Grace and peace to you from God our rock and redeemer. Amen.
One of my favorite novels of all time is Gilead by Marilyn Robinson. The novel is an extended letter to the very young son of the Rev. John Ames, an elderly Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa. Already an older man when the book is set, the Rev. Ames fears that he might not be around when his son is growing up. The letter is his way of passing along a lifetime of advice to his son—just in case. Ames, himself, is the son and grandson of Congregationalist ministers, one of which was a strict Christian pacifist and the other of which once preached a fiery pro-Civil War sermon in clothes freshly stained with blood from the battlefield.
In the novel, the Rev. Ames recalls a scene from his childhood where several newborn kittens come across his path. Having watched his dad and granddad baptize newborns on several occasions, the young Ames feels it appropriate to baptize these kittens. He treats the kittens very tenderly, pours water on their head, and recites the Trinitarian formula that he has seen his dad and granddad do time and time after again. “You are baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You are sealed with the cross and claimed for Christ forever.” After tenderly retelling this moment in his childhood, Ames reflects on his years of parish ministry and talks about baptism and blessing. He writes,
There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time…Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are just more likely to find yourself in that position. (Robinson, 23)
Before the apostles were ever told to go out and baptize anybody, Jesus tells them that the Church is built on them. Peter, the screw up that he was, was a less-than-ideal representative for the apostles and for the Church, but that’s the role we see him play all throughout the New Testament. In telling the apostles that he was building the Church on their shoulders, Jesus aptly tells us that the Church is built on our shoulders—on the shoulders of the simple, common folks and that we don’t need to be anything special to be a part of the Church. We don’t need to be ordained and we don’t need to be educated. We don’t need to be particularly faithful and we don’t need to be righteous. We don’t have to be right all of the time—or most of the time, even. We don’t have to always make the best decisions. We don’t have to be marble saints or perfectly painted frescos.
Jesus says that the keys of the kingdom of heaven are given to the apostles and, as a result, they have the power to “bind” and to “loose.” There are some theologies that suggest that Jesus is giving the apostles the exclusive authority to forgive one another and/or to define who is and is not included in the family of God. I don’t much buy into this because it puts too much responsibility on humans. And we have quite the track record of messing things up, don’t we?
No, instead I like to think that Jesus is telling us that we have an even bigger responsibility. The Gospel tells us that we are given the power to loose and bind. Our words carry weight. We can assure one another of the grace given to them in the Christ or we can intimidate others into believing that they are still wrapped up in their sins and subject to the disfavor of God. As humans, this is the power that we have: to proclaim liberty or to proclaim condemnation, to set free or to bind. What a responsibility! Talk about joys and concerns!
Another novel that relates well to this morning’s Gospel is Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner’s The Final Beast. This novel is also centered on a parish pastor and his congregation with very strong themes of forgiveness and redemption. There is a scene in which a parishioner begs the pastor to declare forgiveness to a woman in the parish who is deeply disturbed because of her past sins, some of which have personally influenced the congregation and the pastor. The pastor replies that the woman knows that he, the pastor, has already forgiven her. The other parishioner replies,
“But she doesn’t know God forgives her. That’s the only power you have, Pastor: to tell her that. Not just that God forgives her for her poor adultery. Tell her that God forgives her for the faces she cannot bear to look at now. Tell her that God forgives her for being lonely and bored, for not being full of joy every day in a household full of children. Tell her that her sin is forgiven whether she knows it or not, that what she wants more than anything else— what we all want—is true. Pastor, what on earth do you think you were ordained for?”
Three simple words are all that it would take to bring this woman back from the dead. Three simple words: God forgives you. This poor woman is living in the death of her sin. Even though the pastor and the congregation have forgiven her, she still seems to think that God bears a grudge against her, probably from past experiences with insecurity, maybe coupled by a few fire-and-brimstone preachers in her past. Her offenses—adultery, amongst others likely—are serious and have made life difficult for more than one person in the parish and the broader community. The guilt of all of this weighs heavily on her shoulders. Even though the rest of the congregation and the pastor have forgiven her, she has no reason to believe that God forgives her. That’s where the pastor must step in. That’s where we, gathered here this morning, also must step in.
Now, Reverend Buechner was writing in a different time and place. Most of us in the mainline Protestant world do not believe that the authority to forgive resides solely in the hands of the ordained minister—even if the religious sense. The final phrase of that congregant’s plea, however, does still resonate with us: “…what on earth do you think you were ordained for?” Ordination, in this case, can be understood differently than Buechner might have understood it in his day.
Ordination is very much wrapped up in the first sacrament—baptism. In baptism, we die and are resurrected with Jesus. We become people of the resurrection, standing boldly and prophetically in a world surrounded by darkness. After we enter the water and come out again, the cross is drawn on our foreheads, sometimes with water and most often with oil, and we are claimed for Christ. This is the most basic sacrament—the one that we all “get”—the one we can all agree on. In fact, the fact that baptism is a sacrament and ordination is not is testament to how much more important baptism is. It’s also good proof that baptism equips us with everything we need to get by in the world. At our baptisms, we were ordained to proclaim liberty to the captives. We are all ordained to the prophetic ministry that Buechner writes about. We are baptized—we are ordained—to declare God’s forgiveness to one another—to “loose” one another and to resist the temptation to “bind,” even and especially when binding is the easiest response.
Ours is a world that lives too much in binary opposition. That binary opposition is only made worse when God is brought into the picture. It’s one thing if I don’t like a person or a group of people. It’s another thing if I say God doesn’t like that person or those people. When Jesus built the Church on our shoulders, he knew that this would be a problem for us. He knew that we would affix his name to the people we dislike. He knew that we would spiritually and physically bind the people we don’t like. He also knew that we were capable of rising above that. He knew that, with the grace of baptism and the love of our neighbor, we could get over our differences and live in communion with all of God’s children: black or white; gay or straight; liberal or conservative.
The cross drawn on our forehead in baptism, the cross that sits on the wall there, the cross that some of us wear around our necks—it is a symbol of God’s forgiveness. I don’t mean that in the sense that some Christians might. I think that there is too much emphasis put on the suffering and the crucifixion and not enough put on the life and resurrection. What I mean is that the cross—the preeminent Roman tool of death and destruction, a symbol of hatred and injustice—has been reclaimed and repurposed as a sign of forgiveness, a sign of life, a sign of love. This is what happens to us in baptism. We are repurposed to bring God’s plan of repurpose to one another—and the cycle continues, as it does with most things in life. We are forgiven and we are then sent out, claimed for Christ, to do likewise. This is the foundation upon which the Christ built his church.
Remember that you are called by name—called by Jesus the Christ, the son of the Living God, not Elijah, not John the Baptist— and given the amazing task of bringing forgiveness to one another. Amen.
