Preached Ash Wednesday, February 13, 2013, at Union Presbyterian Seminary and First Presbyterian Church in Richmond, VA.
Texts: Isaiah 55:1-13
[Pouring
water from a pitcher into the baptismal font] Each time we gather here for
worship, the waters of our baptism are before us. In these waters, we are
sealed in the new covenant of Jesus Christ. Our sins are washed away as we
acknowledge that we have been loved and claimed by the God who knows our name
before we can say God's name. In these waters, the Holy Spirit empowers us to
live as disciples of Jesus Christ - to die daily to our sins and to rise again
with Christ to righteousness and to new life.
Our Gospel lesson this evening
reminds us that Jesus, too, passed through the waters of baptism. Luke tells us
about John, the one who prepared the way for Jesus, baptizing and preaching to
the crowds. The one who baptized Jesus himself. John "went into all the
region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the
forgiveness of sins." And to be sure, John minces no words in his call to
repentance. I think it's safe to say that most of us are grateful that when we
celebrate a baptism here at First Pres, we do not begin by addressing the congregation, "You brood of
vipers!"
Yes, John is a prophet: He calls it
like he sees it, and he is concerned - very
concerned with repentance. Certainly
repentance is something that we associate with baptism. We ask the one being
baptized, or the parents, if we baptize an infant, to renounce evil and affirm their
reliance on God's grace. Furthermore, each week, all of us gathered for worship
confess our sins together and turn to God for forgiveness. But this concept of
repentance can make us a little uncomfortable, can't it? Perhaps it's our
Presbyterian heritage showing through, proclaiming that it is God's grace that
saves us, nothing of ourselves. Perhaps "repent" is a word we hear
too often from street preachers as part of their doomsday proclamations. Still,
we can't deny that living into our baptism, living as disciples of Jesus
Christ, involves this uncomfortable word - repentance.
John's listeners, though, understand
the urgency of this call. They ask him, "What then should we do?" In
John's time, repentance could mean putting on the clothes of mourning -
sackcloth and ashes - ashes like those we will receive today. It could mean
offering sacrifices for atonement and restoration. It could mean a sincere
confession of sin. But John has a larger, more holistic idea of repentance. For
John, repentance has to do with a change of lifestyle. He tells the crowds,
"Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none." To the
tax collectors, he says, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for
you." To the soldiers, he says, "Do not extort money from anyone by
threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages."
John gives real, practical advice on
how to live a life that bears fruit worthy of repentance. Care for those around
you by sharing whatever you have that goes above and beyond what is necessary
for survival. Whatever your profession, go about your work in a way that does
not exploit other people for your own lifestyle or personal gain.
Certainly as twenty-first-century
Christians, our understanding of baptism is different from that of John - a
first-century Jew. In our own baptisms, we look back not to John, but to Jesus.
But in John's call to repentance, don't we also hear Jesus' call to
discipleship, to new life in the covenant community? God claims us in baptism
by God's grace alone - and yet, we can also feel the way the Gospel claims our
lives, the way that, as disciples, we are new people, people who have died and
risen with Jesus Christ and cannot live the same way anymore.
And it is water - this ordinary
substance of our daily lives - that John used and that we still use today in
the sacrament of baptism. A day does not pass that we do not see water: water
from the faucet to drink, water falling from the skies as rain, the water in
which we bathe, or the waters of the lakes, streams, oceans, that make life on
earth possible. Water is an ordinary substance, but it is also the substance
upon which our life depends. A human cannot live more than 3 days without
water. Water makes it possible for us to grow crops for food; it allows ecosystems
to develop and thrive. As we have begun to explore other planets in our solar
system, what have we looked for but signs of water to indicate to us whether life may have been possible on that
planet? Water is an appropriate symbol for baptism because water truly is life.
This January, I had the opportunity
to travel to Guatemala to learn from Guatemalan brothers and sisters about
Christ's work and ministry in their context. Guatemala has had a troubled
history as they have tried to shake off the shackles of colonialism and grow into
their identity as a nation. Though Guatemala officially won independence from
Spain in 1821, the power structure established in colonial times changed very
little in the following 150 years. In the 1950s, troubles came to a head when
the CIA, fearing for US business interests in Guatemala, orchestrated a
military coup to overthrow the elected president. What followed was a 30-year
civil war that killed over 300,000 people. Peace Accords were signed in 1996,
but the culture of violence and inequality persists. People still disappear and
are murdered daily, and the poverty that existed before the civil war has only
gotten worse.
