18 th Sunday

What is at stake here.

18 th Sunday

Is. 55.1-3; Rom. 8.35, 37-39; Mt. 14.13-21

I think that one of the most underrated aspects of the writings of Paul is his literary gift. Granted his intelligence, his ability to make sense of this whole Jesus business, his ingenuity; all these are very important. But virtually nobody talks about his literary genius, and yet we see it in a variety of places in the letters: for example, the famous hymn to love, in the first letter to the Corinthian Church. And today we have this climatic statement at the end of the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans - Paul's most pacific, composed and serene letter wherein he talks about what is going to separate us from the love of Christ.

It is beautiful. Neither death nor life, angels or rulers.... But we need to understand that the context out of which Paul came to feel this way, think this way and write this way.

Those who chose this reading left out verses. Verse 36 is a citation from the Hebrew scriptures. Paul, as a good Pharisaic Jew, would have known them well. That verse says that we are being killed all the time, daily, for the sake of God And that is crucial for understanding the rest of the text. Otherwise it could be understood as saying that, "Well, God's there all the time and God's going to take care of me all the time and it's all going to just be swell." But clearly that is not Paul's experience and that's not what he was talking about. He was talking about his own life. When he talks about hardship or distress or persecution, these are not abstract possibilities that exist somewhere, for somebody, at some time, all of which are indeterminate. No. Paul's talking about the sword or peril or famine or nakedness out of his own experience, his own life as a follower of Christ.

Now everybody has catastrophes. I just came from a third world country. People live very close to the bone and there's a lot of hunger. And we know that that's the situation for most of the people on the planet. Life is hard. Physically hard. Food. Clothing. Foundations. But that's not what Paul's talking about here. He is talking about trying to live in Chris and having Christ live in him. He is referring to his enormous generosity and openness to the world, concern for the world. But that is what cost him. And it makes an enormous difference if we are aware of the concrete realities of his world, and then hear this text. You think... "Ah. Paul's off on another lyrical flight again. We all indulge our selves once in a while with this sort of rhapsodizing, shingling off in space with our feelings or our words. But that's clearly not what's going on here when Paul says that he was convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers, nothing in the world, all the powers in the world that exist, the opinions of other people will separate us from God.

So the fear that encumbers us, surrounds us for so much of our lives not even this power, he says, is going to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. So he will say, over and over, relative to this, even when I am crushed, I am still hard at it, because it is the power of God, the grace of God, driving me. and in another text he speaks of the love of Christ compelling him.

So we have to be careful that we don't romanticize Paul’s words because it's so easy to make religion a kind of anodyne or a sort of a safety hatch out of which I can get out of any kind of tight situation in life. Cancer. The death of my mother, or my dog. Or all the hard things that we have to go through. All of them. That's not what religion was for Paul and should not be for us. It is important to bring up all this stuff upon the occasion of a baptism.

Raising a child, as everybody knows, is the world's most difficult job and the one for which we are the least prepared. All of us who are parents know that very well. You can't take a course and even good old Dr. Spock leaves hole after hole after hole. In raising a child in the Christian tradition we as adults ask from the heart, how do you get from this innocent, totally helpless entity that is a baby, to the condition of a mature person who would make this kind of claim Paul makes? That's the question. That's the leading question. Most of us, I think, grow up and come to the point believing, that the world is in the end an inhospitable and dangerous place. I think at the deepest point of our lives we know that we are menaced and that we have to look out for ourselves. (I think that's even proved obliquely by all those programs that say: "No, everything is wonderful in it's own way." Such programs don't work really, and they seem to work, only at the cost of enormous self-delusion.)

So how do you deal with a baby and bring her to say this world and their life is God's? How do you make this the fundamental act of consciousness, which will then enable this child to come, sooner or later, to the point that fear and the menacing quality of the world does not so encase them that they feel they must look out for themselves above all, and at the cost of everything. I really believe that is the eternal question for those of us who are parents. How do you give the child the sense that the world is safe to live in but that it is not "Bambiland"? That it is fraught with dangers. Not just the dangers of disease, or natural catastrophes, but the dangers resulting from everybody else's self-seeking. So that one does not simply consign oneself to occupying the same kind of role in life. How do you do that? I do not know. But I'm persuaded that's what baptism is all about. Baptism is simply the awakening us would-be adults, to the stakes. What is at stake here? What are we to do ? What vision of life do we have fundamentally and how in God's name can we, if you will allow the language, instrumentalize that in the way we deal with our babies, with our children? How do we keep them from being either terrified by life or go out into life as if it were some pastel painting by Renoir or Monet where there are no sharp edges, where there are no hard surfaces, where everything difficult can be emulsified and made somehow comfortable. How do we do that?

That's what you parents are undertaking. That's what we are all undertaking at one point or another. So that the child will come to see that nothing in life is going to close me on myself, ultimately. Nothing in life is going to make self-preservation the ultimate and foundational reality of every impulse I have. It is our job as Christian parents put it in Pauline language, to convince our kids that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor life, nor death, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, Christ Jesus, our Lord."

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