Sacraments
a sermon by John W. Wimberly, Jr.
Pastor, Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
April 6, 2008

Text: Luke 24:28-35

Here at Western we work hard to attract and retain members.  Therefore, I regret that I have to say the following: If you think you may be a future candidate for President of the United States, you may want to join another congregation!  Carol and my sermons are on the web and in podcasts.  Fox News can get them any time they want.  Think about it. 

Seriously, in the furor over a few of the sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright, commentators have generally overlooked a key reality about the church.  Namely, most Christians are not members of their congregation because they agree with their pastor.  If church membership was dependent upon members agreeing with what is said from the pulpit, many of our sanctuaries would be empty. 

People stay in churches because they enjoy the friendship of the members, the music, the programs for children or adult education, the mission efforts, pastoral care.  My father said that a number of people joined the church he served in Madison, Wisconsin because they were up and coming managers at Oscar Mayer Company and Oscar Mayer was a member of the congregation.  They could talk with their CEO at coffee hour.  Many are the reasons people join and stay in a church.

To understand congregations, we must remember that they are, first and foremost, communities, not pedestals for preachers.  We are families of faith.  So when someone says, “We don’t choose our families but we do choose our pastors,” that isn’t as true as it may appear at first glance.  Many Christians are as wedded to their congregations as they are to their spouses.

Howard Larson, who joined this church in 1953, thirty years before I arrived in 1983, periodically reminds me that he has every intention of out-waiting me at Western.  “John, I was here before you and I’ll be here after you,” he says with great relish and dogged determination.  One of my goals is for every member at Western to feel Howard’s type of loyalty to this faith community.  I hope each of you is committed to the church family, not just to particular staff members.

As a family of faith, we do all the things families do.  Together we laugh and cry; celebrate births and grieve deaths; rejoice at jobs won and lament jobs lost.  Together, we grow old, watching the congregation’s children morph from babies to youth to teens to adults (nothing is better about being a long-term member of a congregation than watching the kids grow up!).  Together, we struggle to raise the money needed to pay our family’s utility bills, care for family members who are sick or grieving and do things to transform the world into a more just and peaceful place. 

At the heart of our family is the Word of God.  It calls us into being, revealing who we are, from whence we came, and where we are going.  It informs our values and beliefs; shapes the choices we make regarding relationships, careers, and politics. 

The church, like all families, has rituals. We call them sacraments.  Baptism, is a ritual we perform when babies are born or adults decide, for the first time, to join our family.  The other ritual is a meal.  Don’t all families have a favorite, ritualistic meal?  As Christians, we certainly do.  It is called holy communion.

Baptism uses God’s life-sustaining gift of water to symbolize God’s gift of faith.  As we pour water over the head of a baby or adult, we represent the way faith washes and keeps us clean, refreshes and sustains us.

When discussing baptism, I always need to say what it doesn’t mean in our theological tradition.  In some traditions, children are baptized to wash away the original sin of Adam and Eve.  When I was growing up, many Roman Catholics would stop at the church on the way home from the hospital to have their newborn baptized.  Because, if the child wasn’t baptized, the parents believed their child’s eternal fate was in jeopardy.  The unfairness of unbaptized children being doomed for no fault of their own became so troubling that the Roman Catholic Church created a place called limbo in the afterlife where unbaptized children supposedly live—living neither in heaven or hell but in limbo. 

For Presbyterians, baptism is not about the state of the child’s soul.  Children are loved and welcomed by God—baptized or unbaptized, Christian or not.  To consider that a ritual of the church has the power to include or exclude people from the eternal Presence of God, to damn or save, is simply unthinkable to us.

So infant baptism is not about the child.  It is about families—biological and spiritual families. 

Faith is a seed planted in us at birth.  Like every seed, it needs help to grow and blossom.  Our biological families and the church family are the two most important influences on the seed of faith.  To grow spiritually, we need family support as we study the story of faith, experience the power of forgiveness, and feel God guiding us to places we otherwise would never go. 

Our family of faith has huge influence on a child.  Watch our kids some Sunday morning because they are watching us.  They are gaining what will be lifelong impressions of what it means to be part of this family—how we act as a family, how we relate to strangers, how we treat little ones who dart around between our legs, what we value, what we support, tolerate and oppose.

For infants and adults alike, baptism becomes real in the years and decades that follow the act of baptism.  Just as it is hard to grow things in the desert, it can be hard to grow our spiritual seeds when we land in one of life’s barren spots.  However, just as water transforms an arid field into a fertile field, over a lifetime, following through on our baptismal vows does the same with the fields of our spiritual lives.

Another way God nurtures and feeds us is with holy communion.  There are a wide variety of ways to understand what transpires in communion.  Many Christians believe the bread and wine, once consecrated, literally become the body and blood of Christ.  Luther believed they become the body and blood of Christ once consumed.  Others understand God’s presence as mystically connected to the sacrament but not physically related to the elements.  Yet others see communion as a simple yet profound remembrance of what happened when Jesus first instituted the sacrament.

I am not here to tell you what is the proper way to understand communion.  But it is extremely important for each of us to develop our own theology as to what happens for us in communion.  For many of us, our understanding of communion changes and evolves as we change and evolve.

Finally, sacraments are incarnational.  They use the physical to evoke and embody the spiritual.  The physical and spiritual are not antithetical as the ancient Greeks supposed.  They are complementary, as we see in the life of Jesus.  Indeed, each requires the other. 

In a healthy family, there are lots of hugs, meals, gifts, rituals and other physical manifestations of the love that exists in the hearts of the family members.  In a healthy family of faith, there are hugs, sacraments and other physical representations of the love we feel for God and one another. 

Senator Obama has explained how Dr. Wright brought him to Jesus.  If Dr. Wright did nothing else but connect one person to God, his ministry has been worthwhile.  But my guess is that what has kept Senator Obama close to God was not so much Dr. Wright as the community of faith Trinity Congregational Church is.  Our congregations are what keep most of us connected to God.

There have been lots of studies done as to what happened to folks who came to Christ in those big Billy Graham events in stadiums.  A small percentage of the individuals had their lives forever.  They are reason enough to value Dr. Graham’s ministry.  But a large percentage never followed up on the commitment they made at the crusade.

How did Dr. Graham define follow through?  He viewed follow through as having individuals link their personal commitment to Christ to that of a community of faith, a congregation.  He knew we all need to become part of a family of faith where we can nurture and be nurtured by others; where we can grow and help others grow.  It troubled him that so few people attending his rallies made that kind of commitment.

Our faith journey begins when God plants the seed of faith in our heart of hearts.  We take the journey to a much deeper, lasting level when we join a community of faith and are baptized.  In the years following baptism, our journey is nurtured by the sacrament of holy communion.  Most important, our pilgrimage through life is sustained, corrected and supported by the family of faith we have come to call the church. 

Think about Jesus’ journey.  His first days in ministry were spent recruiting and surrounding himself with other people who were committed to growing their seed of faith.  And when he returned from the dead, what did he do?  He sought out his family of faith.  Last week we heard how he visited Thomas and the other disciples.  This week we read of him seeking out and walking with several of his followers on the road to Emmaus.  They recognized the Risen Christ as they broke bread together—in community.

For the gift of sacraments that mark and enrich our life as a family of faith, for the gift of community that supports us as we journey from birth to death and beyond, we give thanks to God. 

Let us pray: Gracious God, help us to cherish and build communities in which we can grow and blossom as individuals.  Here at Western, may we help one another identify and develop the gifts with which you have blessed each of us.  As we do so, may we put them to work for the good of all.  This we ask in Christ’s name.  Amen.