First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
30 May 2004
Promises, Promises...
In the massive demonstrations that took place in the days between the Madrid train bombings and the Spanish national elections, one protest slogan stood out for me. It was directed at the Prime Minister, Jose MarÍa Aznar, who led his country into war over the objections of more than 9o% of its citizens. It said, Tu guerra, nuestros muertos: Your war, our dead.
Our dead. A story I read in the National Catholic Reporter last week makes a connection between this same slogan and the promises we make in baptism, and it is an important connection to think about on this Pentecost Sunday, as we baptize Anna and Luke Wendelin this morning, and Zachary Seek and Isobel Heck at the Jazz Service tonight. Here's the story.
A deacon of a rural Canadian church showed up at a monthly meeting in an unusually thoughtful frame of mind—too much time on the combine, perhaps. Out of the blue he announced, "Once we baptize these kids, they're ours. If we see one of them downtown getting into trouble, we have to intervene. If we see kids who have the ability, but not the money for university, we have to help them. It isn't good enough to say, 'Isn't that too bad.' They're our kids. That's what baptism means." The committee meeting ended fast that night. No one wanted to talk much about the cost of Christian community, a community of solidarity formed by the promises we make when we splash water on kids, break bread with them at table, and covenant with them at confirmation.
"Once they're baptized, they're ours"—it's a fact with some practical local consequences. For example, for us at First Church, it means (at a minimum) that when we ask people to teach Sunday School for a trimester, or supervise a youth activity, or become a confirmation mentor, we ought not be recruiting help solely from among the kids' parents. It also means that we learn to welcome and appreciate children wholeheartedly in Sunday worship, even when they act like children, even when by their mere existence they challenge our notions about the strictly adult business of faith.
"Once they're baptized, they're ours"—a fact with practical local consequences indeed. But it has larger ones too. Baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality, a reality that already exists. Baptism proclaims in water and word that God has grasped and claimed us for God's own in Christ. It is a ritual that speaks, then, of something both specifically Christian and universally true as well—that (with or without baptism) all kids are ours. Not just the children of the Christian tribe, but also the children out there "who are starving, caught in labor bondage, struggling to find themselves, caught in the literal crossfire in cities, or ruined in the metaphorical crossfire in upscale neighborhoods."
We are talking about kids here. But we are talking about ourselves too, about us grown-up kids. It sounds so hackneyed, I almost hesitate to say it; but since it hasn't really sunk in yet, it has to be said, and said repeatedly: Sisters and brothers, we are one human family. If Pentecost stands for anything, it is this irreducible solidarity.
We long-time church folk like to call Pentecost "the birthday of the Church," the explosive kick-off of its life and mission. And so it is. But the baptism poured out by the Spirit that day was not given to create a religious organization or institution, especially not an institution defined against other institutions. Instead, the Church was empowered that day to be a Movement, a society mobilized for making good on God's old promise to create universal human solidarity. If the Church was called into being on Pentecost, it was as the vanguard of that new creation.
Remember who was there that day—Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians, people from ancient Persian Gulf States, from the Axis of Evil, Iraqis, Jews, Turks, folks from the Crimea, Galatia, Libya, Rome, cousins from Crete, and Arabs. What got born that morning was hardly a denomination ready-made for the National Council of Churches, not a white Western thing, a group for men, or for a certain social class, or for people of a certain age, but a prophetic inclusive Commonwealth. "Girls shall prophesy, boys shall see visions, the old shall dream dreams. Even servants will get the Spirit in those days."
What Luke is crowing about in the story of Pentecost is the same ambitious divine project Paul describes in the first letter to the Corinthians – the transformation of human division into human solidarity. By Christ's Spirit, he writes, we're made into one Body, Jews, Greeks, slaves, free; we all drink one Spirit from one Cup. With Pentecost's wind, God smashes the fun-house distortions of our humanity that make us think we share no global family resemblance.
The unity the Church received as a gift by the Spirit's action on Pentecost is the gift we are commissioned by the same Spirit to offer to the world in mission and ministry. Our deaths. Our kids. Our covenantal promises to be for them, for each other, and for all. Our solidarity with humankind and everything that lives. This is the meaning and the joy of Pentecost.
Today there are people everywhere, and many in power, who are persuaded that dedication to human solidarity is dangerously misguided—the utopian folderol of folks too soft and pleasant to belly up to the nasty, real-world fact that some people are different in permanent and deadly ways, and that because the only thing such people understand is force, force is what we are obliged use, reluctantly but righteously. Like the cynical bystander in the Pentecost story who heard their exuberant multilingual racket and concluded that the apostles were drunk, these people have concluded that it is because you have lost your mind that you welcome the gift of another's language; that it is because you are duped or benighted or unpatriotic that you long to hear and to speak some day in words that all can understand.
But on Pentecost God poured out the desire and the capacity for just such a world of mutual understanding. And we Christian church people have all made repeated promises to witness and to work, to pray and to pitch in, that by God's gift it may someday be so. And if the promises you make easily on Sunday mornings at baptisms and covenanting ceremonies seem, upon sober reflection on Mondays, too much, too grand, too heroic; if you can't quite bear the thought of such a sweeping mission, such a heavy responsibility; if you can't see yourself taking a full active part of the Spirited effort to create a new humanity, especially given your many meetings and the crazy schedule in your house; if you can't put aside the time it's going to take to re-create the world, don't worry! You can start small. In fact, it's best to ramp up, get the hang of it, in baby steps—say, for example, the next time someone calls and asks, "Will you teach third grade?" (and your kid is not in the third grade, you don't have a kid at all!), or "How about being a youth mentor?" (and you don't even know the kids in question). Just tell them yes! And with that small thing, that little gift of yourself, that glimmer of solidarity and Pentecostal fire, you just might have done it all.
One faith, one baptism, one cup, one Spirit. Our deaths, our kids, our world, our Christ.
© 2004, J Mary Luti