Learning the Script
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
May 7, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 54:1-10
Acts 16:16-34

“They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house…; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay.”

“Dear Harper,” begins Reynolds Price’s letter to his godchild on the occasion of Harper’s baptism, “It’ll be some years before you read this, if ever. But given the uncertainties of all our futures, I’ll set it down here at the time of your baptism and hope that—should you ever need it—it will be legible still….I certainly won’t guess at what your own relation to faith may be, though your parents and godparents have vowed to guide you toward it….None of us who know you in the bright wonder of your laughing, open-armed childhood can begin to imagine who you’ll be and where you’ll want—or need—to go in your youth or your maturity. So here, by way of a gift, are some thoughts that may interest you in time.”

Likewise here, by way of a sermon, are some thoughts that one day may interest you, Henry; or to be more honest about what we are up to with you, here is the script, the means of grace, that one day may be of real help to you and to each of the many sons and daughters we already have promised and yet will promise to raise in the faith and life of Christ’s church.

In the first place, Henry, we are baptizing you into a story. It is a story whose plot stretches from the first light of creation in the beginning to the final city where there will be no need of sun or moon to shine on it for the glory of God will be its light. We will introduce you to its characters whose adventure with the promise-making God just may shape your own imagination for a great trust. Early on we will tell of Noah’s animals marching two by two up the ramp of an ark to get out of the rain and of the rainbow that sealed God’s promise never again to destroy God’s good creation; we will tell of Abraham who went out not knowing where he was going with Sarah who, in her ninetieth year, bore a son from whom descendants as numerous of the stars of heaven were promised by the same God who had promised Noah; we will tell of Moses and the Hebrew people who escaped slavery across a parted sea and stumbled into the land God had promised as an inheritance to them forever; we will tell of the kings, especially David from whom God promised never to take his steadfast love and whose house God promised to establish forever; and we will tell, as though your life depended upon your hearing because we believe it does, we will tell of Jesus through whom we are made heirs of the same promise and members of God’s household forever.

But we also are baptizing you into a story that does not mince words about the darkness around you and within you. Therefore we will tell you of Cain who was so jealous of his brother Abel that he killed him; of Noah too drunk the night he docked the ark to notice is own nakedness; of Abraham proving his love for God by his willingness to sacrifice the son of God’s promise; of David plotting to have his mistress’s husband felled in battle so that he could have whatever he desired; of God’s people, the people of God’s choosing, who chose again and again to bow down before other gods, lesser gods, gods who were powerless to help them in times of trouble; of the powers and principalities who could not bear God’s promise revealed in flesh and so completed the cycle of murder begun in Cain by nailing God’s Son, God’s only Son, God’s beloved on a cross.

This, I repeat, is a story, Henry, that tells the truth; a story whose main character appears mostly off-stage; a story set in the reality of human history and steeped in the complexity of human brokenness; a story with the power to send you into the days of your one precious life with a purpose greater than you could imagine without it or us. Put another way, we are handing you a script which already has, written into it, a part for you to play. From your baptism on, you step onto the stage as a character in this drama whose plot turns on God’s astounding choice to be for you and with you. Now you may refuse the part, may quarrel with the lines as they are written or with their meaning, may pick up another script for awhile and see where the action takes you. But your baptism is the public moment and we are all witnesses to the fact that this is the script you have been handed by your parents, your godparents and this community of faith. We are handing you this script because we believe it is the story that will make sense of the disparate facts of your life, no matter what they may be, more than any other. You must decide, of course, for yourself in the years to come.

Granted in the beginning it is our special responsibility to help you learn the script, perhaps at first simply by having you memorize some of its lines: lines like The Lord is my shepherd, for instance, or God so loved the world, or God is my refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble because, as you have yet to experience, you will find yourself someday walking in the valley of the shadow of death or you will think yourself unloved and unlovable by those closest to your heart or you will tremble before some enormous trouble certain that you are alone. This would all appear to be the case except for these lines written on your heart which have within them the power to remind you of the One who has gone before you in all these things and accompanies you even and especially in the darkness.

