Made For Each Other

Matthew 3:13-17

The sermon referenced here can be found in a recording here beginning at minute 38, given by the Reverend Patricia Lyons, DMin at the ordination to the priesthood of Cara Modisett and Samson Mamour in the Diocese of Southwestern VA. Praise God for their ministries!

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the ordination of the two newest priests in our Diocese at Trinity Church in Staunton. The liturgy was beautiful and moving and the preaching was exceptional. The sermon given by the Reverend Patricia Lyons of Virginia Theological Seminary was also approximately 35 minutes long. I can promise you now that this sermon today will not be 35 minutes long, but I do encourage you to look up the recording on the diocesan Youtube channel. It was powerful, and the kind of preaching our church needs more of if we are to reach the lonely and lost seekers of our world.

One emphasis of Dr. Lyons’ sermon was that we humans are created from our very beginning to be in relationship with one another. Our Triune God, our three-in-one and one-in-three creator who is community, created the first human and said that while the human was good, it was not good for the human to be alone. It was not good for the human to be alone, so God made another, and gave them the potential to cocreate. From our very formation in the hands of God, we were given companionship, community, family, partners. It is not good for a human to be alone. Again and again in scripture, God comes to the isolated and the lonely, the little ones who have lost parents and the widowed who are separated from their spouses and the prophets who are cast out and ahead of their time. To these people God promises redemption, reunion, renewal and remembrance, that all separations will someday come to an end and all loneliness will be relieved.

Ultimately, through sin and the poor use of our own free will, we kept finding ourselves alone anyway, in adversarial relationships with one another and within ourselves. Rather than leave us there, the God who is community came among us as one of us. God felt for the first time what it was to be separated, to be lonely, to be different. God experienced the rough road of growing up, building and losing friendships, burying relatives and welcoming new infants and in-laws into the constellation of family. God reached out to strangers and asked them to be his friends, his disciples, his siblings. In doing so, God showed us a glimpse of the kind of community we were made of and made for. Not a competitive, sectarian, individualistic existence but a family built on a foundation firmer than blood ties or social contracts. A community of relationships like the eternal and co-equal relationship of the Trinity, one in which all needs are met and all burdens shared. This is the kingdom dream that the early church was striving for after the flames of Pentecost lit up their souls, and we as a church have been commissioned to do the same.

That is the dream we claim for one another in baptism. That family, the one that Jesus built out of teenagers and tax collectors and wealthy women and disabled people, is the same family we claim when we call ourselves baptized Christians. Our catechism in the back of our prayerbook says that Baptism “is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.” We are adopted as children, made members of Christ in the Church, and become heirs of God’s kingdom. Every single aspect of Baptism is about belonging, about community, about being part of something greater than ourselves. Yes, it is up to each individual and the people who raise them to decide when to experience the sacrament of baptism, and how to live out the promises we make around the font. But even then it is a corporate act, something that requires a community. In an emergency, any baptized Christian can perform a baptism. But no one can baptize themselves. It requires another, a witness, a fellow human being to welcome the newly baptized into the family of God.

Jesus’s baptism was not a Christian baptism. He was not dressed in a lovely heirloom christening gown and there were no souvenir candles for his Godparents. John did not use the Trinitarian formula, because of course it did not exist yet. Jesus went into the water with John to receive a baptism for the cleansing of sins, a ritual practice that was not uncommon at the time. The catch, of course, was that Jesus was sinless. Why would a sinless person need to be washed clean? John had the same question. He knew Jesus was something special, and he did not feel worthy to baptize his cousin. But God-with-us came to be with us in all our mess, all our brokenness, all our loneliness. So he waded into that river like the many thousands of seekers that responded to the Baptist’s cry for repentance. Not because he needed it, not because he had to, and not as a symbolic gesture. Jesus knelt before John and allowed himself to be pulled under because that was what his people, his family, were doing. Because it is not good that humanity should be alone.

In the waters of baptism, the falsehoods that divide us are washed away. We who have come through the font emerged from the water with the image of God in us laid bare, with nothing clouding or covering the truth that we are created for connection. In baptism that connection is given a name, and a home. The Body of Christ, the Church. She is not perfect, as she is made up of messy humanity. And this messy and divinely human Church is on her best days a glimpse of the kingdom dream. Every day, the Church is the family of God, our chosen family.

 It takes daily effort to renounce the forces that would have us believe we are better off on our own. Minute by minute we may wrestle with the point of it all. This is yet another point in favor of our inherent need for community- we could not do any of what we’ve promised without God’s help and the support of our siblings in Christ. No matter what may happen in the course of our earthly pilgrimage, we do not face a moment of it alone. Every step of the journey that began with our baptisms, we have opportunities to discover and uncover the deep interconnectedness that is a gift of our belonging. It is not good that humanity should be alone. Thank God we never have to be.