A Fourth Church Sermon by John A. Cairns

June 19, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Here and Now

John A. Cairns
Dean, Academy for Faith and Life,
Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 86:1–13
Genesis 21:8–21
Romans 6:1–11

The Bible gives us neither a clothesline nor a timeline nor a system—
it gives us a relationship with God! . . .
What God gives you instead of a system of answers is a blessing
[and] you are forever changed by the encounter.
Jesus will return—once. Until then we are always with Jesus
and he is always with us—Emmanuel.
Our life is held in God’s time.
And we are called to live in wakefulness.

Barbara R. Rossing

One of the great stories in the Old Testament is the story of Hagar, a portion of which we heard as our First Lesson. Hagar is a servant woman. In a much later, more genteel time, she might have been called a lady-in-waiting, for she was the primary aide to Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Sarah and Abraham play a key role in the history of the Hebrew people because they are the ones with whom God made the promise we refer to as the covenant. God promised them a new homeland and generations of offspring; God promised there would be a special relationship: “I will be your God and you shall be my people.”

There was, however, one problem. Abraham and Sarah were well along in years, and they had no children. God’s great covenant promise seemed to them improbable at best. Without a child, everything was in jeopardy. So Sarah and Abraham did what was often done in those times. If a woman could not conceive, her servant, her maid, became a stand-in for her. And as long as the woman—in this case, Sarah—was present at the birth, custom allowed her to consider the child her own. So with Hagar as the surrogate, Abraham and Sarah gave birth to a son named Ishmael, and the covenant was safe. The line could go on.

Except that was not what God had in mind! So as well thought-out as this effort had been, God confounds the situation. Sarah, in her old age, becomes pregnant and gives birth to Isaac. Now everything changes. I’m sure you can imagine. What had been an attitude of gratitude, pride, and acceptance toward Ishmael is abruptly turned on its head. Hagar and her son quickly become persona non grata, and the part of the story we read today details their being cast out of the family compound and their struggle to survive in the wilderness.

But that is not the end of the story. What appears to be a tragedy—a classic tale of a woman who turned out to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—what appears to be a story of being abandoned by those who once valued you, turns out to have a positive ending. With Ishmael at the very edge of death and with Hagar at the brink of despair, God intervenes. An angel directs Hagar to a well, and mother and child not only survive but go on to live full lives with God’s blessing and watchful care.

Now we are all glad for the happy ending, because that gives us a bit of hope. Still, Hagar’s story of ultimate despair—about being totally encompassed by death—has a familiar ring. There are days when we feel like we are out in the wilderness. Hagar knew that the string had run out, that she was going nowhere. Her situation reminds me of the phrase used to refer to a condemned prisoner: dead man walking. Hagar was a dead woman walking. For her, the reality was that even though she might still be walking, the only place she was going was death, and the time of that inevitability had arrived.

It strikes me that many of us periodically find ourselves at just such a place, if not in regard to our external life, then certainly in regard to our internal life. We may not be gasping for air or water. We may be in reasonably good health, have just had our annual physical. But when it comes down to the essence of who we are, to what makes us tick, to what gives meaning and vitality to our person, there may not be a lot going on. Beyond your heart rate and blood pressure, beyond your percentage of body fat and your most recent PSA number, how are you doing? When it comes to your spirit, your soul, are you just another dead person walking? How goes it with you spiritually? Are you really alive, or are you close to death? It’s a question we may not want to consider, but it haunts us just the same. Is anything happening? Are there any signs of life?

I had to smile at a story that Bill O’Brien recounted in a recent issue of the Christian Century. He told of a man who thought he was dead. When his wife asked him to take out the garbage, he would answer, “I can’t. I’m dead.” Finally in utter exasperation, she asked him if dead men could feel pain. When he responded with a no, she pinched him as hard as she could, which caused him to blurt out, “Honey, I was wrong. Dead men can feel pain.”

