Searching for Sunday, Part 1: Baptism

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

February 21, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

Lord God,
you who breathed the spirit of life within me.
Draw out of me the light and life you created.
Help me to find my way back to you.
Help me to use my life to reflect your glory
and to serve others
as your son Jesus did. Amen.

 

Genesis 9: 8-17

8Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9“I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

12And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

17So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

 

A Message

“Searching for Sunday, Part 1: Baptism”

Friends, I’m beginning a brand new sermon series this week on one of the best books I’ve ever read: Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans. We’ll be reading this together through Easter, and If you like to read, too, I invite you to grab a copy and join me.

 

Rachel Held Evans was raised the daughter of an evangelical Christian pastor who was teaching at a local Christian college. She grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian church and then also attended a conservative, evangelical private Christian school. She was very, very deeply immersed in that particular culture. And she felt very strongly about her faith. She grew up believing that her faith could answer every question that life would ever hurl her way. However, when she got older, she discovered that really wasn't true. There were lots of questions out there that her faith couldn't answer for her. Perhaps even worse than that for her, there were lots of questions out there for which her faith provided an answer, but the answer was overly simplistic and sometimes even just plain wrong. On top of that, Evans started to observe the horrors of how badly the Church had hurt people that she cared about very much. This pushed her into a crisis of faith, and she left the Church. Ultimately she found her way back to the Church as a young adult, no longer as a conservative evangelical, but as an Episcopalian.

 

Tragically, Evans is no longer living. She passed away two years ago and she was only 37 when she died. The most horrible thing about her death, after her husband and two young children losing Evans in their lives, is that the world will never see more of her writing. It’s a profound loss because her writing was so brilliant. She had so much to say about faith, weaving in stories, coming from ancient, ancient Christian history, going all the way up till today. She was witty, funny, educated, insightful, and precisely the voice the Church needs right now. I think what we all really need to do, especially if you read this book along with me and you appreciate Evans’ faith insights as much as me, is soak in as much of Evans’ wisdom as possible from these pages. If we learn from her writings and if we use them to put some vitality back in our churches and in our own personal faith lives, then her insight and her wisdom can live on even after her. I think that’s exactly what God would have us do.

 

Evans broke up her book, Searching for Sunday, into seven sections, and she named each of these seven sections after a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church: baptism, confession, Holy Orders, communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage. Today we’re talking about the first section of the book—baptism.

 

Now, Baptism of Our Lord Sunday happened about a month ago. And when that happened, I preached about the story of Jesus's baptism, and I talked a bit more about my theology, my personal beliefs on baptism, and some stories of how I've experienced baptism in my life. So rather than spending a lot of time talking about baptism this morning, I wanted to take a look at our Lectionary-appointed Hebrew Bible reading, from the very end of the Noah’s Ark story. Noah's Ark is one of these ultra-familiar stories that a lot of us grew up learning about. Like Jonah, this is a story that lends itself well to coloring book pages and cutesy plays where kids put on animal costumes. It’s a story that looks really palatable on the surface, but gets quite messy once you unpack it even a little. It’s a story about God’s conflicted experience of humanity.

 

God creates us, God gives us free will, we immediately screw up, we screw up some more, we fill the earth with many generations of people with little regard for one another or their Maker, and God starts to regret even making us.

 

God decides to start over. God picks the only family that hasn’t made the Divine blood boil lately—Noah’s family—tells him how to build an arc, tells him to collect some animals, and once they’re on board, God makes the big water happen. Every person and animal who wasn’t on the ark drowns. It’s a rather horrifying story when you let yourself think about the details.

 

When the flood subsides God makes a whole new covenant with the only people who survived it. God puts a rainbow in the sky, points to it, and tells Noah’s family that the rainbow is an everlasting sign that nothing that horrible will ever happen again.

 

Taking a look, then, at all of this and what you might have read from Evans this week, I have a few questions to lift up to you.

 

What are your first memories of the church? For Jesus himself, his baptism is one of his earliest and most core memories of his walk with God, even though it happens when he's an adult. For Evans, she lifts up in her book that her baptism happened when she was 13. It was a Believers’ Baptism, and a very powerful experience. She further lifts up lots of other vivid memories from her childhood church. They're things that help sustain her, even when the floodwaters of this world are overcoming her. What are your first memories of the church? What are your most salient memories of your church life? Whether you were raised in a church from the time that you were tiny, whether you've been part of one church and only one your whole life, or whether you really only started going to church as an adult, or, you know, like last Sunday. How has church been for you?

 

My overall experience of the Church has been a crazy mix. Happiness, sadness, love, and anger. My first memories involve singing in my church’s little kids choir, and feeling very loved by my Sunday School teachers. In this Christian family, we find joy. But we also experience deep heartbreak. The heartbreak I faced would have shattered my faith had it not been for the strong foundation under it—and that foundation was my baptism.

 

When I was about twelve, there was a crisis at the Methodist Campgrounds in the town I grew up in. It started as a happy summer. But a few campers discovered that a gay couple was vacationing in a cabin. And the homophobic ugliness sprang up like thorns. The other campers harassed the couple until they fled. This was the late ‘90s in Chicago, and I admit I was super naïve but I had really thought homophobia was a thing of the past…until this happened.

 

A few years later, a small but wealthy contingent of my childhood church decided they hated our current pastor, and announced they would no longer tithe until he was gone. They brought the church to its knees, and ultimately the Bishop moved our pastor in April (when Methodists don’t usually move until July) just to appease the protesters. I had no idea people could be so cruel.

 

Yet despite the cruelty, there’s always love. The same church that so callously ousted my pastor also enthusiastically supported my calling to the ministry. I got engaged and married in a house of worship. I baptized my three children because despite all the bad, I want this family for my kids. Church life has introduced me to my closest friends.

 

Ultimately, baptism does two very important things for you-- it identifies you as a beloved member of God's family, no matter what. It also makes you a beloved part of your church family. How does it feel to belong to a church family? What are the best parts about that? What are the drawbacks? How do we love each other when we need to, how do we stand by each other when it's important? And then how do we fail each other? Sometimes when we look at all of that critically, this is how we grow. What reminds us of that sacred identity, especially on the worst days, on the days that we fully understand why God sometimes regretted making people.

 

On those days when the floodwaters are consuming us, what helps us remember that we still belong? Once we have that within us, how do we help bring that to other people? In prettier words, when the waters of the flood are starting to surround all of us, how do we bring God's sign of the rainbow to somebody who needs to see it? This promise that even when there are flood waters, never, ever again, shall they wipe us out, that we will overcome no matter what, that we are beloved, no matter what--how do we bring that message to the people who need to hear it?

 

Because there are floods. Literal ones and figurative ones. The floods of white supremacy, the floods of homophobia. The floods of patriarchy, the floods of capitalism, the floods of ableism. What are we doing to build a safe ark, to protect one another, and then to paint a rainbow in the sky, big enough that everyone can see it?

 

We need to make sure we’re always helping one another find that rainbow, because we owe it to one another as family. Amen.

 

I invite you to receive a benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard your coming out and coming in, from this time on and forevermore. And as all of God’s people we say together: Amen.