Texts: Matthew 3: 13-17; Matthew 13: 44-45; 2 Corinthians 4: 5-7
Becoming the Beloved
A passage from the New Testament that we need to return to often is found in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. We have this treasure, Paul writes, and indeed, I can think of no better way to begin on a Sunday during which we celebrate confirmation than to remind us all of the treasure that we’ve been given in the life of faith. There are the stories and the rituals and the teachings, yes, but more than that, there’s the Spirit that dwells within and among each of us that is a treasure. There’s the treasure of relationships, of having one another. There’s the treasure of this place, the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme. There’s the treasure of how we’re connected to so many other traditions and cultures through this place. On a Sunday like this, we need to begin by reminding ourselves of the treasures we have, the gifts that are ours. For those of you being confirmed today, I hope you have the sense that it is a treasure.
That’s where I want to begin. But I also want to complicate things a little bit, as a way of speaking honestly about what it is to inhabit the Christian faith. It is a treasure, but it’s not without its complications. It’s not without its ambiguities. It’s not without its struggles. What does it mean, really, to inhabit a tradition that’s been handed to us all? What does it mean to make a place for ourselves in a lineage that stretches back thousands of years, one that contains stories of people at their best, and stories of people at their very worst? What does it mean to live with, and to live into, this thing we call church, this thing we call faith, this thing called Christianity?
Shusaku Endo was a Japanese novelist who wrote powerfully about his own relationship to Christian faith. He was Catholic, which in Japan is a relatively rare phenomenon. And so he had to struggle to reconcile what often felt irreconcilable to him – Japanese culture and his understanding of Christianity. In the preface to his novel Silence, a novel that Martin Scorcese recently turned into a film, Endo offers a helpful metaphor about how it feels to inhabit a tradition like Christianity, but also how it feels to make it one’s own. Here’s what he says:
I received baptism when I was a child…in other words, my Catholicism was a kind of ready-made suit…I had to decide either to make this ready-made suit fit my body or get rid of it and find another suit that fitted…In the end, I decided not to remove the suit….Instead, I would refashion it into clothing that would fit me.
Endo’s words capture what it is to inhabit a tradition – any tradition, whether a faith tradition, or patterns handed to us by our family, or gender, or the nationality that we’re born into, or the very language we speak. We’re handed something ready made, a kind of suit, and we’re asked to place it on our bodies. We’re asked to wear it. For some of us, what we inherit by way of family or faith or nationality is easy to wear. It’s easy to inhabit. For others of us, like Endo, it requires continual negotiation to make that suit of clothing fit. That can be especially true of this thing we all participate in Sunday by Sunday, and really day by day. To live in faith, to inhabit faith, is to participate in a continual process of negotiation.
I wish to suggest to all of you this morning that that is good news. Not only that, I wish to suggest that the process Shusaku Endo names, where we fashion a readymade suit of clothing into something that fits us, exists at the very core of who we are as people of faith. There is a freedom at the center of our faith that allows for a continual conversation, a continual process of reformation, if you will, one that aligns with a phrase some older theologians coined: “Once reformed, always reforming.” All of us are given the freedom to fashion what we’ve been given into something that fits us.
As it happens, that very notion was embodied in the life of Jesus. In fact, that stance toward faith sums up much of Jesus’s life. We don’t know much about his childhood or adolescence, but we do have one crucial story that expresses what I’m describing. It takes place when Jesus is twelve, which in that time would have been the height of adolescence. Jesus travels with his parents from Nazareth to Jerusalem, to celebrate the festival of Passover. They traveled with a large number of friends and relatives, so large in fact that when the festival was over, and they were traveling home, Mary and Joseph didn’t even notice that Jesus wasn’t with them. I like that detail because of the rich sense of community it suggests – I imagine parents who aren’t overly concerned about where their child is at any given moment because there are a hundred parents all around, and everyone is mindful of everyone else. Even so, after a time it becomes apparent that Jesus isn’t among the travelers, and so Mary and Joseph have to double back, returning to Jerusalem, where they find Jesus debating with the leaders of the temple. I imagine them arguing back and forth about what the sacred stories meant. I imagine a give and take exchange, where the leaders of that community learn something new by entering that discussion. And I imagine that Jesus himself must have received something from the conversation as well, as he tested his wits against their learning.
It’s an important story for what it suggests about inhabiting a faith tradition, then as now. It hints that belonging to a faith tradition or a church isn’t to accept something as true once and for all. It isn’t to subscribe to a series of beliefs that are unchanging. And it certainly isn’t to stuff yourself into a formal suit that doesn’t fit you, that rubs you the wrong way, that chafes and makes you uncomfortable. The story of Jesus in the temple suggests that the life of faith is one of argumentation and debate, of challenge and provocation. Nothing in theology, or in faith, is given once and for all – it’s something you’ll have to live with, and wrestle with, and sometimes challenge. The point of it all, in other words, isn’t a fixed state like belief. Rather, the point seems to be living in a state of passionate engagement, living in an attitude of open conversation, trusting that God is found in that dynamic mix. Even Jesus had to undergo such a process. Even he had to make the suit his own.