We may chuckle at this man’s mental predicament; we may scratch our heads over the results of Terry Schiavo’s autopsy. We may find ourselves thinking again about definitions of life, because it’s not what we hoped it would be. Sitting here in worship brings the acknowledgement that there have been dead spots in our own lives and an accompanying emptiness that we’re hoping to somehow address. Our question is the same one voiced by the Apostle Paul: “Who can rescue us from this body of death?”

Interestingly, Paul’s answer to his own question does not describe a way to escape from death or a way around it. He talks instead about going through death to life. That’s not a pleasant thought. Death is what we are trying to avoid. But his words describe a regular part of our life here at Fourth Church, a part I’m afraid we often overlook, often fail to pay attention to. He is talking not about death by lightning bolt or spiritual dehydration; he’s talking about baptism.

In our scripture for today, Paul describes baptism in these words: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In other words, after baptism we are “alive people walking”!

So often our focus at the time of baptism is on how cute each a precious little baby is, on how moving the occasion is. It becomes easy to miss the words that talk about dying with Christ and being raised to new life. How can we be expected to connect such a joyous occasion with symbols of death? Yet, in fact, each baptism is a symbolic reenactment of Christ’s death and resurrection. (Perhaps if we Presbyterians used a little more water, we could more easily make the connection between “going under the water” and dying.) That is the connection that enables us to see baptism as the launch point for our new life in Christ.

What Paul is saying is that is that theologically and symbolically our old selves (even an infant’s three-month-old self) have died and we have begun to live a new and blessed life—a resurrected life—on the other side of that death, here and now. My point—and Paul’s—is that we are already part of a reality that we have failed to notice, of which we may be completely unaware.

On the calendar, today is June 19, which in certain parts of our country is a holiday, a day of celebration of events that allowed awareness to catch up with reality. June 19—or Juneteenth as it is referred to, particularly in Texas—celebrates that date in 1865 when the Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and General Gordon Granger announced the end of the Civil War and his intention to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation that had been the law for two-and-a-half years. In fact, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox more than two months earlier, but this news had not reached the people of Texas nor had the slaves in that part of the country heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. They had been freed without knowing it.

The new life in Christ Paul describes is ours here and now, but like the slaves in Texas, that news—that reality—has not reached us, and so we walk around as if we’re dead. Too often we spend our time and our energy feeling sorry for ourselves because life is such a struggle. We feel at sea because we have such a hard time finding nourishment for the journey, finding perspective with which to view our situation. On all sides we are bombarded with inputs and viewpoints that heighten our sense of frustration and despair, sometimes from within the church community. People carrying a detailed road map to heaven cause us to doubt our convictions or to see ourselves as inferior contestants in the contest to win God’s favor. On all sides, we are peppered with images of ideal spirituality, with people eager to share their successful practices with those whom they assume to be on the ladder’s lowest rungs. There’s no escape. Borders is even carrying a book called Prayer for Dummies.

There are so many messages, so many answers for our spiritual thirst, that we find our heads spinning; uncertain of where to turn, confused, frustrated, and needy. We arrive at worship like the walking dead, like cars pulling into a gas station, hoping to get enough fuel for another week. But like dead people walking, we have a fear that all of this is going nowhere.

Friends, what we are searching for, what we need to be alive, we already have. God is about giving, not withholding; about abundant life, not dying in the wilderness. The death you are worried about you have already died. In baptism, you died with Christ, and in baptism, you were resurrected into a new life with Christ. You have it here and now. It is not something you need to struggle to gain. It is not something you have to go to heaven to discover. All you need to do is claim it.

But each of us has days when claiming this new life is hard, when, like Hagar, we find ourselves in the wilderness and life seems to be going nowhere. What the angel did for Hagar, we need to do for each other. We need to remind one another of the reality. We need to remind one another that God is not about condemnation and chaos and death. God is about blessing and salvation and life. That has always been true. And it is true here and now. That is the reality in which we live. We are alive people walking. Thanks be to God. Amen.