Sermon for 10 Pentecost

August 8, 2004

St. Luke’s Church, Jamestown, NY

Eric M. Williams

Today we are baptizing Griffin Martenson-Goldberg, grandson of Bruce and Alta Martenson. In Baptism, as in all sacraments, it takes faith to see what is really happening—faith reveals the hidden reality. It will look like just a few splashes of water, but in reality Griffin will be brought out of sin into righteousness, out of death into eternal life. It will look like ordinary Jamestown tap water, but in reality this will be the same water that flowed in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Biblical garden of Eden, the same water that flows through those same rivers today in Iraq, the same water John used to baptize Jesus in the Jordan river, the same water which flows from the throne of God in the heavenly Jerusalem. It may look like ordinary water, but in the eyes of faith it is the water of life.

That’s the hard thing about the Christian faith. Things are never what they seem. Susan and I went to the Amy Grant concert on Friday night at Chautauqua. Before her concert she and some band members went on a bike ride. She was talking to some teenagers who were walking around. She asked them some questions about how long they had been coming to Chautauqua and what they liked. One of the girls asked her, “What’s your importance around here?” “Oh, I’m just a singer,” she said.

The Christian faith invites us, requires us to look at the world differently, with new eyes. After all, we follow a king who was born in a stable and who trained as a carpenter. And he invites us into a kingdom that does not look at all like what we would expect, a kingdom where the poor are rich, the mourners are laughing, and to inherit that kingdom, you’ve got to let everything else go. It is a kingdom based not on earthly values, nor on conventional wisdom. It is a kingdom based on faith.

Faith means trusting God even when it makes no earthly sense. Abraham followed God, even though he had no idea where God was leading him. As an old man with a barren wife, he believed God would bless him with a child and make him the ancestor of a great people. The Bible is full of people who had no earthly reason to trust God, and yet who had faith.

The best definition of faith is found in our reading from Hebrews today. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It means believing in God when things look bad. It means believing in peace, justice and love even when we can’t see them, when they seem forever out of reach. It means holding on to hope, when despair seems like the sensible thing to do.

In 1992 a man named Vedran Smajlovic gave the world a stunning picture of faith. For twenty-two days during the height of the fighting in Sarajevo, he dressed up in his tuxedo and tails, and went out on a dangerous street corner to play his cello. It was the same street corner where twenty-two men, women and children were killed by a mortar as they waited for bread. He could not avenge their deaths. He could not stop the war. He was no soldier, no diplomat. He was a member of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, and he took up his weapon of faith and of peace, his cello. Against the orders of the police, he risked his life for twenty-two days to reclaim that street corner from the forces of darkness. The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

We desperately need that hope and that conviction that comes from faith. We don’t live in Sarajevo, but we do, all of us, live in a world more full of conflict than of peace. We see more of cruelty and corruption than of justice. We experience more of failure and disappointment than of success. And loving each other remains complicated and difficult, not only between strangers and nations, but sometimes even with those closest to us.

We yearn for peace, for justice, for love, and it is precisely because we can’t see them always here and now that we need faith to carry us through. Faith, which even at our darkest hour wells up in us like the water of life, the water of baptism, and fills us to overflowing, makes us want to play our cello, to laugh and to dance and to sing.

I can’t play the cello, but I want to close this morning by singing a little bit of an old Quaker hymn that is, for me, a beautiful statement of faith.

How Can I Keep From Singing?
Traditional

My life flows on in endless song
Above earth's lamentation.
I hear the real, thought far off hymn
That hails the new creation
Above the tumult and the strife,
I hear the music ringing;
It sounds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?

What through the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
What through the darkness round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of Heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging.
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?