Baptism as infants/believers

Jesus’ Baptism is the beginning of the story in Mark

God’s breath over the water – beginning in Genesis

All it takes is a short time without water to know water’s importance. We take it for granted toilets will flush, sinks will run In baptism we remember that water is both life-giving, and life threatening. Our colleagues who heard the call to go to Mississippi know that water can wipe out as well as those who went to Belize came to know that the availability of water can change lives

This water is a symbol, not only of our welcome into God’s gracious community, But of our call to discipleship to do something in service to the almighty

The call begins here – even as parents claim baptism on behalf of a child, They turn that child’s life over to God Infant baptism is a scandalous thing in our modern age that emphasizes the importance of family, for in baptism we make the claim that children don’t belong to their parents, They belong to God We think of it as a touching and tender moment, but the very act of my friend Lynn Illingsworth putting water on Cade’s head began a strange and wonderful journey into letting go as a parent. Our child’s care would be our responsibility, but the call and preparation would have to come from God. In the facial expressions painted for centuries of icons of Mary and Jesus, you can see in Mary’s eyes the striking sadness of giving the child of one’s own flesh for God’s own purposes.

It is from this start point that many of us begin to be called. We may not see it as that since our parents brought us to church/ Sunday School But we become formed in the stories of our faith We hear the word through scripture read, proclaimed, and sung And we begin to claim God’s story as our story

However, we have, as a church, become quite adept at the ways of our world, and we’ve forgotten some of the biblical examples of call, and exchanged them for a managerial way of doing things.

Call in most Presbyterian churches is less a model from scripture and more a model from the corporate world where we get people to fill slots in our structure instead of prayerfully discerning what kinds of ministry we ought to be doing

In the seminar that I returned from yesterday, we began what will be a three-year discourse in thinking about how the larger church structure nurtures the practice of call,

And for the particular call that takes place in congregations to the ordained lay offices of elder and deacon– we were struck by the realization that the nominating committee has the most important job in the life of the church, and frequently across the denomination we do not take that process seriously enough. Those asked to nominate elders for the church need to know people well, and need to ask how God is calling each personality, each set of gifts, and each set of limitations to the work of discernment in the whole church’s particular call – even here at First Presbyterian, Oak Ridge.

But even more importantly, we turned to scripture to see how and who God was calling And we found God’s qualifications to be a bit skewed from what we normally think of as those who would be well suited for the gifts of ministry

God called prostitutes to important acts of faith, and one is even included in Jesus’ geneology
God calls murderers to bear roles of leadership, King David and Moses
God calls women to not only show compassion, but to preach the gospel
God calls a persecutor of Christians and a denier of Christ upon which to build the church
God uses ordinary people, you, me, the elders we’ve elected to bring good news to the oppressed, and relief to the brokenhearted.

“Feed my sheep” “Make disciples” “Baptize and teach in my name” are the scriptural mandates and sometimes I wonder just how we will find ways of doing those very things even as we try to make over God’s plans in our own corporate and modern images

So I ask you, is this an intelligent design? Splash some water on human beings to call them to ministry. Pay attention for God’s call in the lives of the sinful and broken, rather than in the well dressed and put together. Act like we believe that God still speaks to people - challenging them out of their comfort zones into new life. Perhaps it’s more the foolishness spoken of in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. God’s intelligent design may be creation, but God’s foolish design was to entrust that creation to human beings.

Oddly enough, we develop programs to call the “best and the brightest” into ministry, to make the career look more attractive as small churches are dying, and large churches require greater and greater specialization. We promise elders power and position in the church when their role instead is to be servant of all. We underestimate the call to membership in our congregations when it may very well be the regular old church member who is praying for God’s leadership and God’s direction and who may lead the church into a new understanding of who we are in spite of the elders wondering if we’ll have money in the budget or enough volunteers to get the work done.

It is a new day, church! God is calling us to more questions than answers. God is nudging us to re-form, and by re-form, I was reminded this weekend that Calvin meant not embracing any old new idea, but re –forming ourselves around scripture. He believed that our own sinfulness would keep drawing us away from the central reality of the church as the Body of Christ, and periodically we would have to go back and remember what that meant for us to be.

So next time you hear anything about the creation/evolution debate or have someone ask if you believe in God’s intelligent design, I think we need to find ourselves laughing out loud. This design is certainly not “intelligent” by our worldly standards. That would imply that we can understand God, and God is bigger than anything we imagine. I’ll end with a quote I read recently from a Roman Catholic Cardinal, “Any scientist that uses evolution to try to disprove the existence of God is not acting as a professional scientist, but as an amateur theologian.” Science has no answers whether there is a God or about how that God works. It only remains to be seen that God will use what and who God will use to wake us up to this amazing life God intends for us as a gift.

Amen.