January 7, 2006

Being comfortable with God…

Baptism is the subject in the lessons for today. Baptism was a ritual in many religions long before John the Baptist met Jesus. You may remember that one of the Old Testament prophets, Elisha, sent a leper, Naham, to bathe away his leprosy in the River Jordan. Actually the Jordan is so foul he must have come out more contaminated than he went in.

Baptism as a religious ritual was meant to rid the body of demons and sin. In modern literature any time there is a description of a bath, swimming or even accidental dumping in the ocean, we know that a transformation is coming to the person being dunked. A symbolic baptism is a sign of transformation.

I grew up in the Baptist Church which had inherited the old Anabaptist ritual of total immersion in a pool, like dipping cattle for ticks. When we joined the church by walking alone down front to shake hands with the preacher, you then got baptized in a pool also down front with all the congregation as witnesses. We were discouraged from joining the church until we had reached “the age of consent,” which was 12. After that baptism we could take communion, vote and make our own pledge. I pledged a nickel a week until I got my first paper route. Then I raised my pledge to a quarter a week. The Baptists take membership in the church very seriously and we young Baptists did, too. Baptism meant we were joining the group.

When I was a Boy Scout and initiated into the Order of the Arrow, we were first hazed all night but finally dumped in the lake. That baptism signified real membership. I got baptized in the Navy again when I crossed the equator.

In the old days The Church was responsible for getting you into Heaven. The Catholic Church still assumes the responsibility for getting its members into Heaven. Most Protestant Churches still see Heaven as the goal of all religious activity. I think their main doctrine is that if you believe and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you will go straight to Heaven when you die if you live right. So the sermons we used to hear were admonitions to accept Jesus as your personal savior and live sinless lives which were pleasing to God. Now there are some mega churches and those we hear on TV urging their members to live right so they can win the favor of God and grow rich and powerful. Apparently it helps if you contribute generously to the church.

In the Catholic Church to get to Heaven you have to take the sacraments all your life, and in the Protestant churches you are almost required to read your Bible and accept it as the definitive word of God. So you will see many Protestants carrying their Bibles to church and observant Catholics still going to mass every Sunday, but they only have to take communion once a year.

But the rules and rituals evolve. Catholics now eat meat on Friday and most Protestants drink alcohol, play cards, dance and accept divorce and remarriage as normal. Most Judaism has not changed much. Observant Jews still do not eat pork but all of them circumcise their males. Catholics still teach the sinfulness of contraception, but it’s rather obvious that none of them observes that admonition, nor are they expected to.

I tried being a Roman Catholic when I married one, but I never could harmonize the strict rules of the Catholic Church with the advice of the priests who advised us to not take the rules so seriously. In the Baptist Church if there were rules, every one believed that if you violated the rules you were a sinner and would go straight to Hell when you died.

What a breath of fresh air it was to discover the Episcopal Church, which I think has no rules at all - none that I’ve ever come across. There used to be some rules like using the proper prayer book, not permitting women to serve on the vestry or be ordained. And there are still some Episcopalians who believe you have to follow certain admonitions of Leviticus and St. Paul to be sincere Christians, but by and large most Episcopalians accept the doctrine that we are all sinners before, during and after Baptism. Our burial service reminds us that we are all born sinners and die sinners still in need of the redemption of Jesus Christ. We accept the idea that sin is part of humanity and we are dependent on God’s grace to get into Heaven. Baptism is still a good bath like it was for Jesus when he was baptized by John in the Jordan, and it means for us not that we are sin free but that we are really members of our Lord’s church. In the Episcopal Church you will rarely hear a sermon admonishing you to live without sin. We frankly just believe that sin is like germs, ubiquitous and always with us. No baptism is gong to make us pure.

The Episcopal Church began as The Catholic Church, and we still offer all the traditional catholic sacraments, but like all other churches we don’t take them so seriously. You are advised to make a confession before taking communion, but it is not withheld if you don’t. It is a good thing to avoid notorious sins, but you are not rejected if you don’t. In sum our church wants its members to be as comfortable with God as possible. We really do teach here that God wants us all to go to Heaven when you die. But there is not much you can do to feel better about being a sinful human being in need of God’s grace. And If you need to be reassured that you are somehow better than some people because you belong to a better church or live less sinfully that some people, you are probably not going to be very happy in this church. It really is a church doctrine here that we all children of God and that he loves all of us all the time just as we are, like a father, just like Jesus taught.

So we offer our baptism and all our other sacraments to anybody who will come in and receive them. In effect we believe that whoever you are you are one of us, no more and no less.

Are there any requirements for Episcopal Christians? Well, I think there is one, almost. It is never said to be a requirement, but you will hear that God gave us one or two requirements: Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. I’m not sure if that’s one commandment to two. How can you love God if you don’t love your neighbor or vice versa – how can somebody love their neighbor created by God and not the God who created the neighbor?

Now note in my summation of our Episcopal faith that what we now believe and practice now did not happen all at once. Our faith has evolved steadily since the apostles first doctrinized it many centuries ago. Our faith, our theology and our relationship with God have evolved and are still evolving as we are. That seems to be the nature of life. It is also our nature to resist all changes. God seems to have made us that way. Try to remember that when God created something he saw that it was good. We are. We are his creation and we are good too.

Amen.