Confirmation called to mind a similar moment in my own life, though I was a little younger than all of you who are going through confirmation today. In the church I attended as a kid, baptism took place when we were in sixth grade, and here’s what we did – it’s the sort of thing that will make most of you thankful to be growing up as a Congregationalist. There was a large tub at the front of the church, a heated River Jordan, if you will, and one by one, those of us undergoing baptism stepped into the water, where we shared our conversion story, after which we were lowered into the water three times. As it happens, it was my grandfather doing the baptizing that night, and it was a point of pride for him, and for me, to go through such a significant ritual with him. When it was over, I dried off, and my family gathered for a meal, where I was given gifts. At the time, it all felt important, but also sort of mundane. All of the adults in my life seemed to value it, but it felt like celebrating a holiday that was way less fun than Christmas or a birthday. Even so, the next day at school, I remember walking around and feeling as though something significant had taken place, wondering if anyone else at school knew what that felt like. It felt like wearing a new suit, one that I was willing to wear, but one that felt stiff and uncomfortable for a while. I wonder if our confirmands will feel something like that tomorrow. I wonder if you’ve ever felt like that after undergoing a ritual moment like confirmation, or baptism – knowing something significant has taken place, but feeling unsure about how to live into it.
We often use the metaphor of a journey when we describe the life of faith – we did it this morning in our call to worship. It’s an image with a long pedigree, from the Hebrew people traveling through the wilderness to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I don’t know about you, but I often hear that language and imagine a kind of linear progression, moving from one point to another. But I suspect it’s not like that at all. Maybe it’s more like a spiral than it is a linear progression. Maybe we orbit around significant events in our lives, and attach meaning to those events. And maybe the meaning evolves, in the same way that we evolve as people. At times, something within our lives brings us close to those bedrock events, while at other times we’re orbiting around them more at a distance. I was privileged to do a wedding yesterday, and I think marriage often works like that. In the first days and months and even years, we circle close to the event, that formative moment where two individuals commit themselves to one another. As time passes, we continue to orbit that event – if the marriage sticks that is – but we access it in a different way. That’s true of all significant life passages – the birth of a child, the loss of someone we love, undergoing an illness or some other struggle – those things become stars around which we do orbit, though always from different positions, accessing it from different angles.
There will be days that you might feel quite close to the event of faith, days when you dwell easily within it. I hope there are many such days. But there will be times in your life when you feel some ambiguity about it, when you wonder if God is a word, or a reality, you wish to engage. That too is a part of what it means to inhabit a living faith. I believe it’s a part of what it means to be confirmed.
But there’s one more story about Jesus that I want all of us to remember today, because it conveys the most fundamental truth of what it is to live into this thing called faith. It’s the story of Jesus’s baptism. Immediately after being baptized, the heavens are opened, and a voice is heard to say, “This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” We share those words every time we perform a baptism here, but they’re also worth remembering on this Sunday of confirmation. You are God’s beloved, in whom God is well pleased. That pertains to us all, no matter how we may have failed, no matter what trouble we may face, no matter what.
One of the movies I’ve enjoyed most lately is the musical The Greatest Showman, about P.T. Barnum and the formation of his circus in the late 19th century. Barnum, an idealized fiction of the real character, collects a cast of oddities and misfits about him for the purpose of putting them onstage. In a way, the entire movie is a way of dramatizing that bedrock affirmation at the core of our faith: we are all of us God’s beloved. Midway through the film, there’s a show stopping song performed by a bearded lady, who, prior to joining the circus, lived her life in the shadows. She’s shut out of a meet and greet reception, and she goes on to sing a song entitled “This is Me,” which prompts the rest of the cast to join her. It’s their “coming out” moment. “When the sharpest words wanna cut me down,” she sings, “I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out. I am brave, I am bruised, I am who I’m meant to be, this is me. I’m not scared to be seen, I make no apologies, this is me.”
We have this treasure. We have this gift of faith, this affirmation that each of us is God’s beloved child. Whether you’ve been at this for years or you’re only now trying on this suit of clothing, the question to ask is: what will you do with that realization? How will you live into the suit, or the dress, that you’ve been given? You may, I suppose, decide one day that you no longer wish to wear it. That’s an integral part of your freedom. But I hope you learn to live into it. I hope you tailor it, taking it in or letting it out, as the need arises. I hope you make it your own, and that you boldly take it out into the world, declaring with the bearded lady, “This is me!”
