William Yagel
Grace Radford
September 4, 2022
Proper 18, Year C
“Baptism does not confer on us a status that marks us off from everybody else. To be able to say, ‘I’m baptized’ is not to claim an extra dignity, let alone a sort of privilege that keeps you separate from and superior to the rest of the human race, but to claim a new level of solidarity with other people. It is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected – you might even say contaminated – by the mess of humanity. This is very paradoxical. Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed, and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied.”
May it be so.
Amen
- The Reverend Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury, Retired. From his work Being Christian; Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer.
I have to confess that the words of the Psalmist this morning are some of my very favorite in Scripture. They were introduced to me as a young person at a church youth event. I think it was a Diocesan weekend where I was one of the High School leaders that would sit with a small group as we had a conversation surrounding this psalm. Particularly, we were discussing verses 12 through 15, I think, at least, those are the verses that I remember. I should add that I don’t remember at all how that small group conversation went, nor can I remember much about the woman who reviewed the psalm and the questions with myself and the other small group leaders before the event. My sense is that she was not a priest, but I am not certain… Almost all of those details are now gone.
What I do remember, however, is a feeling. I remember feeling more than a little shocked. You see the woman - again, I can’t remember who, but I know it was a woman - was encouraging us to focus on verse 13 –
“I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.”
This was a concept that High School William Yagel did not believe, at all. I certainly didn’t feel marvelously made. I felt more like a shabbily hobbled together character with a string of inadequacies and insecurities that I wanted to hide. But the Psalmist cut through all of that. There isn’t anything that is unknown. I was intimately known. From the very beginning of me, I was known, and known well. Now, I can not tell you that this was the epiphany that turned my life around. I can’t tell you that this was the moment I found God… but as often happens with scripture, it lodged itself in the recesses of my consciousness, and went to work. “I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well” became part of the affirming reality that is our Episcopal Church. This community has repeatedly told me that I am loved, not because of who I am, but simply because I am. I pray that each of you have heard the same in your own lives.
It is this same sentiment that we hear regularly in our baptismal covenant. Even if you haven’t heard a baptism in some time, I hope you have heard the words of the covenant every so often in Church. We are encouraged to renew our baptismal covenant four times a year if we are not having a baptism. ON Easter Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, All Saints Sunday, and the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord we are encouraged to replace the Nicene Creed with a renewal of our vows of baptism. We don’t do this to simply trot out the old BCP and make folks fumble through to find the right pages, we renew our vows from baptism four times a year because they are important and essential to our ongoing journey as disciples of Christ.
A significant part of the journey is reminding us that we are all, each of us, and all of this creation, marvelously made. That all of creation has been intimately known by the creator, redeemer, and sustainer, knit together carefully, lovingly, marvelously. God knows us, and God loves us. So, in our vows when we affirm that we will “strive for Justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being” with God’s help, it is because God has knitted those human beings together in their mother’s womb, has known them well. Through our baptism we contaminate ourselves with everyone else and we are convicted by their humanity to value them and to respect their dignity, because they are beloved of God, just as we are. And the work hasn’t gotten easier in the past 2000 years.
It is this conviction that we hear in the words of Paul this morning. The book of Philemon is the third shortest of the bible, and this morning we hear all but a couple of verses. Historians have traditionally agreed that this is Paul’s letter asking Philemon to take back Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, and pardon him after running away. It should be noted that Paul can be a challenging figure for us to hear from time to time. In fact, Howard Thurman’s grandmother famously refused to hear any of Paul’s letters because the overseers who enslaved her used other writings from Paul to justify her enslavement. No doubt those who enslaved her did not care for this letter to Philemon, especially the last line “knowing you will do even more than I say”. It is widely accepted that Paul expects Onesimus not just to be accepted back, but to be made free.
There is, of course, a risk in this request, we don’t have a letter in response from Philemon. It is unknown what historically happened, but that is less important than the request. Certainly, we hope that Onesimus was freed, but more important are the thoughts of Paul and the dignity he gave to Onesimus. That same dignity we are called to give to those we meet along our journey, through our baptism.
It is this image of a great journey which we are on as Christians that theologian NT Wright observes as critical in considering our passage from Luke today. Certainly, these words of needing to hate one’s family to follow Christ fall hard on all of us, and this is a price most of us are not eager to pay. But Wright reminds us that we are on a journey and that we are called to pack light. We are not encouraged to hate at all, but we are called particularly to love, no matter the cost. As the quote from Rowan Williams offered, our baptism places us solidly within this mess that is humanity.
Amen