Sermon by Aron, 1 Epiphany, Jan 9, 2011

Jonathon Goldstein is a radio personality who is often on the show “This American Life” and has his own podcast called Wiretap. Recently he was talking about his sisters new baby boy and the effect it had on him and his family. Now, he’s Jewish, so there is not all that much to say about Christian Baptism, but he does say some profound things about love. He said on a recent podcast, “How strange to find yourself falling in love with someone you only just met, and how endlessly fascinating it is to watch someone getting used to being alive, though perhaps even more fascinating will be watching someone getting used to becoming a member of our family.”

Those of you who have witnessed children being born, who have raised children yourself, can understand this fascination of watching someone getting used to being alive, and watching someone getting used to becoming a new member of a family. It takes time, as he suggests, it is not something that happens over night. Our beings are catalogs of experiences that have shaped and formed us over the years. A vast library of books filed with stories that make up who we are and how we behave. We are a wealth of information and we are amazing creatures that, in the end, have a unique claim on life.

I have been reflecting deeply on the incarnation, I have been wondering about this concept and what it means. At Christmas I talked about how the incarnation pulls us deeper into the act of embracing the world, not as a place we must fix, or make better, but as God’s good creation. Howard Anderson, my old mentor, used to always talk about how Anglican’s baptize the popular culture, how important it is not to reject and condemn the world around us, the people we walk with, the creatures we are called to steward, but rather how important it is to embrace the world, to embrace the things that have been created by God, and man, so that we can more fully see the holiness of God in everything around us.

There is a Sufi quote I enjoy, it says, “When you place the world between yourself and God it becomes a spiritual obstacle. When you place God between yourself and the world, it becomes your spiritual friend.” Our task as Christians is not to reject the world we live in, our task is rather, to embrace this world as fully as we can, to live as fully as we can into God’s call for us and God’s desire to be with us. In the coming weeks we will have a couple of Baptisms, Baptisms of children recently born to families in this church. It will be a time to remember this day, to remember Jesus’ baptism. It will be a time to remember how it is we are a part of the Body of Christ. It will be a time for us to be filled with fascination and deep love as we fall in love with these children, as we watch them grow and become their own beings, fully incorporated into the Body of Christ.

Jonathon Goldstein, later in the same podcast, is at dinner with his family, and they have a conversation about how much each of them loves the new born baby, Justin. It starts out innocently enough with the family reflecting upon the deep love they have for this child, but then it takes a funny twist. The grandmother says, simply, I love him so much it hurts. Then the Grandfather says, I love his so much it hurts, like a serrated knife, being corkscrewed into my side. The contest is on, at that point, each family member debating how much they love this new child more than the next by creating some form of deep and dark punishment to explain their great and soaring love.

The mother of the child finishes the debate when she says, I am so in love with him it hurts, it is like I am drowning in love. Then she proceeds to make choking noises and scratch the air as if she is actually drowning in love for her child. This debate got me to thinking, what if we were able to express the same kind of love for every child we baptized here in the Church. What if we held, after services each time we baptized a child, a contest, a contest to see who of us could explain and proclaim why we loved that child the most. And what if that love we explained was not simply happy warm feelings, but truly deep and abiding love? What if making a contest out of loving someone made us love something or someone more?

How do we express our love for God, how do we express our deep gratitude for Christ, how do we express our expectation of the Spirit? God tore open the skies and said to everyone who could hear, “This is my beloved, with him I am well pleased.” Tore open the sky! Yes, its’ a metaphor, but is there anyone here who can say they have ever accomplished anything that could even remotely stand up to God’s tearing open of the sky? Peter stood up and said to all that could hear him, “God shows no partiality.” This to a community of people who believed they were set apart, to a community of people who knew who was in and who was out. It radically turned the world he walked in upside down. “This is Christ’s table, open to people of every race, class, gender, faith, belief of today, no belief at all.” I know this turns peoples hearts inside out, I have heard it said to me that those simply words have changed people’s lives.

It is so important to express our love, our gratitude, our hospitality. It is life changing for people, it is important, it is divine, our hospitality. Baptism, the main event for our lives as Christians, should cause us all to go whacky. Baptism should make us crazy. Baptism should make us tremble and shake, maybe even dance with joy, swing our hands a bit. Baptism, the main event of our Christian life, the main event of our Christian faith allows us to witness, with great fascination, the becoming of an individual as part of a larger community. As we grow in Christ, we grow in love, as we grow in love we grow in faith, as we grow in faith, our hope transcends all time.

Jonathon Goldstein ends his podcast with a call to his parents, to ask them how a new baby has changed their lives. It is cute and gentle, to listen to his parents talk about how they have now had reason to reflect more deeply upon their lives. They are changed, they are new forms of their old selves. They have seen love in a new light. But then Jonathon turns on them, and asks, “Which one of you loves him more?” The debate is on, “I do!”, Grandma says. “No, I do!” Grandpa counters. “My love is stronger than yours as a mother.” Says Grandma. “My love is more concrete!” yells Grandpa. The podcast fades off into silence with the two of them battling toe to toe about which one loves their grandson the most.

So I leave you all here today with one important question:

Which one of you loves Jesus the most?