In the midst of this context, our
group met with an organization called COPAI, the Commission on Peace and
Ecology, located in the mountain town of San Marcos. COPAI started as a social
ministry of the local Catholic Church in 2003, when the Guatemalan Government
gave the transnational corporation Gold Corp the license to open a mine in San
Marcos. Gold Corp built the mine on land where many Maya indigenous campesinos lived and farmed, and yet they
had no say in the matter. In a technicality that struck our group as incredibly
exploitative, we learned that while the Maya people own the land, the government claims to own subsoil and any resources found there. They
can give the land to mining corporations as they please.
The people at COPAI explained to us
that the campesinos living in the
area are not opposed to giving up some of their land to the mines, but they
want enough land to survive, and they want the integrity of the earth and of
their own lives to be protected. But you
see, mining corporations like Gold Corp aren't required to follow any
environmental regulations, so the waste from the mining projects flows into the
residents' water, contaminating their drinking water, their crops, and their
livestock. COPAI has established labs to monitor the quality of the water. Even
just 1 year after the mine opened, they were finding dangerous quantities of
lead, other heavy metals, and cyanide.
As I listened to these stories of
the contamination of San Marcos' waters, I couldn't help but think about other
waters, these waters [gesture to the font], the waters
through which God claims us in baptism. And what happens when we pollute these
waters? [Sprinkle ash/dirt into the font
throughout the next several sentences.] When we think of sin, of the ways
we are impure, unholy, defiled before God, I imagine most of us tend to think
in spiritual terms. Perhaps we think of our spirits being darkened, our souls
bearing black marks or spots. But as we talked with the people at COPAI, one
man, let's call him Andrés,
stood up and reminded us that water is God's gift of life - physical life. Water is the
substance on which our physical and our spiritual lives depend. He looked us in
the eye and asked us - how can we pollute and privatize God's precious gift of
life abundant? [Raise a pitcher of the
dirty baptismal water before the congregation.]
John the Baptist tells us to bear
fruit worthy of the repentance expressed in our baptism. Andrés gave me a glimpse of what the fruit of
repentance might look like. A member of our group asked him what we, a visiting
group from the United States, could do to accompany COPAI and the people of San
Marcos in their ministry and their struggle. He told us, "You are our
prophets. Tell our story. Announce the good news of the abundant life God has
given us and denounce that which
limits abundance to only one group of people." Andrés'
words sound to me a lot
like John the Baptist's description of repentance. He called us to participate
in God's Kingdom of abundant life for all by sharing what we have with our
neighbors and by not profiting ourselves through the exploitation and
oppression of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
"Ho," calls the Prophet
Isaiah, "Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters! And you that have no
money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."
It's appropriate, isn't it, that again it is water that Isaiah uses as an image of God's salvation. Water is a universal need, and we understand this
just as well as the ancient Israelites, as John the Baptist's audience, and as
the campesinos of San Marcos. This
water is the very symbol of the abundant life God gives us. Yet how can anyone
come to the waters, if we have filled them with toxic waste?
When we are baptized into the new
covenant of Jesus Christ, we enter into covenant relationship not only with God,
but also with one another. Through our baptism we are joined with believers in
all times and places. Not only here in Richmond, VA, but also in San Marcos,
Guatemala. We are bound in covenant relationship with people we'll never know
from places we've never heard of. And as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are
called to love them as ourselves.
This kind of living requires great
trust in God's Word and God's claim on our lives. It requires that we repent -
that we turn from our sin, from ourselves,
and rely on God's grace for a new future. It requires that we change live so that we might bear fruit
worthy of repentance.
So will we? As we come forward and
receive the imposition of ashes this evening, will we announce God's abundance
and denounce those who would keep it all to themselves? Will we see the world
around us through the lens of our faith in Jesus Christ, and will we respond
accordingly? Will we listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from
around the world about the way our actions and decisions affect their daily
lives? Will we live in such a way that people can see we belong to a covenant
community?
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