January 13, 2013 | 8:00 a.m. | Baptism of the Lord

Not Over, Under, or Around, but Through

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 29
Isaiah 43:1–7
Luke 3:15–17, 21–22

“Is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion, the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh,” said Susan, “I thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king I tell you.”

C. S. Lewis
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

On the cover page of your bulletin, you will find a dialogue taken from C. S. Lewis’s well-known Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Let me set the scene for you.

Little Lucy, who has a child’s faith, and her older siblings, who often pick on her, have found themselves in the strange world of Narnia, discovered through a wardrobe, and have been betrayed by Tumnus who had befriended little Lucy. They are helped and find refuge with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, one of several talking animals of Narnia who long for the return of Aslan, a Christ-like figure. As readers, we along with the children discover that Aslan seems absent but will soon appear, is on the move, and that winter and its evil ruler will soon come to an end.

Before discovering the Narnia covered in winter, these children find themselves coming from their own “winter in England,” that is that they are away from their family, and the World War II bombings of London are the reason, a historical fact for many other children during that time. In both worlds, there is a faint hope—for some a fading one—that this “winter,” this terrible suffering at the hand of evil rulers who would make war, would come to an end.

Now we come to our dialogue: as it snows heavily and the children seek comfort in the hospitality of talking beavers, they begin to inquire, who is Aslan? As they discover, Aslan is a lion. This is discomforting, so it is quite reasonable that it should be asked, “Is he safe?”

To those of us who have known great danger or suffered at its hand or have been close to those who have, we know how comforting this word safety can be. As parents, teachers, and caring human beings and people of faith, we want to know that our children our safe, our families and friends are safe, that those for whom we care are safe. There is nothing wrong with wishing for the safety of others or ourselves.

But what is at issue in the journey of faith, as Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, talking animals from which we human animals can learn much, point out is that our journey is not primarily a safe one.

We find this throughout scripture: Abraham is called from the land of his ancestors to an unknown, foreign, and distant land. Moses is called out of his escape and back to dangerous Egypt, where he is guilty of murder, to deliver the people from Pharaoh. Deborah, the judge, leads the men in the battle for their lives. Jesus is sent into the very world in which he will be persecuted and receive the death penalty upon a cross. His disciples will be scattered and some will be killed for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ.

In fact, in many of the stories we don’t usually see the redeemable at the start (and some might wonder if ever): Abraham never does get to see his seed number the stars. The people Moses delivers from Egypt mostly die in the wilderness, and Moses himself only sees the Promised Land from a distance. In other words, the journey of faith is fraught with risk that often seems to end in failure after failure.

In this morning’s text, we encounter this. God doesn’t promise deliverance from the fire or from the water. Listen again:

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.

When, it says, not if, you pass through the waters and walk through fire, not around, under, or over, but through, I will be with you. God offers us not the safety of avoiding these situations or the escape from life but that we won’t ultimately be overwhelmed or ultimately be consumed, because God has the last say on ultimate things.

Today, on Baptism Sunday, on the day when the church the world-over remembers Jesus’ baptism, we know that this will come to mean the baptism into Jesus’ suffering and death and also his life again, a journey we symbolically take when we are baptized: we die to sin and live again for God. It means that the journey of faith, even the journey of Jesus, isn’t a safe one, but must be one that travels through life not escapes it.

This is the error of vitriolic essays against Christianity that posit that it is a religion wrought with escapism, that lives schizophrenically between this world and the next. This is a false accusation. Christianity is not ultimately about escape from but a journey through the pain of life. It’s not about detachment or a lack of suffering but that in suffering we might still share God’s love; that we might still be patient, kind, humble, and grateful; that our faith and hope is strengthened; that we might be agents of transformation; that by God’s love we might share a word of encouragement and healing. And this isn’t an easy path, either.

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes,

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. . . .

Costly grace . . . is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it [costs] God. . . . Costly grace is the Incarnation of God. . . . When Christ calls [someone], God bids [this one to] come and die.

He would know very much about this. He himself, a self-declared and passionate pacifist, found himself foregoing his pacifism in the plot to assassinate Hitler, a plot that can be seen in Hollywood’s Valkyrie but that unfortunately omitted the German pastor and theologian’s role.

In fact, from a relatively comfortable post at Union Theological Seminary in New York Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to be a pastor to his people during World War II, and it cost him his life.

If love is to mean anything more than like, it must have concrete actions and confront concrete consequences.

But in our culture, isn’t this exactly what we’re trying to avoid? In a time when it’s easier to walk away from our friendships, marriages, and families and many a commitment, do we really want to hear of a God that is committed to us, until death and beyond, and that to reciprocate would mean that we are committed to, devoted to God until death?

In her book Almost Christian, Kenda Dean addresses some sociological research on teenagers, aged thirteen to seventeen, and their religion, practices of faith, and beliefs. What she and others found in the research was that teenagers are not hostile to religion, as some adults might assume, but are actually very open to it, in so far as it is “nice.” She references Moral Therapeutic Theism, in which God is nice, wants us to be nice to one another, wants nice things in the world, helps us in certain emergency situations, and that’s that.

What’s even more striking is that often the very parents concerned about their children’s faith wanted their teenagers to be “nice” and nothing more. Be nice to people, get nice grades, go to a nice college, get a nice job, and meet a nice date. This is “Niceianity” at its best. It’s not teenagers that have come up with Moral Therapeutic Theism, Dean contends, but it is we, their elders, mentors, and parents who have given it to them. We don’t talk about our faith to our children to the same degree that we might talk about our favorite book, movie, idea, or our interests in news items, business ventures, and so on.

Could it be that we want a safe God that stays at a safe distance and thus demands little of us, leaving us to our relatively safe corner of the world to meander into some kind of meaning we might make for ourselves? Could it be that being nice is hard enough and so we project our own low thresholds onto a “god” of our making, in our image, but not the God beyond that God?

Just then, just as we have opted for, live life according to, and continue to hope in some way for a “safe god,” Mr. Beaver, the talking animal from Narnia, interrupts our thoughts and way of life. “Of course Aslan isn’t safe!” That is, of course God isn’t safe, but God is good.”

It is God’s goodness, the power of God’s love, that has an ultimate say in which our only last and true hope lies; that God’s love would heal the world, end the winter of our discontent, make peace in the midst of war, and dry tears in the midst of death and mourning; that Love would take us all up in the end and bring justice and restore our families and friends, our broken communities, and make sense of the narratives of our lives.

Friends, brothers and sisters, the journey of faith isn’t primarily a safe one. We will be asked to forgive just as we’ve been forgiven. We will be asked to share just at the moment we would rather keep and hoard. We will be asked to love, even when we feel hate. We will be asked to be patient, even when we want it now. We will be asked to welcome the stranger, even when we don’t feel very hospitable. We will be asked to be present with the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the rejected and invisible of the world, the unlikely ones, and we won’t always like it.

But embrace this fact; embrace your fear, your inadequacy, and your dislike—for you don’t do it alone. Let yourself go, as you accept the fact that you don’t always want to do what is right and good and Christ-like, and leave yourself in the hands of God. Remember your baptism into the suffering of Christ where we die to our false selves.

Accept that there is no way around, over, or under the challenges of life, but we must journey through them. The question is whether we will journey through them at a safe distance with a “safe god” or welcome the God who isn’t safe, who interrupts us and challenges us, welcome this God on the journey of our lives. A fair warning and good news: if you do this, you will see that you will never be the same again.

Of course, this isn’t the safest option. But then again, nor is God. But in all this, know that God is good. God’s love is true and ultimate. God is God. And that is enough.

Amen.