A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

May 12, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Water and Salt

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 68:4–10
1 Samuel 1:20–28
Mark 1:9–11

“And a voice came from heaven,
‘You are my Son, the Beloved;
with you I am well pleased.’”

Mark 1:11 (NRSV)

God of mercy, you have promised never to break covenant with us. Amid all the changing words of our generation, may we hear your eternal word that does not change, and may we respond to your gracious promises with faithful lives lived to your glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A minister friend of mine tells of

a couple who had been told by numerous specialists that they were likely going to be unable to have children. This was very heartbreaking news to Rob and Kim, who wanted children deeply and prayed for them daily, but disappointment followed disappointment. There were medical tests, miscarriages, long periods of waiting and hoping. To top it all off, Kim broke her leg in a skiing accident, which meant that she was in traction and a cast for months. Finally, when she was healed enough to travel, they decided to go see one more specialist in one more city. After the examination, the doctor called them into his office, and as they sat down, he folded his hands on the desk and leaned toward them, saying, “Well it is true. You cannot get pregnant. You cannot get pregnant, because you already are pregnant.”

The couple was ecstatic. They could not wait to return to their home and share the glad tidings with their friends and family, their pastor, members of their church. Months passed, and a beautiful baby girl was born, whom they named in good southern style, Ann Hannah. She was an answer to prayer, a miracle. And so it was much to the pastor’s dismay when he received a call one morning from Ann Hannah’s dad saying, “Kim and I have decided we are going to put the baby up for adoption.” What he really meant, of course, was that he had called to schedule their child’s baptism at the church. (1)

Here is the question. To whom do our children belong in the first place? For that matter, to whom does each of us belong? When Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, as he was coming up out of the water, a voice from heaven was heard, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Clearly Jesus belonged to God. It was God’s voice, God’s initiative, God’s obvious delight in the existence of God’s own Son that confirmed it. Later, Paul explained in his letter to the Ephesians what Jesus’ belonging to God has to do with all the rest of us. He wrote, “God has destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will” (Ephesians 1:5).

Our adoption as God’s children, the gifts of life and grace itself have always been understood in our faith tradition to be functions of the very nature and will of the Almighty. “Thus says the Lord, the one who created you, O Jacob, the one who formed you, O Israel: ‘Do not fear, for I have called you by name, you are mine’” (Isaiah 43:1–2).

When we present our children or ourselves for baptism, we are acknowledging this fundamental reality that can never be changed: God initiates a covenant with us and intends to keep it forever. Neither life’s darkest valleys nor its confusing twists and turns can ever alter the fact that we are God’s own.

We receive all kinds of contrary messages from our culture. So much about life tells us that we belong to ourselves and are answerable to no one but ourselves. But that is not the truth. We belong to God. A woman once complained to theologian Annie Dillard, “You know it just seems as if we were all just set down here and nobody has ever been able to figure out why.” Here is the counterpoint to that woman’s conclusion: we have been searched and known by God. God is acquainted in all our ways (Psalm 139:1–3). “See what love the Father has for us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are” (1 John 3:1),

One of the grandest stories in the Old Testament is the story of Hannah, who had prayed to God for an end to her barrenness and the gift of a child. Finally a son was born to her and her husband. They named him Samuel, which in Hebrew means “the child asked of God.” When he was weaned, she took him to the temple, and she handed him over to Eli, the priest, and said, “Here. I am giving this child to the Lord.” It was not because she did not want him any more; it was because she knew to whom he belonged in the first place.

It is to make visible this divine prior ownership of us that the church engages in the sacrament of baptism. I think of Paul Tillich’s definition of a symbol: a symbol is “a piece of finite reality which points to the infinite and which participates in the power and meaning of that to which it points.” (2) There is nothing magic about having water put on our heads. There is nothing magic about the ritual of the laying on of hands, as members of the confirmation class at Fourth Church make their commitment to God and to the purposes of Christ. What the church is saying by means of these rituals is that God is present within our finite, temporal world. There is real spiritual power here through Christ himself, through bread and cup, through water that flows in a river or is drawn from a faucet and put in a font, through hands that touch and bless.

I recently read about an African American congregation here in Chicago that has instituted a powerful new ritual in which, on a regular basis, each child in the parish is blessed. The children are brought forward by their parents, who are also accompanied by their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors. The pastor blesses each child by name, and then the mothers and fathers take their children into the large chancel area. Women in the congregation who are lay leaders rise from their pews and come forward. Each is carrying something to place in the mouths of the babies. With her hand, the first woman places a bit of pepper in the child’s mouth and says, “This pepper is the sign of the cross.” The next woman places a pinch of salt on the tongue of the baby and says, “This salt is the sign that these children are called to be wise and faithful, to be the salt of the earth.” Then there is vinegar, a symbol that Christian life is not easy, but that is followed by the taste of honey, a sign of the essential sweetness of the gospel. The last woman carries oil, a sign of joy. (3)

This is exactly the kind of thing Paul Tillich was talking about—material signs of profound spiritual realities. Finite symbols that participate in infinite grace.

