By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, RectorToday is our Homecoming Sunday. It's a time for us as a church community to renew our focus on our spiritual lives in this place. Most of our programs and classes are suspended for the summer and it's good to have a break. It's good to refresh and re-create ourselves. It's also good to come back.
St. George's is a spiritual home to many. Generations have come and gone, and we who have benefited from their work, have added our own to building and renovating this wonderful place so that our prayer, fellowship, study and outreach may be enriched, that we may make it appealing and available to others, and raise our children in a faith that they will need to face the challenges of their day.
It's fitting that we celebrate a baptism today. As we welcome Paolo, Julia, Margot and Elizabeth into Christ's church and fellowship, we'll renew our own baptismal vows and strengthen our own commitments to God and ourselves and the faith we proclaim.
Our scripture lessons are rich this morning. In Exodus, children of Israel have been wandering in the desert a long time and Moses, their leader has been missing for quite some time. They fear the worst and feeling abandoned, feeling cut off from God for whom Moses is the spokesperson, they panic. They revert to old ways and create their own gods they can speak to themselves, that are in their camp where they can be watched and carried when they travel. God observes all this, gets jealous and angry and threatens to kill them all and promises Moses that he'll start a new nation beginning at scratch with Moses' children. Moses intercedes again, saves the day and restores the peace and relationship between God and the people.
There's a touch of the story teller in this scripture reading which captures some wonderful myth and imagery while reaching for some deep truths. The most compelling truth in this scripture lesson is that we need to feel in relationship with God. We need that divine grace and love to embrace us in a way we can feel and even if we don't understand it fully, we can breathe it in like the air we depend on so much. Like the children of Israel, when we don't feel connected to God, we devise our own lesser gods in a desperate attempt to fill that gap. For the children of Israel, their substitute gods took the form of golden calves. Each person contributed something gold, like jewelry or decorative items. How important it was that they all contributed to this project, melted these items down and molded them into calves they then called their gods. They empowered these inanimate objects with vast spiritual significance because they had felt cut off from the God Moses introduced them to. For them it was golden calves, for us, when we feel cut off from God we devise gods of other types. Anything from addictions, to material fads, to pop gurus, you name it.
One of the problems confronted by Moses in this episode was how to teach the people of Israel to have their own knowledge of God, their own contact and their own relationship. If they felt disconnected because he wasn't there, then he needed to teach them how to get connected by themselves.
That remains one of the biggest problems of faith communities: how to instruct each person to connect with God themselves. I'm about to ask rhetorical questions, so don't feel put on the spot or like you have to raise your hands. Here goes: Do you take time to pray? Do you take time to meditate? Do you read scriptures or spiritual literature? Do you feel God's presence in your day to day life? If so, do you look for ways to deepen it? If not, what do you get close to, connect with or attach spiritual significance?
I've been in this "business" if you will a long time and have come to believe that God is big enough to be seen in many ways. But each of those ways requires diligence and intention to be fruitful. If no effort is made, we depend on those who we identify as having found a connection to God. We follow them and bask in the warmth of their fire. The problem is, that if they leave, we are again cold and spiritually alone.
Being here this day, in this church, during this baptism, we are proclaiming a way to God that works. There are many, but this is the one we've chosen. It is impossible to devote ourselves to all the possible ways. We must choose.
Our recent college graduates feel frustrated because they have so many interests and at this point in their young lives can see themselves going in many different directions successfully and have a hard time deciding. And decide they must. One of my nieces declared at a young age that she wanted to be either a teacher or a rock star. Both are admirable pursuits, but a choice needed to be made, you can't be both. In time she discovered this and took yet another option for her career.
Just so, in matters of faith. In a world of competing teachings and spiritual paths. Many offer valid approaches, and many can be explored but only one can be explored to any depth.
And that's what brings us here. We are a progressive Christian community. We maintain traditional liturgy formed in the earliest recorded ways. We embrace the Anglican spiritual approach of studying scripture, observing tradition and using reason. We pray with our hearts, work with hands and think with our brains. We follow the teaching of Jesus in loving God and neighbor. We take scripture seriously as a source of spiritual truth. We may debate, argue or do lunch, but in this place we take responsibility for our own relationship with God in the company of others as fellow seekers.
The worldwide Anglican Communion teeters toward a division created by forgetting its own history and tradition of tolerance and debate. Other gods are created as demonstrated by the loss of love between brothers and sisters, children of the God who is love.
Baptism is a bringing into fellowship people desiring a way to God. It signifies intention and commitment. It echoes the promise of Jesus that God is available to all people without discrimination and that life in God's love is eternal. The children for whom these vows are made today and the adults who renew their own vows re-establish this relationship.
There are many individuals that seek God. Many churches created to form a fellowship where that seeking may occur. This is our way, our understanding, our home. Stay as long as you are spiritually fed and join us in our prayer, work, fellowship and study. Welcome to all in the name of Jesus. Amen.
© 2007 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ
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