All Saints, Dorval
January 12, 2020
This is the text of the sermon I preached on Facebook Live when church was cancelled on Sunday due to the ice storm.
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
I wonder what Jesus expected to happen when he was baptized.
It’s clear, even from this brief and not very detailed description, that John the Baptist was not expecting his day to unfold this way. Even though John had been preaching and baptizing for a while, while Jesus was just embarking on his public ministry, John thought that his cousin should be the one to baptize him. Jesus’ request was surprising, even disruptive. But John was persuaded, and performed the baptism, thus confirming that Jesus was a part of the prophetic lineage stretching back to Moses.
But we are left to infer what was going through Jesus’ mind. Was it a surprise when the heavens were opened, the Spirit of God descended, and a voice said “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”? Was Jesus expecting to be able to keep it all quiet, to stay incognito? Did everyone else who had come to John for baptism that day also see the vision and hear the voice? Was the whole experience as disruptive for them as it was for John?
Sometimes God speaks more loudly that we are expecting, and sometimes what God says is most definitely not what we were expecting. Our reading from Acts today, Peter’s sermon in Cornelius’ house in Caesarea, sounds like a very coherent and logical presentation, but it arose out of an experience that was deeply discombobulating for Peter: he was peacefully praying on the roof of the house he was staying, when God spoke to him in a vision telling him to kill and eat unclean animals. Shortly thereafter, messengers arrived from the centurion Cornelius, asking Peter to come and preach for them. On the ride from Joppa to Caesarea, Peter mentally revamped his entire worldview, inspired by the vision in which he had been commanded to eat the unclean foods, and arrived at the other end prepared to preach this sermon in which he opens the promise of the Gospel to all nations.
Sometimes God’s voice, or God’s showing up, disrupts all our expectations and upends our plans. Sometimes it makes us grow in ways we would really rather have avoided.
We hear a lot about the “still, small voice” with which God speaks, but today’s readings seem to hint that sometimes that voice isn’t still or small at all. Sometimes it ruptures the heavens, demanding our attention. As the Psalm says, sometimes it shakes the cedars of Lebanon, making the oak trees writhe and stripping the forests bare. That is not a voice conducive to peace and calm. That is a voice hauling us up by the scruff of the neck and sending us in a completely different direction. That is the voice telling Peter to rethink everything he’s always believed, telling Jesus that whether or not he’s realized it before this minute, he is in fact the beloved and unique son of God, and that from now on that calling will determine the rest of his life.
You may be able to recall such a moment in your own life. Perhaps it came with joy, or perhaps with terror. But looking back, you can see where the voice and presence of God stepped in and wrenched you off course, redefining your hopes and plans. And while these kinds of detours may be – often are – alarming and stressful, in my experience they also frequently lead to unimagined fulfilment and joy.
And these kinds of disruptions can occur in the life of a community as well as that of an individual. Peter’s sermon in the house of Cornelius was part of an ongoing debate in the early Church, in which God had to repeatedly smack numerous disciples upside the head to get them to understand that God really meant that “welcome the Gentiles” thing, and there was still a good deal of sniping and infighting about the issue and its ramifications. And of course Jesus’ baptism brought profound change to John the Baptist’s ministry, culminating not long after in John’s arrest and execution.
There have been a lot of wrenching changes in this particular community over the past couple of years, and we could be forgiven for wishing that the voice of the Lord would settle down and stop shaking the wilderness and stripping the forests bare. But whether we like it or not, that’s not how God works.
In particular, we are discovering that the voice of the Lord can come to us not only in silence and reverence, but in the presence of new and different people – something that every church longs and prays for, but that still requires some adjustment when it actually happens. Last Sunday, more than 10% of the congregation at the 10am service was under 10 years old – and that is, delightfully, not all that unusual lately. But with that encouraging statistic comes the reality that worship is, perhaps, a bit more like God shaking the wilderness and rending the heavens, than like the still, small voice.
Welcoming and growing are not always easy. God’s work in our lives can be disruptive. It can require us to change and adjust. And yet, the voice that shouts and twists the trees is just as real as the one that speaks in the silence of our hearts.
As part of my work as a birth doula, I am trained to teach Mindfulness Based Childbirth and Parenting courses. As one might expect from a method based on mindfulness, there is a lot of sitting in silence and paying attention to one’s breathing. And yet, the whole point of the course is to prepare for parenthood – which is, by its nature, loud, messy, and unpredictable. One of the catchphrases is “You give birth to your mindfulness teacher” – that is, the realities of pregnancy, birth and parenthood are a powerful lesson on how to be in the moment without external expectations. And one of the techniques that participants work on is how, in fact, to meditate with distraction – with sounds, sensations, and even interruptions – rather than seeing them as a disruption to the practice.
During my training as a teacher, we watched a series of videos depicting a group class in San Francisco in 2008. The class met in a house that was big by Bay Area standards, but was still a rowhouse in a busy neighbourhood. At one point, all the participants were in silence, some of them inside and some of them outside, and the camera was lingering on some of those who were sitting outdoors, meditating, in close proximity to each other but not interacting. From the backyard next door, though – in addition to the usual sounds of traffic and so forth – were coming the loud and happy noises of a father and his two young children, enjoying a weekend afternoon in the fresh air.
My first, gut reaction, as I watched, was “argh, it must be hard for them to practice with all that noise nearby!” But then I realized that, of course, it was simply part of the practice – to hear the sounds, take notice of them, and then let them go. And then it occurred to me that in a way, that this was entirely appropriate – that these soon-to-be first time parents, preparing for the profound disruption that the birth of their baby would bring to their lives, were receiving bulletins from the country of parenthood that they were soon to enter, letting them know that there was meaning and joy in both the silence and the sounds, in both the calm and the chaos, in both the planning and the inevitable disruption.
Today we remember our baptisms and renew our vows. We remember Jesus’ baptism, and celebrate a different kind of birth, our rebirth into the family of God, and we renew the vows we make every time we witness a baptism, which include the promise to do everything in our power to uphold each new Christian’s life in Christ.
And part of that promise is welcoming the disruptions that each new family member brings to this community, and the changes that growth requires of us. It means listening to people – new parents, refugees, LGBTQ siblings, Indigenous people – when they tell us what they need from this community, and being willing to expand our concept of what it means to be God’s people together.
May we always be open to the voice of God, whether is whispers or thunders, for it is saying to each and every one of us that we are God’s beloved children, in whom God is well pleased.
Amen.
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