Easter 7 May 16, 2010

Easter 7
May 16, 2010

Last week, as most of you know, one of the men from the Mentally Handicapped Offenders’ Program was confirmed by Bishop Robinson.
The Bishop was late getting to the church because of road construction on 93, so we had time for conversation as Perry, Michael (who’d been confirmed out of the same program two years ago), and I waited.
Michael leaned over to me and asked, “So what’s next?” “What?,” I said. Perry chimed in, “Well, first we were baptized, then we’re confirmed—what’s next?” Michael said, “Being ordained a priest is next, isn’t it?”
And I realized that they were seeing the Christian life as a sort of ladder, with baptism as the bottom rung. To be a good, faithful Christian you had to climb the ladder. A definite sense that each rung up made you a better Christian. Sort of like academic degrees—AA, BA, MA, PhD. Being an academic means climbing up the ladder.
Being a Christian for them meant climbing from basic baptism to exotic bishophood.

I tried to explain that the image of a ladder is dead wrong.
Baptism is not the bottom rung. Baptism is IT.
Confirmation, I told Perry and Michael, strengthens our awareness of what it means to be a baptized person. It reminds us who we are—but it doesn’t make us any more or any better Christians.
They weren’t convinced. “What about priests?”, they said, “aren’t priests more important than regular baptized people? Aren’t you more important than us?”
I was burbling something about priesthood being just a sort of specialization among all the possible ministries of baptized peoples, when the bishop walked in.
If I’d had a few more minutes I would have told Perry and Michael a story: the story in today’s first lesson, about the baptisms in Philippi.

Philippi—a Manchester-sized city in northeastern Greece—was a wild place.
Fortune-telling spirits, temples to every god and goddess in the Roman pantheon and a few others besides, plus a pretty rough idea of justice.
All Paul and Silas did was cast out a slave girl’s demon, and they wound up being beaten and thrown into jail.
That night an earthquake struck, serious enough to knock down the walls of the jail and somehow unfasten the prisoners’ chains.
Things happened quickly: the jailer woke up, saw the wreckage of the jail, and grabbed a sword to kill himself before Paul’s god, who was obviously more powerful than his gods, Jupiter and Mars, could get to him.
But just in time he hears a voice call calmly out of the wreckage, “Don’t be afraid, we are still here,”
The jailer can’t believe it. He can’t believe that his prisoners hadn’t escaped, that they had actually put his welfare before their own safety.
He can’t understand it. What kind of God could inspire that kind of foolhardy courage? More importantly, that kind of compassion. Not Jupiter, not Mars. Only, as Paul explained to them, Jesus Christ, who became human not to gain power and victory, but so that God’s justice and mercy could live on earth.
That was enough for the jailer. What did he need to do to turn himself over to Paul’s God. That very night he was baptized, and his whole household with him.

They were baptized and then Paul and Silas left them, the only Christians in this pagan town, except for a few others. How many?—20? The number of worshipers at 8:00. At the outside 30.
What was that like, for that tiny group of just-baptizeds to be left there in Philippi? Isolated, all alone, amidst all those temples to Jupiter. No preachers, no priests, no bishops, no support or encouragement except what they gave to one another.
How likely was it that such a small group would survive? Yet the fact is that survive they did, and more—That little group grew to such an extent that not too many years later Paul wrote to them sending greetings to “the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons”?
How could that happen?

Baptism. Simply—baptism.
The jailer and his friends in Philippi knew that they were different after they were baptized, and they knew the difference didn’t come from them. They knew that as that water poured upon them, God was right there working in them, the Holy Spirit was right there changing them, turning them into a new and mysterious thing—a Christian.
And here’s the amazing thing: it worked. No bishops, no priests, no teachers, with only the occasional letter from Paul, the community grew and grew through each person living out his or her Spirit-given, baptismal gifts—-for compassion, teaching, counseling, leadership, prayer .
If I’d had a chance to tell the story of the jailer and his friends in Philippi to Perry and Michael, here’s what I hope: that they’d understand what it takes to make a church: baptized people, each one with the gifts they have been given by the Holy Spirit—gifts to be embraced and exercised in the church and in the world.
In Baptism, God the Creator welcomes you; Jesus Christ becomes your brother and master and guide; God the Holy Spirit blows into you the particular and unique gifts you, YOU, need to do God’s work as part of the church, gives you POWER to do that work.
And despite the fact that priests and especially bishops!—get to wear fancy clothes and have special titles—here’s the bottom line theologically: the gift, the calling of each baptized person is of equal worth-------yours, and yours, and mine, and Gene Robinson’s. It’s not ordination that makes a church, it’s baptism that makes a church.

We’re about then to witness not just a joyful event for Graham’s family and the congregation—we’re about to witness a miracle.
You probably won’t be able to perceive it—probably we won’t see angels around us or feel the strong wind of the Holy Spirit—but God will be acting here in the next few minutes in a very specific way, and when we greet Graham at the Peace he will be different, a full, gifted, and equal member of the People of God, our brother and future coworker in God’s work of compassion and mercy.nkj