January 13, 2008
(The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ)

Leveraging Baptismal Synergies

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Isaiah 42:1-9  •  Psalm 29  •  Acts 10:34-43  •  Matthew 3:13-17
(From The Lectionary Page)

At the web site Dilbert.com, you will find business-related games that will probably give you a chuckle. My favorite is the Mission Statement Generator (in the Games category). By selecting the most popular buzzwords common to virtually every industry, the generator will then create for you the perfect one sentence Mission Statement.

Here are some samples:

I find reading these statements is for me something akin to eating potato chips – once I start it is hard to stop. And they are not good for me!

The Alliance for Non-Profit Management advises that in just a few sentences, a mission statement needs to communicate the essence of your organization. And one of the elements of an expanded mission statement is to clearly state what your organization seeks to accomplish: Why does your organization exist? What is the ultimate result of your work?

Mission statements in business and industry are relatively recent innovations compared to the centuries old proclamation of the mission of God’s people. For the Church, both Testaments, and especially the life of Jesus Christ, are focused on mission. Despite the unfortunate tendencies to denigrate the Holy Scriptures into a collection of recipes for how to live perfectly, or recreating our sacred stories into an instruction manual on how to best please God and reap those material benefits for doing so, the Scriptures repeatedly call us to embrace but a few basic elements of mission.

On this Feast of our Lord’s baptism, and as we continue our journey through the season after the Epiphany, you and I as the Body of Christ are called to commit again to God’s mission.

In the scroll of the prophet Isaiah are four portions called the Servant Songs. A figure is described in these songs. This figure represents the nation of Israel in each historical setting during which the songs were written. The figure is also the Messiah who delivers, and for us as Christians we see the Christ, the Lord Jesus described here. And finally, the servant figure also represents all who believe.

Keeping in mind any or all of those interpretations, listen again to our first reading, for a repeated theme, a job description, an element of a mission statement the prophet says is God’s expectation: Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations… He will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice on the earth.

The Spirit of the Lord Isaiah describes came upon Jesus in Baptism. In our sacred baptismal ritual, a cross of holy oil is imposed on the forehead of the newly baptized with this promise: You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever. Together you and I belong to the community of the baptized, and a primary element of our mission, given us by Almighty God, is to establish justice and not give into weariness until that work is done.

Our second lesson today is from the Acts of the Apostles, heard also on Easter Day. Peter is in the home of the centurion Cornelius, a Gentile, who is seeking baptism. Peter is moved to make a startling pronouncement: the Messiah has come for all. Jesus, crucified and risen, has opened the Kingdom of God to all. This revelation shakes the foundations of how things have been and how things will be. Peter preaches: I am convinced that God shows no partiality. Maybe Rosa Parks had read that passage as she waited for the bus one morning. Perhaps the electing convention of the Diocese of Massachusetts had studied that lesson before electing Barbara Harris the first woman priest to become a Bishop in the Church of God. Same for the Diocese of New Hampshire before Canon Robinson was elected their Bishop. Peter said that God sees nothing that disqualifies us from the covenant if we love God and nothing disqualifies if from doing God’s work if we love and serve each other.

In Peter’s moment of Epiphany, the mission of God is manifested in Cornelius, a Gentile formally outside the Covenant, who is now fully welcomed into the eternal covenant with God and is commissioned to carry out God’s mission. Here, too, is found the justice of which Isaiah speaks.

When walls come down, and chains are broken, there is still much work for justice to be done. The lives of Ms. Parks, Bishop Harris and Bishop Robinson are filled with personal sacrifices and with stories of conversion. The baptized community always has the freedom to destroy or build up, to enslave or make free, to give into fear or live in trust. But if we are faithful to our baptism, to God’s mission proclaimed in the Scriptures, and to our Lord and Savior, then the choices before us are clear.

At Jesus’ baptism, the Father proclaimed his love for his Son. At every baptism, at your baptism, God proclaimed his love. In this most Sacred Meal, Jesus fills us with his life of love. Confident of that love and of a clear mission, let us build a more just society and Church.

You are loved by God. You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism. You are marked as Christ’s own forever. And you have work to do.

Spiritual Friendship

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Today we observe the feast of Aelred, the 12th century monk and abbot of Rievaulx in the north of England. Born in 1109 into an upper class family in Yorkshire, educated in the court of King David of Scotland, Aelred entered the monastic order of the Cistercians in the year 1133. He quickly became a major figure in English church life, and was appointed abbot of Rievaulx in 1147. Twenty years later, the abbey had over 600 monks. It was during this period that Aelred wrote his best known work, Spiritual Friendship.

Friendship, Aelred taught, is both a gift from God and a creation of human effort. While love is universal, freely given to all, friendship is a particular love between individuals, of which the example is Jesus and the Beloved Disciple.

Aelred went against conventional monastic wisdom in this teaching. Going back all the way to the Sixth Century and none other than Basil the Great, particular friendships as they were known, were seen as injurious to the healthy life of monastic community. Basil believed that all monks should be shown equal love, and therefore cliques or partiality (singularis amor) must be banned because from such particularity arise suspicions and jealousies. "Monks," Basil wrote, "should flee from all intimacy with their peers, even on the pretext of spiritual love. Conversations for pleasure with anyone should be avoided: one should only speak as necessary in order to obey the command to love."

To be generous here, whatever tenuous hold on civilization existed in northern Europe in the 12the century, it was found in monasteries. There, the rigorous disciplined life maintained structure in an otherwise chaotic world. The lives of those who embraced a monastic calling were tightly regimented for fear that the chaos of the outer darkness, as represented by the world outside the monastic community, would invade the church, and that the darkness ultimately would prove victorious.

Aelred, to his great credit, saw it differently. Particular friendships by the monks in Rievaulx were seen as the means by which Christ’s great commandment to love could be best lived out. Absent the practice of friendship, love devolves into an abstraction.

Our gospel reading this evening, appointed for the feast of Aelred, is taken from the farewell discourse by Jesus at the Last Supper. This is John’s gospel, and so there are no words of institution. There is no breaking of bread or blessing of the cup. There is Jesus washing the disciples feet, an act of intimate servanthood, and there is the mandatum – the mandate – that Christ’s disciples are to love one another as he has loved them. The context for this, of course, is remarkable. This is John’s gospel. Jesus, if not his disciples, knows very well what shortly awaits him – crucifixion and death. By every bit of conventional wisdom, Jesus and the disciples should have been paralyzed with fear. And instead Jesus counsels the one thing that alone can cast out fear: love. It was a message that the disciples desperately needed to hear. It was a message that the Johannine community, for whom the gospel was written at the end of the first century, desperately needed to hear. It is a message that the Church in 2008 desperately needs to hear.

When we perceive a threat to our well-being and localize the threat as something that “they” are doing out “there,” that endangers “us” in “here,” the normal human physiological response is to draw inward, to adopt a mode of self-protectiveness, to be hyper-vigilant to anything that might smack of a breach in the self-erected walls of security. We find ourselves living in fear. Our higher brains, our better selves shut down, and the more primitive portions of our brains take over. Spend any time on the internet on various Anglican or Episcopal websites, and you know what I am talking about. Jesus has given us the means to do it differently. We have had this business of love in our tool kits for 2,000 years. And still we are inept in its usage. Love one another as I have loved you. What part of that don’t we get?

Thanks be to God for the courageous witness of Abbot Aelred, who weighed in the balance the threats to peaceful and productive monastic life through friendships by his monks as over against love lived as an abstraction only, a lovely ideal that we dare not practice in real time. May we continually be challenged by his witness to see our fears for what they are, and daily to engage the mandatum of Christ.