Kendall's Notebook page 18
Sermon: “The Diminished Ego”
By: Kendall Brown
Text: Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22
January 11, 2004
To read the Biblical narrative without asking the question, “How is this story about me?” is to waste a lot of time on exercising the eye. Reading the story to find some magic, moral or motive in it about God or Jesus may be entertaining or even intellectually enlightening. The Scriptures are given to us not to entertain, nor solely to enlighten. The Scriptures are set before us that we might be enlarged – enlarged spiritually, enlarged in our moral capacity and ethical astuteness, enlarged in our vision of God’s world and work, enlarged in our ability to be make visible to this world the invisible truth of the other world.
We could approach today’s lesson about John the Baptist and Jesus with the question, “What does this story tell us about Jesus and his cousin, John?” To be enlarged by the story, I bring the question to the text, “How is this story about me, my life and our life together in the church?”
Jesus was never ordained. The story of his Baptism is as close as we will ever get to a story about Jesus being ordained. Ordination means to be set apart by the church to perform a particular task of the church. Ordination does not mean to be granted some holier than thou status – a higher place in some ecclesiastical caste system. Ordination does not mean an investiture of some otherwise unavailable spiritual power. Ordination marks the setting aside to a particular task. Jesus’ task, as so well expressed at his Baptism, was to simply be the beloved son, one in whom God is well pleased.
Encountering again this week the story marking the beginning of Jesus’ ministry reminds me of my own ordination. Upon the finish of seminary, I was called to my first parish in northern Vermont. In the UCC, one cannot be ordained without a call. The call defines the task for which one is being set aside to perform. Without the call or the task, there is no reason to ordain. Even graduation from seminary summa cum laude is not a reason to be ordained. The call is the reason.
My seminary in Bangor, Maine is located 18 miles upstream from my hometown in Bucksport, Maine. Except for a few years spent in Western Massachusetts, most of my childhood was spent in Bucksport. My father was the minister in that church for over forty years. I was brought home from the hospital as a newborn to that church. My first public appearance on this earth was in a clothesbasket at the Women’s Guild meeting where my mother took me, thus giving nurture to the early development and care of my feminine side.
People in that church changed my diapers, wiped my nose, taught me to sing and play the piano, and took me to sea on their lobster boats. They read the paper I delivered to their doors and watch me mature and do OK in the world of scholarship. In that seaport town, they gave me a vision of the world and life as places where there is always more to learn and explore.
As the end of my seminary days drew close, there was much excited anticipation in Bucksport about my ordination. There had not been an ordination in the Bucksport church for a hundred years and what a great thing it would be when Kendall Brown would be ordained there. It would be a day of glorious celebration.
There was a wailing in Zion on the shores of the Penobscot River when word got out that my ordination would take place in Barton, Vermont in the sanctuary of the my first called parish – a sanctuary that was closer to a barn in those days than the lovely Bucksport sanctuary with its huge brass and glass chandelier, new rich royal red carpet, renovated 150 year old Skinner organ, and hand carved woodwork and colonial molding freshly painted in several matching shades of Williamsburg blues.
Ordination is a rite that belongs to the church, not to the individual ordinand. Ordination is a rite to be employed in the service of the church. It is not a ceremony to be used for the pleasure and enjoyment of the ordinand and his or her family and friends, even when family and friends, like mine, were also all members of the church, for the most part the same congregation.
If the parish in Vermont had not called me, I couldn’t have been ordained at all. They had honored me, a still wet behind the ears fresh out of seminary upstart startup, to come to their pulpit with a word to teach them, a congregation where there appeared every Sunday a former governor of Vermont and advisor to the Eisenhower administration, the Speaker of the Vermont House, the President of the Vermont Senate, the Treasurer of the State of Vermont and many other teachers and leaders in America’s business world, too.
What an honor it was to receive a call from them. Perhaps, more than an honor – an expression of grace itself!
It didn’t feel all that good those few months before the ordination came in the Spring. Cheryl and fought off 40 degree below 0 January breezes that came thru one inch cracks in our parsonage bedroom wall. We watched the muddy spring mountain flood waters fill our yard and the cellar beneath us. We didn’t know many people and many didn’t know us. My car was frozen fast on Sunday mornings when I needed it to get to worship. It would have felt great that first spring to return to Maine to be ordained and have a riotous party among friends and family - and be a hero and star again instead of being the nobody, who no one knew, in a cold and distant place where there were 6000 cows and 500 people in my parish. It would have felt good to have gone back to Maine for that event. But even though I didn’t yet know the people very well, I did know that it would be a slap in their face for me to have my ordination in Maine. They were the ones who had called me and made it possible to be ordained. They were the ones who had honored me by calling me to their pulpit. Their church sanctuary was where my ordination belonged.
Spring came and with it a caravan of cars from the Penobscot shores, over the White Mountains to our home in the Green Mountains. The ordination day was a great day for all. The wailing and gnashing of teeth in Zion subsided in Maine and people there love me to this day, Lord knows why.
