Today we welcomed Pastor Nick Doversberger as our guest pastor. He joined us from the Mexican Baja Peninsula. The gift of Zoom worship allows retired pastors to lead from a distance.
Pastor Nick detailed what he has come to feel about repentance. He does not feel the message of Jesus is primarily about feeling repentant for what we did but more of a realization of what we could do. John's baptism was taking place outside the land those who were baptized knew and beginning again. This was a time of asking root questions that awaken realization and trigger a radical reorientation and a new openness to how are we doing and asking are we where God wants us to be.
John ate wild locusts and honey. He wore camel skins. He was dependent only on what God provided and did to look to men for approval. And he did not point to himself but one who would come after. He looks to Jesus who will become the pioneer leader of our faith. Unlike the pioneers of the past, Jesus is a leader concerned primarily with faith and the Kingdom of God. He was unafraid when encountering physical or spiritual wilderness. Jesus also knew the demands and temptations of settling in a new Promised Land. He faced and navigated the new and gave us visions and ways to perfect our faith.
In this context, John is particularly meaningful today as Creator mixes this year's Advent journey with our time of transition to call a new pastor. The Jordan River in the Bible is important because the river demarcates wilderness from the new Promised Land.
The children of Israel crossed the Jordan River in the Old Testament to enter their Promised Land from their forty year long wilderness journey. In the New Testament John the Baptizer baptizes his followers in the Jordan, including Jesus despite Jesus being proclaimed by John as someone greater than himself. This is begins the reversals of what would be expected in Jesus' story.
Now add to that the followers baptized by John while thinking about wildernesses and Promised Lands. People flock to John come to the Jordan River - from the "wilderness" of a former Promised Land. These pilgrims are destined for a new Promised Land. Geographically this new Promised Land is not just a place contained by earthly borders.
For years I worked on an ELCA Synod Team involved in coming up with a future church vision. We lamented the fact that for generations the church had been The Place, the most important gathering place for those generations. Later church was A Place, one of a number of important gathering places for my parent's generation and perhaps my generation. Finally it was No Place for many in the millennial generation. Many do not feel the same importance of church in their lives as their parents and grandparents.
No one argued how correct these assessments were but the team did not know what to do with these insights. Today's Gospel was revelatory in another way that was related to the Advent Journey insights on John and the River Jordan. The Promised Land beyond borders is No Place. Pilgrims like us can physically live anywhere and still be a part of the new Promised Land Our spiritual concern has moved beyond an ecological concern only for the piece of land we inhabit. We know this is about the entire planet. Given this, how will life in this Promised Land be lived and how should this Promised Land be described? For one vision I quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers:
It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. As to the boundaries, it seems to me better to be silent and leave the insoluble unsolved.
Belief in the resurrection is not the ‘solution’ of the problem of death. God’s ‘beyond’ is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. Transcendence and new life has nothing to do with the transcendence of God over our lives. God is beyond that and in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.
That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I’m thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility.
Another vision of living in the Promised Land is expressed for me in the R.E.M. song You Are The Everything. These lyrics in particular paint a portrait of pilgrim and the Promised Land world as one:
All you hear is time stand still in travel
And feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn't end but slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you've ever seen
And they're there for you
For you alone, you are the everything
Pastor Ray once preached about wilderness and the Promised Land. He felt God comes to us when we are in the wildness. He suggested some hold a belief that Jesus did not need to be baptized. If baptism involves only purification or becoming more acceptable in God's sight this may be true. I am, however, at this moment, drawn more strongly to the statement we sing with the hymn Waterlife:
A simple sweet beginning, a lovely place to start:
Christ began the singing that swells within my heart
There is the power of community and identity in baptism. Jesus' baptism is as important to that identity we are being baptized into as it is for all of us. Since Jesus was son of man as well as son of God, his need for baptism was the same as ours.
Pastor Nick ended his sermon with an inspiriting poem captured on the left. It is titled The Old Shepherd.
It was apparent to him that the poet that wrote this had spent a great deal of time in the presence of God.
What these words reminded Pastor Nick is that we need not be afraid of anything whethe as long as we have faith that we are held in the love of God and are confident that this love will not fail us.
No comments:
Post a Comment