Beginning with an invitation
It is an honor for me as rector of St. Chrysostom’s to invite you to Sunday, November 6 which on the calendar of the church is All Saints’ Sunday. All Saints’ Day is November 1 when our bishop will ordain Ben Varnum to the diaconate. The Prayer Book allows us to keep the Sunday after as the great festival – one of what the Prayer Book calls the Major Feast Days of the Church Year. All Saints’ is a majestic liturgy, when we celebrate the whole company of those who have followed Jesus as disciples, who believed in the Lord Jesus and followed him, in all the centuries and around the world, and who are now with him in heaven, held in the safe keeping of his love.
I invite you to make a pledge
All Saints is just the right day to invite you to make a pledge to support the ministry of Jesus Christ in this parish church in 2012. It is an old parish custom to invite the congregation to bring their pledge cards up to the altar along with those already received, to be offered to God with the bread and wine for the Eucharist.
November 6th will also be a combined service. Our last on May 22nd was such fun and joyous that we all thought we should do a combined 9 and 11 more often and we will on November 6th.
This will be the 19th time I have been honored to invite this congregation to offer our pledges. Of course, I am inviting you to give for a year I will not be here -- I will be for two months of 2012 and then no longer rector and 900 miles away. The ministry of this great parish is far larger than any one of us, and will go on long after all of us in this church today are no longer here.
I am going on to a new chapter in my life and am very excited about that. I am sad at cutting old ties, but it is in the natural order of things. The parish is also going on to a new chapter and may that be marked by generosity and love. It is an honor for me to invite you to be a partner and stake-holder, a supporter, in that new chapter.
I invite you make your offering on November 6th out of love for God, in thanksgiving, first and last for God’s love for you in Jesus Christ, for the riches of God’s grace, for all that is good and true and beautiful in your life.
Nothing I enjoy more than a baptism
Out of love for God. In this past day, in the past twenty four hours, I have had two baptisms. Nothing I enjoy more than a baptism. One of the greatest honors a priest has, is to baptize people. The majority are infants, although we are all delighted to baptize an adult and you will recall that a year ago in the summer I had my first baptisms by immersion – two adults I was to marry the next day. The Prayer Book not only allows baptism by immersion, if you read the fine print, it is choice number one!
priest or deacon, who then immerses, or pours water upon, the
candidate, saying …
Given this picture of God
This past day’s baptisms were both infants, lovely little lives. I said the baby’s name and I baptize you in the Name of the Father – with a pour from my hand -- and of the Son – and again a very small sprinkle – and a third as I said and of the Holy Spirit.
Here in these names is the picture of God we are given in the Gospel of Jesus Christ – I mean as I say those words, or Danielle says them, or they are said in any of the languages of the world or have been said over two thousand years – we are given a picture of God in these names.
In the Name of the Father
“Father”, that incredibly human name, and as someone who is both a dad and a son I know precisely how human and fallible the word is. The word is meant as a sign of a relationship that our human loving of dads and moms mirrors. It is a deeply human name that means we are invited into a relationship with God that our human loving – made in God’s image and likeness – mirrors.
It is a deeply human name that is a sign that God loves you – not all human parents do, or are capable of doing that, or choose to do that. God always chooses to love each life.
and in the Name of the Son
We cannot see God. God so loved the world, that God sent God’s only begotten Son to show us what God is like. And what we see is God’s love for every human being born into this world. Every one.
Father and Son – these human words, these incredibly human words – speak of a love that is given and returned and Jesus shows the way, is the pioneer in showing us how to return love to the God who loves us.
Jesus did that completely on the cross, laying down his life for us. And Jesus calls to follow day by day on his way of love – loving God and loving others.
and in the Name of the Holy Spirit
The picture of God given us in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is incomplete without all three names. The Holy Spirit is the name of God living with us and within us – making our interior selves God’s temple and dwelling place. Giving us something of the love we see in Jesus so we may give it away. Paul wrote in the Letter to the Romans, the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Not a discrete Anglican sprinkle but poured, splashing in. And the Holy Spirit gives us rich gifts for loving God.
You are loved by God with a boundless immensity – loved by God whose Son laid down his life on the cross on a day in our history out of love for you – you and every single human life.
God calls us to glimpse that love and trust it – not completely understand, not know everything (although one of the great gifts God has given us is the human mind and we are to love God with our minds) – but trust and love.
It just took a minute for me to touch these small new lives with water and say these ancient words given to me to say:
I baptize you in the Name of God who is love in action, love that has come and taken on flesh in human history, love that is present with us, and given to us to give, love that is like wind that fills our sails, and like fire that melts our frozen hearts.
And these children and you and I are given rich gifts, immense gifts all sorts of gifts, often quite unexplored gifts, for loving God in worship and prayer and for loving other people.
That love is given to you. God gives it to you. God calls you to accept it and trust it and return it. You. And every single one.
Not one forgotten …
… even if the whole world has forgotten.
Thursday evening Eve and I went to the Chicago Symphony, and got there early – for a radiant performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony – and there were very few cars in the part of the garage where I like to park. “Il n’y a personne” I said to Eve. And she remembered years ago I said that when we went into a subway station in Paris
“Il y a moi-même.” Hey, I’m here. Yes you are.
And God sees you
The great message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that there is a God, who does see each human being – who is present with each one, and sees each one and loves each one. In my time here at St. Chrysostom’s how often have I said how much I love the story in John 9 where Jesus, walking along the road, saw the blind beggar by the roadside – he saw him, he did not look the other way, the beggar was not invisible. Human beings make other human beings invisible in all sorts of ways, Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man”-- God sees each one, even perhaps especially those forgotten by the world (in the Prayer Book’s phrase), those invisible to the world, those on the margins, those on the other side of the fences we human beings are always putting up. God’s eye is on the sparrow. Even the littlest. Especially the littlest.
And may someone who has been a priest a long time say that sometimes there are people who in the eyes of the world have every advantage, and in every sense are on the in of whatever one is to be in, in this city – and find themselves poor inside and empty inside and on the outside even from those they love. Oh it happens. And sometimes unable to see. Unable to see where to go, how to go, certainly unable to see God’s love for them.
God so loved that person and every other one in the world of God’s making that God gave his only begotten Son, to be born among us as a human being, who we could see and remember, whose story we could read, and hear the record of what he said and did, and in that hear and see the love God has for each one. For you.
Let us pray.
Come, Holy Spirit and give me light,
To see the love of God for me
And for each one, everyone, in Jesus Christ.
Come, Holy Spirit, help me hear
God’s call to follow Jesus day by day
On his way of loving God and others.
Give me wisdom and light to see the
Rich and special gifts you give each one of us
For loving on his way.
Give me trust in God’s love
At the very center of my life,
Give me wisdom to trust even when I cannot see.
And may I make my offering of love –
In love and thanks and joy –
The offering of my heart. Amen.
(This sermon was preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster, Rector, in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, October 23, 2011, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.)
