Matthew 3:13-17 (NRSV)
Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
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One of my favorite parts of the Book of Common Prayer has become our Baptismal Covenant. Found on pages 292 to 293 of the Book of Common Prayer, after we reaffirm our profession of faith in the Apostle's Creed we are asked the following questions.
Will you continue in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
Will you seek to serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human person?
To all each of these questions we respond with: "I will, with God's Help."
And then it is completed with the following prayer:
May Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has given us a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and bestow upon us the forgiveness of our sins, keep us in eternal life by his grace, in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Among the many big tensions among Christians have been the difference between being chosen vs. elected. The Calvinists started by John Calvin claimed that some individuals are elected by God as "predestined" for salvation. The Weslyans whose work is claimed by John Wesley who started the Methodists have preferred the word "chosen" meaning that all who are saved through the death and resurrection of Christ are among God's chosen. The Out in Scripture commentary for The Baptism of Jesus Christ offers some thoughts on this matter.
Through the ages scholars have surmised the identity of the servant in Isaiah 42:1-9. Two interpretations have emerged; one identifies the servant with a heroic individual, and the other with the collective Israel. Contemporary readers, inclined toward the latter interpretation, might substitute the collective Israel with the LGBT communities of our respective contexts. We might ask then with Israel, how do we understand ourselves as chosen by God, as delight to God’s being (the Hebrew nephesh has a more wholistic meaning than the translation “soul” suggests) and endowed with God’s spirit (Isaiah 42: 1)?
There is much joy in this passage, joy found in struggle. A female-identified God takes a female “you” by the hand (verse 6). Gender boundaries have become fluid. The goal of the struggle, namely to “establish justice on the earth” is all that counts — justice for all everywhere (verse 4). Such a universal promise offers hope, even though some might find God’s impartiality (see also Acts 10:34) hard to bear because it means that God is impartial to LGBT people as well. There clearly remains a tension between God’s universal promise and God’s choosing a particular people.
Chosenness has long been understood as entitlement that has resulted in violence and terror for many. What would it mean if we instead understood chosenness as belovedness? Such theology offers rich possibilities as it takes the emphasis away from the supposed qualities of those who are loved and emphasizes instead the gracious gift of love itself. Still the idea of choseness raises serious questions as to who is left out of choice and left out of love. The Isaiah passage adds an important criterion: the bringing of justice – leading us to claim that if we love, we make justice. Feeling loved leads to more self-esteem and consequently a better ability to act justly and to extend love beyond the confines of a chosen few.
Among the remarks that I appreciate from this commentary is those that express concern about the notion that being "chosen" allows a sense of privilege for some to marginalize and justify cruelty to others. Even without adding the issue of religion with in the debate about health care reform, we can certainly see an attitude of corporate and political greed on behalf of those who are healthy and wealthy vs those who are unhealthy or challenged and middle class or poor. The Health Care Reform, the Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and the President last year gave a great degree of hope to so many people who are sick and struggling. The news that the new Congress wants to repeal it, brings attitudes of fear and concern for those who are sick and in need of help from some where. What has truly been troubling me is how those who interpret the Bible and the U.S. Constitution selfishly and literally justify their efforts to leave the sick and the poor with little or no hope to get help to get off ground zero and begin to live independently. This hardly reflects a mindset of "loving our neighbor as ourselves." To add more insult to injury, this past week at least two individuals died late last year because of Arizona's law taking away the opportunity for organ transplants.
As more States work to provide marriage equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the Minnesota Family Council and the Family Research Council work to further marginalize LGBT people by offering classes to help Minnesota's new Republican Legislature to work to put a Constitutional Amendment against same-sex marriage on the ballot for 2012. Not only do conservative Christians continue to discriminate against LGBT individuals, they justify it by their interpretations of the Bible, however erroneous they are.
The difference in thinking here is the distance between believing that certain Christians or individuals are "elected" or even "chosen" vs that all of God's children are beloved in Jesus Christ and with us God is well-pleased. As Paul wrote in Ephesians that we were in fact "destined for adoption as God's children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of God's will, to the praise of God's glorious grace that God freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." (Ephesians 1:5-6).
In today's reading from the New Testament we read:
Acts 10:34-43 (NRSV)
Then Peter began to speak to them: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name."
In his book: Gay Unions: In the Light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, the Rev. Canon Gray Temple writes:
1. The Bible says homosexuality is a sin.
Where? The sentence, "Homosexuality is a sin" does not occur in the Bible, neither does the word "homosexuality"-- for reasons explained earlier. The Bible does not recognize anything as abstract as "homosexuality." It simply condemns specific actions that our gay sisters and brothers don't contemplate.