Curiously it is the poet, the artist, the musician who has taken up the gauntlet laid down at my baptism, who continues to insinuate these lines onto my imagination, who reminds me of life’s paucity before their cadences sounded in my ear. To wit, Brooks Haxton writes:
    After my mother’s father died,
    she gave me his morocco Bible.
    I took it from her hand, and saw
    the gold was worn away, the binding
    scuffed and ragged, split below the spine,
    and inside, smudges where her father’s
    right hand gripped the bottom corner
    page by page, an old man waiting, not quite
    reading the words he had known by heart
    for sixty years: our parents in the garden,
    naked, free from shame; the bitterness of labor;
    blood in the ground, still calling for God’s
    curse. His thumbprints faded after the flood,
    to darken again where God bids Moses smite
    the rock, and then again in Psalms, in Matthew
    every page. And where Paul speaks of things
    God hath prepared, things promised to them who wait,
    things not yet entered into the loving heart,
    below the margin of the verse, the paper
    is translucent with the oil and dark
    still with the dirt of his right hand.

This that I have said thus far is obviously the good news about the script into which you have been baptized, the story with a plot whose larger purpose is yours for the leap and whose characters cannot help but stretch your imagination Godward. But there is also some disturbing news concerning the script soon to be in your hand and your head. The story we will tell you and the script that contains your part is a story and script counter to the story and script you will be given by the world, the society, the culture into which you simply have been born. Today you have been baptized into a counter-story, Henry, that if told truthfully to you by us will make possible “an alternative performance of human life in the world, a performance that requires precisely the kind of imagination, courage, energy, and freedom for which this script vouches in particular ways,” says Walter Brueggemann.

I have not yet mentioned the prophets who are a critical—literally a critical--part of the story. We hear their voices rise to a sounding fury whenever we mistake the counter-story we have been given by God for the culture’s story, the comfortable story, the compromising story we tell so effortlessly and self-righteously and smugly these days. In my opinion, Henry, you are being baptized into this counter-story at a time when we are sorely in need of those critical voices, in need of prophetic characters that alone are able to remind us of our baptism and its radical claim upon our lives. Though I would not wish such a life on you for its end surely is the cross, still I pray for the sake of the character we all mean to follow, for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the message of reconciliation he has given us for the world, I pray that we may be a community which will dare to raise up a prophet or two—maybe you--for such a time as this.

One of those voices just beginning to speak when I was baptized is the voice of a man who died the other day. His name was William Sloane Coffin and when I imagine the prophets, I imagine a character like his. Because he lived and breathed this counter story, the story caused him to see things very differently from those living out of the culture’s story. To this day, his words make people angry! “Prejudice,” he wrote for instance, “disfigures the observer, not the person observed. If only the latter could remember it” and “Not to take sides is effectively to weigh in on the side of the stronger” and “Compassion and justice are companions, not choices” and “To know God is to do justice. To recognize this implacable moral imperative of the faith represents the kind of good religion that mixes well with politics.”

There are no guarantees but I do believe if--in spite of ourselves--we tell this story holding back none of its sharp-edged truth, its plot may lead you to be such a voice and so a child of God who never tires of being outraged by a social order that values “amnesia, autonomy, despair and self-sufficiency” over compassion; if we tell the story faithfully, its characters may compel you never to grow weary of speaking up against a culture that bows to “the media, the market, the furies of technological reason and the sanctioned brutalities” instead of worshipping the God who requires mercy and humility and kindness. If we tell this story for all the truth that is in its pages, your part in the drama may be that of a pilgrim longing for a better country and so enacting in your own economics and politics God’s preference for the poor, the outcast, the weak, the least of these because in these you will have met God’s Christ face to face.

What I hope finally, Henry, is that by the time you become a conscious Christian, you will not be a lone witness but will have been baptized into a community-becoming-counter-community more and more, day by day, even as today you surely have been baptized into a community of broken and forgiven human beings. That hope leads me to mention, at the close, another letter written by another godparent to his godchild, a godparent whose name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer writing from a Nazi prison to his godson Dietrich Wilhelm Rudiger Bethge on the day of his baptism: “Today you will be baptized a Christian…[in a time when] we are once again being driven back to the beginnings of our understanding….It is not for us to prophecy the day (though the day will come) when people will once more be called to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. It will be a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious, but liberating and redeeming—as was Jesus’ language. It will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with people and the coming of God’s kingdom. Till then the Christian cause will be a silent and hidden affair, but there will be those who pray and act for justice and wait for God’s own time.” May you, Henry, and all the children of this congregation to whom we have made promises, by God’s grace, be among them. Thanks be to God!

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