15 January 2006

Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

Church of the Redeemer

New Haven, Conn.

Scripture:  Psalm 139:  1-6, 13-18

One Baptism!

Have you ever watched someone write by hand in a foreign language?  Finger tips move their pen in what seem to be rapid and unpredictable strokes.  Chinese brush strokes fly down a column.  Hebrew unfolding from right to left.  And there are long curves in Arabic Zorro would die for!

Letters, letters, letters.  Magical letters, printed or script, intricate.  Unformed substance, as our psalmist might say, human thought in this case, human thought, intricately hand-wrought in lots of little lines that somebody else can read and understand.

So it is, our psalmist says, God is with us.  God has written, in God’s language, the book, the book of our life, “…Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;  in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, (when as yet there was none of them.)”  (vs. 16, Ps. 139, parentheses added).

If the divine script were not so inscrutable I imagine we might read our lives a little better.  I don’t know about you but sometimes I have to wonder if God knows what he’s doing writing me up this way?  This way in the book of life.

Have you ever watched a person knit?  Flashing needles, some like beautiful pens or pencils, making double points—seemingly at cross purposes—with lines of wool that make up a fabric text—like this one from Lori Minkema:  a baptismal blanket for such a day as today?  Also an intricately wrought text in a language foreign to me, anyway!

We have in this church a wonderful group of folks who knit prayer shawls.  What a great thing it is, these gifts they make!  Prayers being prayed into the wool as they knit, prayers being worn across other shoulders as they sit.

We ourselves are made in secret, God’s secret code, and by God’s own hand.  “Even before a word is on (our) tongue, oh Lord, thou knowest it altogether.”  (vs. 4).  “For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb” (vs. 13).

How fearful!  How wonderful! 

And how glad we are that God has made us, and not we ourselves.  How wonderful, and fearful, it is when we follow in God’s ways.  How wonderful and fearful it has been, the knitting together of Olivia within her mother’s womb!

How happy we are and full of praise and thanksgiving when such a piece of work is done!  And Olivia is certainly a “piece of work”!

Getting something done, in this world, is hard to do.  And only those who do the work really know how hard—how hard it is to get anything done, much less co-create new life in a baby.

We all know the hard, hard work that Thomas and Courtney have gone through just to get Olivia written and published!

And part of what we do here today is to honor the work already well done.

One of the most inspiring and memorable moments in my ministry with you all was my afternoon visit with Courtney in their home as she took weeks and weeks off from work to settle into the creation-to-birth of this child.

Her attitude of calm patience and practical faith was and is astounding to me.  I could see and feel the legacy of strength and endurance, as well as faith and hope, I know from her parents Alan and Marilyn and could easily imagine in this fine, fine husband, Thomas.

(We professionals in the medical world know that care-givers endure all the same hardships as care-receivers.  The hardship Courtney has endured has been duplicated and carried in Thomas’ life as well.)

New life out of hardship is a Christian and a Christmas story.  Our God gives life and love in such stories just like this one.  Mary and Joseph are co-authors, God-parents, here.

As we work to get things done, and even done around here, like new doors, capital campaign, annual budget, new minister-search, we can be inspired and we should be instructed by the text this new family has written—this intricately woven, beautifully written, new masterpiece. 

Today is a little like a victory celebration, where having won the game looks a little inevitable and not so hard.  Let us not forget that almost all of our life is lived in practice and in preparation, not in parades.

When I was ten, I would walk down to Beaver Stadium at Penn State to watch football practice.  I would wear my shoulder pads.  Joe Paterno was a new assistant coach.  Roosevelt Grier was a giant god to me!

One day I saw a guy drop a ball on a pass.  I heard a coach scream.  It scared me.  I never forgot his passionate command.  “I don’t want to see you catch this in Saturday’s game.  I want to see you catch this now!”

Wow, I thought.  Practice is the game.  And how did the coach read the player’s mind like that?  Psychology in action!

Well, Courtney and Thomas caught the ball in the game because they caught the ball in practice!

Our religion is so good to us because it not only allows us public happiness about valuable work well done, but it gives us times to celebrate what’s valuable.

Without the authority of religious traditions we would really have trouble finding the time to lift up what we value.   Time really flies;  religion helps us land, more so now in our society than ever before, we feel.

Our private personal time is fleeting.  Our community time is almost impossible to coordinate.  Ever try to schedule a meeting?!

Our religion gives us a measure of time we cannot ignore.  A baby is born;  a baby will be baptized.  And this is not something we can do by email. 

Our steeple is our sundial and our community is gathered as a circle in time together.  This is not time marked on our wrists.  This is time shared side by side, face to face, by our spirits, in our souls!

In the moving shadows of time we, as a community, are also aware today that Thomas, Olivia’s father, lost his own father only a few days after Olivia’s birth.  In the blink of eternity we take now a breath of silence to remember Thomas’ dad.  And to give thanks for his life…

So some goodness has been done here and we spend time to celebrate, give thanks, and to turn to God.

We did not have to ask the deacons to come up with a little ritual for today!  We have a sacred language, for our writing.  We have sacred instructions for what we knit together this morning.

So much of our society lacks access to our sacred language.  Teenagers decorate trees that mark a place of a car-accident death because they don’t really know a church where a candle could be lit, and a prayer shared.

Our Bible gives us a story for baptism.  Our God gives us a spirit for baptism.  For we baptize in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Spirit, we baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

This is a cosmic thing we do.  And like all things cosmic it is not a fact but a faith.  The cosmos is not made up of facts on the ground but by faith held in the heart, about theories held in the head. 

When the Native American medicine man sends the young brave to the edge of the canyon to pray for the rising of the sun, that is a cosmic thing, it is a heart-held faith about things that are seen and thought about.  Without the prayer, no sunrise.

We cannot disprove a cosmic faith;  there is no proof for the non-existence of God, and is NPR or Channel 8 a better way to make the day begin?

And so, in our cosmic faith, we baptize Olivia in the name of the God from whom she came.  We baptize her into the life of Christ, the death of Christ, and the Resurrection of Christ.  We baptize her into the washing away of all sin—sins she has yet to write out.  We baptize her into new and eternal life and into that body of Christ we call the church, now and forever.

In a very foreign language, in other words, we write a very powerful line in the book of her life.  With very mysterious needles we knit a very intricate mantle.

When I was in Chicago for three summers doing course work I would end my evenings listening to a local blues station and an announcer named Arkansas Red.  Coming from the same state, loving the same Elvin Spencer blues, I loved it. 

Arkansas Red was not just a blues lover, and a bit of a loose cannon;  he was also a people lover.  His was also a call-in show and he was ministerial to his listeners.  Broken-hearted young men, lonely or abandoned women, double-shift hard workers comin’ home to nothing.’  He had a sweet way of talkin’ and listenin.’  And sharin’ his own woes, like the night at the Dixie Chicken when he said his girl friend must have put some magic goober dust in his food when he wasn’t lookin’ otherwise he never would have asked her to marry him and why couldn’t she just understand that?!

But whether it was his woes or theirs, he would often offer encouragement and consolation with these words.  He’d say, “I ain’t worried.  No sir.  I ain’t worried a bit.  ‘Cause I know.  I know my name, my name, is written in the Lamb’s book of life.  That’s right.  The Lamb’s book of life.  I seen it there,” he would say.

Now I don’t know that he had his written-out baptismal certificate framed over his mike next to the clock—but he lived like he did, the wondrous and fearful faith that God knew him, through and through, and had written him in, into his plans, and into his will.

Amen.