Baptism of the Lord - Sermon

A New Thing

                This past Halloween, I learned that there are some new names out there for our youth to gravitate towards or away from.   Andi would not tell me what she was dressing up as for Halloween.  So, when the night arrived, and she was dressed in her pretty normal clothes, all accept for her hair, which she had done up with lots of extra barrettes, I had to ask her, “Please, explain.”  She responded:  I’m a soft girl.  And that was as much information as she would give me.  So, luckily for me, I know two middle school young ladies here at the church and they became my inside source.  So, when I asked Kylie and Kendra about Soft Girls, they burst out laughing and filled me in with the scoop.  Except, they gave me even more information.  There is apparently another type of girl called a VISCO girl.  A VISCO girl uses a hydro flask water bottle.  She is all about saving the turtles, and wears hair scrunchies.  Oh my.  The best I could make of this was the Valley Girl movement back when I was in middle school.  So, I googled it and learned a bit more.  And then for Christmas, Andi went full VISCO on me by asking her grandparents for the hydro flask and other VISCO girl accessories. 

So, what does this all mean?  Identity.  It means identity.  And I was concerned that it could mean creating labels about people in order to poke fun at them, belittle them, or even dress up like them for Halloween.  Identity and labels are all around us.  Some of them are good and some of them can be damaging, humiliating, and demeaning.  I just spent the last two days at two separate events addressing the negative consequences of identity and labeling others when it takes the form of Anti-Semitism, or racism.  At least twice in my own life, I have been given derogatory names.  To think, someone had to do that.  To say or in one case write out words aimed at deeply offending and hurting.  And for some, this is a life long attack.  To see symbols of anti Semitism in one community, impacts the greater Jewish community.  Over and over and over again.  The pain is real, and it is raw, it is part of an atrocious history and to think, that someone has to make a choice to behave in such a way as to dehumanize or degrade another.  And the same holds true with racist comments, jokes, and statements. 

One of the commentaries I read shared that we are living in a day and age where our labels are dividing us more and more.  We are using labels to point fingers at each other, generalizing people into larger categories even if they don’t belong there.  Unfortunately, that has also happened with the word Christian and Church – too many people have lumped us all into one label and pointed a finger calling us hypocrites and intolerant of others. 

As we think about who we are as people gathered here in worship, it is really not about who we are, but about whose we are.  And this Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord Sunday, reminds us who Jesus is, his identity, that he is the Beloved.  And when we are baptized, we are named as children of God, children of the covenant, that is our label, beloved by God.  We are created by God, named by God, and loved by God.  Even when the world deals us the worst day of our lives, we belong to God.  And that should be what unites us.  We are diverse in so many ways, but what brings us together, what gives us our strength as the body of Christ in this place is that we are children of God, it is not our political views or our stand on issues, or how we dress, or our sexual orientation or our age.  And yet, we can use these things to pull ourselves apart from each other. 

Together, in baptism, God calls us, to work together, to pray together, to worship together, and to remember we are God’s children.  Here in this place, we are to set aside any and all labels that can divide, and put our energy, and our love towards serving God and one another.  And we are to work towards the healing of the impact of anti-Semitism and Racism both in our local community and the greater world. 

Has your name as child of God been meaningful in your own life journey?  Has it given you the strength you might need to get through rough times?  Has it been a positive reminder that you belong to God and that there is nothing that can separate you from the love of God?  If you have never thought about the full impact of your baptism on your daily journey, take time to think about it.   

And what about the identity of our church?  We have tried to name our identity through our mission statement. Last year we created two areas of focus that would enhance our identity – that we would grow in our fellowship with each other and our mission in the world.  This year, we are, in a way, focusing on baptism.  We believe baptism is an important part of our faith, and we are going to intentionally reach out to those families that have had their children baptized here within the past five to eight years if not further back. 

Baptism marks the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, it is part of the new thing God is doing.  We believe God can do a new thing in our lives and in the life of this church and so we go back to the beginning, to the story of baptism and we engage it, we engage it for our own story and we go and invite others to remember their baptism and seek to provide the spiritual nurture for those seeds that have been planted.  Let’s engage this new year and new decade with a newness of God’s love and the full understanding that we are children of God and nothing can separate us from God’s love.  Amen.