Sermon – Being Baptized Together
Genesis 2:20-23; Galatians 3:23-29
Farmville Presbyterian Church
1/18/25
Teaching is my bread and butter. I do really enjoy teaching, and that informs a lot of my ministry. That is why Bible study has been so much fun over the last year. When I left teaching to go into preaching, my complaint was that I just didn’t like what I was teaching. I wanted to engage others concerning God and the Bible. Latin had lost its appeal to me. I was driven by a deep need to teach about divine things. I feel like I still try to do that normally in my sharing through worship.
Today is different. I need to sit with you in the emotions of these days. Our nation is holding some difficult, difficult feelings right now, and it is especially hard to put things together in a way that makes sense. We need to be open and honest and have integrity about how we as Christians deal with the strife and tension. Hearts are struggling. It is possible to ignore this, but we will not end up the better for it. History is our guide. This is not the first time that we as a community have had to face tough cultural moments. A number of you were around in the 1950s and 60s. It was not just here, though, that people were struggling then. Many in our nation had to reckon with changing attitudes. Honestly, true racial reconciliation still eludes us in significant ways. Vietnam and September 11 both created a lot of turmoil for us. We were traumatized by COVID. Yes, we were and still are traumatized by COVID among these other times of loss. Our children have lived only in a world where school shootings happen. I have an emergency pullcord here in the pulpit that our insurance carrier provided in case we need to call law enforcement immediately – seems like a good idea, but for some reason they are discontinuing the service – not because it is no longer needed. Terrible things happen in our midst. We are holding trauma and loss and pain. This brings us closer to anger and frustration and resentment.
It’s no surprise to see news with protests and violence. What is a surprise is to have even witnessed death in the conflict between the sides. Think about that. There is such division that death seems to be acceptable. Americans also died in the eruption of January 6, 2021. This is not the world I grew up in. This is not the world most of us grew up in. But this is the world we have. What I am exploring today is one way to see this world that I pray might be helpful in the Spirit of Christ.
In the Garden of Eden, God has made Adam, and Adam is alone. There are animals of every type, and Adam names them, but there is no one for Adam to share in life. He has no one with whom to have the kind of relationship that might mean love and a family. He has no prospects for a future outside of loneliness and isolation. That is when God, in God’s infinite wisdom, provided a partner for Adam out of his very body. You might consider this odd. You should consider this odd. That creation could have gone differently: woman could have been made like man was. Instead, God chose to create another, complimentary human being, out of Adam’s physical existence. The point of this story is our God chose to fabricate a help-mate for Adam out of Adam’s own self. They shared a bond greater than any other human relationship. They were literally bound to each other through sharing the same genetic essence. Adam recognizes this when he calls Woman “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” That woman was taken out of him. They were connected, and he celebrated that. A shared humanity was born, and it was good.
We have not done a very good job recognizing just how connected we are to each other. Over the centuries, we have sometimes been terrible to other human beings for all kinds of stated reasons, but the horror has played out again and again. It is OK to be sad about this. I am sad about this: all the ways we have run away from each other, oppressed each other, vilified each other, and destroyed each other. Even in the church, we are more likely to split than to come together.
Even though we still continue to be made out of each other, we cannot recognize our shared humanity. We all share the same human essence crafted by God. We are like 99.5% the same. Our DNA, the building blocks of our being, are passed along and shared again and again. We literally still come from each other. We are also bound and connected.
Hold that thought for a moment. We are bound to each other, and we are connected to each other even if just by nature. Of course, we are going much bigger than nature. That is just the beginning place. Nature points us to where God is headed, to where God has always been headed. God needs us connected. From the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the great wedding feast in Revelation, God shows us what it means to be connected, bound to one another – not just to those whom we like, not just to the ones who look, talk, or act like us, not only to the ones who are only nice or the ones to whom we have been nice, not to the ones who are easy to love. The Bible is full of conflict, and the people did not get along very well then. It was a very divided world. Still, God called them to be God’s people and to live together. Even when they broke the nation and went to war with each other, they were still connected as God’s people. Even when Jesus’ own people rejected him and gave him to death, he never rejected us. It is hard to understand this, but we should try. We must try. Our lives, the lives of our neighbors, our families, and our communities are at risk. It is life or death.
God provided the water as a symbol of new living. John the Baptizer told the people that doing things the old way was not going to cut it anymore. The Messiah was coming and a new world with him. That was God’s Kingdom. A new world, a new way of life, was coming whether they were ready or not. To help them get ready, they were invited to the water. They were invited to wash. We do the same thing today before we do something important. What they did not realize was that as they washed, they became even more connected, even more bound.
One of the biggest faults of American Christianity is our insistence on personal salvation, personal faith, personal relationship. It is all about ME: MY God, MY Jesus, MY life. God does not speak like this. The Bible does not speak like this. Paul tells us that we are ONE in Christ. There is no longer difference or distinction between us. Maybe you consider this nice talk or fancy talk or irrelevant talk. This is God talk.
We are bound and connected in ways that we cannot understand, but we are bound to our sister and brother – to the protester and the one protested, to the ones who hurt and to the ones hurt, to the ones who are afraid and the ones causing fear, to the ones making decisions and to the ones who lives are being changed. We are bound to sisters and brothers in Minnesota, Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza. We are bound and connected wherever God has connected us. We don’t have the choice or the option to unbind to disconnect.
There is nothing easy about this, but we cannot disregard how deeply our lives are intertwined by nature and the design of God. We are connected so fundamentally that Christ has made us one. The sooner we find this gift, the better off we will be. To God be the glory. Amen.