The Bible condemns several things that we no longer consider sinful. The Bible considers lending money at interest a violation of God's commandment and (in Ezek, 18:13) an abomination. The same with eating shrimp or weasels. On what basis do we privilege one set of prohibitions over others? In no debate in which I've taken part has any opponent answered those questions. All too often their importance goes unrecognized. (Page 138-139).
Out in Scripture concludes their commentary for this Feast with the following remarks.
The gifts of the spirit of God and divine love are the ritual outcomes of Jesus’ baptism. As a result we too become agents of God’s spirit, mercy and justice in the world – part of the baptismal covenant we often don’t remember. What difference does our lives of faith look like when we truly live our baptismal covenants?
As baptized LGBT people of faith, we are called not to shrink from our baptismal covenant. Even though there are those who attempt to push us outside the community, we are the community of the baptized, we are beloved. Our baptisms call us to work for opening up the blessings of baptism for all within Christ’s body. Such blessings, it seems, include marriage and ordination for LGBT people who are called to, but denied these rites. At the same time, we are called to look beyond our own chosen community to live in love and justice with God’s children of all religions and faiths.
As LGBT individuals we are among God's Beloved with whom God is well-pleased. The love we have for ourselves with all our sexual and gender diversity, our significant others, our friends, families and even those who fight against our equal rights shows that God is very much at work in and through us. The reason that conservatives are becoming so much more arrogant about stopping us from gaining ground, is because we have been advancing. At the end of the lame-duck session of Congress we finally repealed even if only legislatively the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. This significant victory for the LGBT communities tells us and those opposed to our efforts that more and more people are accepting of us and our relationships as alternatives. And that having alternatives is not so awful as some previously thought. We have advanced the idea that respect for diversity is within the reach of humankind, and even the most obstinate of thinkers. What we are also finding out is that with every step forward we take, there are those within the Church and society who just are not happy with themselves unless they work to bring happy people down to their level.
As God's Beloved with whom God is well-pleased in Christ, we have been asked: "Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human person?" If we answer truthfully: "We will, with God's help" then we must be prepared to recognize within ourselves, our own obstacles of prejudice and ill feeling towards others unlike ourselves. That is very difficult. Even LGBT individuals whether they are believing Christians, or unbelievers in any religion have some ideal about how others ought to be more like how we are, think of behave. The fact is, God has created and redeemed within all humankind through Christ, a beautiful garden of all kinds of colors, races, religions, sexual orientations, genders, gender identities/expressions, cultures, abilities/challenges, languages and classes that need to be respected and helped if God's garden is to grow and bloom. Through our Baptismal Covenant, God has called all of us to acknowledge and participate in God's creative and redemptive work of grace, so that what started as a huge bag of different seeds, will bloom and grow into a beautiful and diverse people of inclusion, diversity and opportunity for all God's people. Amen.
Diane Butler Bass author of the book: Christianity for the Rest of Us wrote a blog about mentioning the tragic assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford in Tuscon, Arizona yesterday.
Sunday January 9 is the day on which many Christians celebrate the Baptism of Jesus: "When Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'" Jesus' baptism in water symbolizes life, the newness that comes of cleansing. But there is a darker symbol of baptism in American history: that of blood. In 1862, Episcopal bishop Stephen Elliot of Georgia said, "All nations which come into existence . . . must be born amid the storm of revolution and must win their way to a place in history through the baptism of blood." Baptism as water? Baptism as blood? Baptism accompanied by a dove or baptism accompanied by the storm of revolution?
American Christianity is deeply conflicted, caught between two powerful symbols of baptism, symbols that haunt our political sub-consciousness. To which baptism are we called? Which baptism does the world most need today? Which baptism truly heals? Do we need the water of God, or the blood of a nine-year old laying on a street in Tucson? The answer is profoundly and simply obvious. We need redemption gushing from the rivers of God's love, not that of blood-soaked sidewalks.
If we don't speak for the soul, our silence will surely aid evil.
Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. (Collect for the First Sunday After the Epiphany. The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ, Book of Common Prayer, page 214).
O Brother Jesus, who in your baptism
left us a sign of your love and acceptance.
Grant we beseech you, so to honor your calling,
that we may ever perceive our own preciousness in your eyes
and be moved to share the pain of those on the margins,
that we may in all of life promote
the dignity and freedom of every human being.
In your Holy Name we pray. Amen. (Prayerfully Out in Scripture).
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