It might have felt good to have gone back to my hometown and to have made my ordination a personal event between me and my friends. Personal events are not what ordinations, and baptisms and weddings and many other church events are supposed to be. They have greater a purpose. It might have felt good to have returned to Maine and basked in the glory of local boy makes good kind of sunshine for a day or two.
There was a reward in doing it right. There was a reward in setting aside my personal claims around my ordination and in searching out God’s process and plans for my ordination. The reward was in the way my ordination sealed my pastoral relationship with the people in my first parish. Even though we never talked about it, (that is a New England sort of thing), people in that church knew that I had choices to make around my place of ordination and knew how I had decided. My choice enlarged my ministry in that parish in ways that never could have happened had I returned home for my ordination. That felt good.
My ordination struggle is old stuff in the church. What I am talking about is what today’s lesson about John the Baptist is all about. Have you ever wondered why John keeps popping up in the New Testament narrative? We meet him today on this first Sunday of Epiphany. He comes after us again in Lent. And we heard about him just a few weeks ago during Advent. John the Baptist is a frequent flier in the Gospels. There is a historical reason for that.
Today’s lesson reminds us that the crowds were waiting expectantly and wondering in their hearts if John might be the Christ. (Luke 3:15) That crowd grew even as the multitudes following Jesus grew. That crowd grew even after John lost his head and Jesus was resurrected and ascended. That crowd, a group of people who not only wondered if John was the Christ but also doubted that Jesus was the Christ and was ready to put John in Jesus’ place, were around and in and among the early church folk for quite a long time.
Because of their presence and their doubts and questions about Jesus being the Christ, all four Gospel writers give John a fair amount of attention and usually manage in that attention to put John in his place. Luke does that today by reminding John’s would-be followers that John was not worthy to even tie Jesus’ sandals. Furthermore, Luke pointedly reminds John’s followers that John himself had said that.
The issues in today’s lesson continue to dwell among us, full of something less than grace and truth. The people were hungering for a leader. In a sense they were quite willing to attach themselves to the first thing that came along that looked good – or in John’s case sounded good because from all reports John didn’t look very good at all. John in response points them to the one who is greater than he, whose sandals he is not worthy to untie. John points and reaches beyond his own personality and personal preferences and choices, directing people away from his personality to God’s plans, design and purpose as found in Jesus Christ.
I have found myself reworking these issues throughout my ministry. Today’s lesson is about Baptism. The sacrament of baptism itself has a place and purpose within the life of the church. Baptism not only is an instrument of God’s grace, an outward sign of an inner real transformation, as our Disciples friends will say, Baptism is a rite of the church marking rebirth into the fellowship of the body of Christ. As a minister, I have often been asked and tempted to use the sacrament of baptism in some personal way that would feel good personally but in a way that would detach and separate the rite of Baptism from its purpose in the plan and design of the Body of Christ and the church.
This happens when I am on vacation and some family member or friend gives birth to the bright idea that: Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful since Kendall will be around if we baptize the newest baby in the fold on the fourth of July. We can have the baptism on the cottage porch by the lake, and then have hot dogs and cake and take cute pictures before going water skiing and watching the fire works.
This bright idea is floated far more often than you might ever imagine among friends and families of clergy folk. I have always turned these invitations down even though that results in some wailing and gnashing of teeth in my own personal Zion. But people get over it. I turn the invites down for the same reason that John knew that he must diminish himself in order that Christ might increase. I turn the invites down because the rite of baptism was not given to me to use as a personal party favor for making merry at gatherings of my friends and family. I turn the invites down because baptism is a rite of the church to be used to point and direct people beyond themselves to a larger self in Christ and a greater reality in the grace of God. I cannot point people to a reality larger than us when I am so filled with my own ego that I can’t even say “No” to people and guide them in what is the right way. 99% of the time in this type of happening, the parents have no relationship with any church. They have some inner disturbance telling them their new child should be baptized but they really don’t have a clue as to what it is all about.
This is one of those times when the older, more mature and experienced Christian has an opportunity to teach the younger and less experienced as to what it is all about. But we are of no earthly use to heaven above when it comes to teaching those whom we should be mentoring when we cannot get around our own egos, and our own selves. John the Baptist was able to do that as he faced the potential adulation of the crowd and elevation of his self to a higher throne by pointing the crowd to the one who was greater than he. John was not wrapped up in his ego. John did not make the choices that would feel good to him and serve his purposes and ego. He did what was right.
What is right with young parents wanting ministers who are personal acquaintances to baptize their newborn in private little ceremonies is to direct them to a local church of their choice, to encourage them to attend that church, to encourage them to get to know the minister as a pastor, and then ask their pastor to baptize their child. At that point, it is appropriate to ask the pastor if a friend or relative, who happens to be a minister, if he or she might visit and take part in the service with the pastor. That often happens, and it is as it should be when the business of the church is being conducted as church business and not as personal business.
The story of John the Baptist, the early church’s struggle with the followers of John who would replace Jesus with John, and Paul’s letter to the churches often directed at divisions and arguments in the early church all remind us that it is bad business in the church to wrap ourselves around individual personalities. It is good business when we wrap ourselves in the personality of Christ and let his personality and his alone be that in which we live and move and have our being. Amen.