All my life I have had a heroine, and her name is Helen Keller. Perhaps you have heard of her. Though she died in 1968, no one has led the way in overcoming disability more than Helen Keller. By the time she was nineteen months old, she was blind, deaf, and unable to speak due to illness. When she was seven years old, her teacher, Anne Sullivan, took her on a walk. They passed by the well house covered with honeysuckle. It was the fragrance of the honeysuckle that drew them inside, where someone was pumping water. Helen’s teacher took one of Helen’s hands and held it under the cool water coming from the pump. Then she wrote in the palm of Helen’s other hand these five letters: W-A-T-E-R. “Gradually,” Helen Keller wrote later, “I realized that ‘water’ meant the wonderfully cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul. . . . It would have been difficult to find a happier child that day than I was as I lay in my bed. . . . For the first time, I longed for a new day.” (4)

You might be interested in knowing that Helen Keller never learned to speak and was blind and deaf all her life, but she went on to graduate cum laude from Radcliffe College and to write dozens of books, one of which was gladly titled Let Us Have Faith. The beginning of her life as a person was when she made the connection between symbol and reality.

We Christians believe that by our baptism, the symbol of our immersion into the death and resurrection of Christ, we too are transformed. But that transformation is entirely God’s doing; it is God’s choice of us in the first place. Infant baptism communicates this reality so wonderfully, I think. In the past twenty-three years, I have baptized more than a few babies. Some of them sleep and some of them scream, and all of them wiggle. The one common thread that runs through the entirety of my experience with baptism of infants is that not a single one of them ever had a clue as to what was happening to them.

I know a man who is an outstanding theologian in our denomination. He tells of how, when he was 10 years old, his parents decided that he should be baptized. Their pastor decided that he was old enough for what we call believer’s baptism. The Sunday came that the 10-year-old boy answered the questions about his belief in Jesus Christ, his renunciation of sin, but he says that he neither meant what he said nor understood what he said. Throughout his adolescence and young adulthood, he was troubled by what had appeared to him to be pretense and hypocrisy, until the day came that he read these few words found in the Gospel of John. They are Jesus’ words to his disciples: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). Those words were his revelation, the point at which he was able to claim his baptism and make it his own. (6)

There are so many voices that would tell us who we are and what makes our lives valuable—that we are what we have, we are the car we drive, we are how we look—but all of that is a lie. We are first and last the beloved of God. We are the reason Christ came into the world and gave his life. Our lives will be pepper and salt, honey and vinegar, but more than anything, they are grace, divine grace. Grace beneath us. Grace above us. Grace everywhere.

No wonder Hannah walked over to the temple and gave her baby Samuel to Eli and said, “This is God’s baby.” And so he was, and so are we.

For many years I had a colleague in the ministry, a wonderful leader in the Presbyterian church, named Dr. P. C. Enniss. He began his ministry at First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee, Florida. He tells of a Sunday morning when he was busy and harried, trying to slip away from the breakfast table where the family had gathered. His 14-year-old son said, “Dad, before you go, I have an announcement to make. I am not going to church today.” It was not a question; it was a simple declaration. “What do you mean, you are not going to church?” his dad asked. “Well, because I do not believe in God anymore,” he said. David’s mother, a very wise and wonderful person, said, “Well, I am sorry David that you do not believe in God, but God still believes in you. So eat your eggs, comb your hair; the car is leaving in ten minutes.” Even on those days when children find it difficult to believe in God, there will never be a day when God ceases to believe in them. That is the message of the sacrament. Long before we ever were able to love God, God loved us and decided never to let us go.

Well, it’s Mother’s Day, and I ask for an indulgence to close with the words of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s story The Runaway Bunny.

Once there was a little bunny that wanted to run away, so he said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you, for you are my little bunny.”
“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and swim away.”
“Well, if you become a trout in a fish stream,” said his mother, “I will become a fisherman, and I will come fishing for you.”
“Well then, I will become a rock on a mountain high above you,” said the bunny.
“If you become a rock on a mountain, then I will become a mountain climber and climb to wherever you are.”

And so the story goes on. “I will be a bird and fly away. . . . I will be the tree you come home to. . . . I will be a sailboat and sail away; then I will become the wind that fills your sails.” There were other attempts to leave, all to no avail.

Finally, the little bunny said, “Alright, I might as well stay here and be your little bunny. . . . And so he did.”
“Have a carrot,” said the mother bunny. (6)

“Whither shall I flee from your presence?” the psalmist asked. And the answer? There is nowhere we can go where God will not be with us. In life and in death, we belong to God, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and in communion and fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

May our hearts be filled with joy that we live in such a state, now and forever. Amen.

Endnotes
1. My friend and colleague for many years, P. C. Enniss, tells this story. Dr. Enniss’s sermon “Adoption,” preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, was the inspiration for this sermon. Today’s message was not based on the lectionary texts for the day, but was intended particularly for the congregation of Fourth Church on a Sunday when 15 babies and 2 adults were being baptized and 23 members of the confirmation class were joining the church.
2. As quoted in “Adoption.”
3. Thomas Long, Beyond the Worship Wars (The Alban Institute: 2001), 50–51.
4. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Doubleday: 1954).
5. Ronald Byars, Christian Worship (Geneva Press: 2000), 56-57.
6. As quoted in “Adoption.”