat and drink at parties that celebrate only ourselves,
Strike us down, if you must, but set us upright again,
On the wilderness way, the way of the cross, the way of life.
In the name of our pillar, our cloud, our light in the dark, Jesus Christ.
Amen.
-----
[1] This story is fictional. But like any story worth retelling, "fictional" or "non-fictional," it is inspired by the truth of lived experience. It is inspired, in part, by a portion from Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 31-32, in which a young couple are caught by a stream of “luminous water” when the boy tugs on a tree branch overhead. It is inspired also by my friendship with a young man who came to the United States as a Burmese refugee when he was thirteen.
[2] I daresay Peter would agree, who proudly proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah and saw the light of Jesus’ transfiguration, only to deny Jesus shortly thereafter and suffer the utter darkness of those hours of death.
[3] Cf. Num 32:11-12.
[4] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), ebook loc. 765: “It is not a matter of becoming who you already are but of becoming something new, a metanoia, a new creation, which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor the heart imagined, an openness to the coming of the other, which we don’t already possess.”
[5] There is a sense in which Paul’s interpretation restages Moses’ call to decision between death and life (Deut 30:1-20). To embrace God’s grace is to choose life. When Paul says that God will provide a “way out,” I interpret this figuratively along the lines that Paul outlines elsewhere in his thoughts on salvation. The “way” is “out” of our own selves. That is what God’s grace does: it leads us beyond ourselves, beyond the same, into the newness of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment