I preached this sermon with fear and trepidation - the good kind. Paul says we work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). It's ok to be nervous, as long as it doesn't keep you from proclaiming God's Word. The two best descriptor compliments I received afterwards were "radical message" and "orthodox sermon"; because of the Holy Spirit's help, it is both.
Trinity Sunday
Communion Sunday
June 3, 2012
“For the Love of Dog”
Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-8
How many of your
would consider yourselves animal lovers?
You know, you've got a fondness for dogs, cats, iguanas, chia pets. And how many more of you have pets? According to the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, around 62% of U.S. households have pets. About one month after I got married, I became
a dog owner. I knew it was coming, Lee
had told me before we even got engaged that getting a dog was
non-negotiable. If I stayed with him, I
was going to become a dog owner. I
responded with certain conditions of my own: she had to have short hair; she
wouldn’t be allowed on the furniture or in our bedroom; she would be
well-trained; and she would be apartment-sized, because that’s where we’d be
living. So, a month after we got
married, we adopted Clara from the Durham APS.
I still remembered the language that was used in the adoption process:
we promised that we would be her “forever home” and would not give her up; she
would be part of our family as long as she lived.
In a similar way, we
are adopted members of God’s family. We received
this Spirit of adoption in our baptism.
The words of the Anglican/Episcopal baptism liturgy say that we “are
sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Being “Christ’s own forever” means that God’s
family becomes our “forever home.”
Another way of phrasing it is how Jesus explains it to Nicodemus in the
passage from John: “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” and being born
again means being “born of water and the Spirit.” That’s how we enter God’s kingdom, God’s
family. Being born again through water
and the Spirit is what happens in baptism.
It’s how God adopts us into his family.
Like my dog, none of us are natural born members. Shoot, we’re not even natural born citizens. In God’s kingdom, we are adopted into his
family only by his grace and through his Spirit and we are all on equal
footing. In God’s family, we are all
brothers and sisters. It’s common in
some churches, including all Protestant Hispanic ones, for the members to
address each other that way, too, as “Brother Ken,” or “Hermana Maria,” and it allows a way to greet visitors – “hola hermano, hi sister,” and make them
feel welcomed and included even when you’ve never met them before. The greeting is a nice reminder that we’re
all equal members of one family, the body of Christ, and God is our
parent.
Only by the Spirit’s
power can we address God as Father just like Jesus did and taught his followers
to do. I don’t know if you noticed, but
that was a very Trinitarian sentence.
Before Trinity became a character in the Matrix, it was a doctrine
hammered out by early Christianity trying to figure out the relationship
between God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three in one. If you want to see what they figured out and
we as Christians believe about the Trinity, read again the Apostle’s Creed or check
out the Nicene Creed. So, as children of
God, God’s Spirit enables us to cry to God, “Abba, Father!” just like Jesus
did. In fact, Abba
is Aramaic for father, and that is the language Jesus spoke most of the
time. The Spirit does this work; it
transforms us from rebellious enemies into beloved children, from people who
didn’t know God to God’s children. This
is kinda what happens when you adopt a dog, too, I learned. Clara ran away a couple times in the first
month we had her, including one memorable time when my husband’s knee got
dislocated when he chased after her.
That resulted in surgery and crutches and physical therapy and a whole
mess as a result of this one disobedient dog.
However, over the course of that first year as we worked with her and
took her to obedience classes and became students of “The Dog Whisperer,” she
became a very well-behaved dog. Clara’s
transformation from rebellious to obedient came about through our hard work. Our transformation from rebellious to beloved
child is the work of the Holy Spirit.
It’s not something we do on our own but a gift of God’s grace.
And so those of us
who call God “Father” are transformed in such a way that our old way of life,
our old world, is no longer our home. We
become foreigners in the culture to which we once belonged. And instead of our primary loyalty being to
that world, it is now to God and to his family, the Church. Our loyalty to God supercedes even our
loyalty to our biological family. In our
adoption and baptism where we become members of God’s family, it means that
family becomes the most important one, not our biological family. The blood that matters the most and has the
final say on my life is Jesus’ blood that was shed on the cross, not the blood
that genetically connects me to family members.
The Church, God’s family, is the primary source of my identity, not the
people in my household or the people with whom I grew up. The biological family is not absolute, is not
the end all, be all. This does not
mean you don’t honor your father and mother.
This does not mean you don’t respect your elders. It means your elders and your mother and
father don’t define who you are; God the Father of us all, Jesus Christ whose
blood saved us, and the Holy Spirit who transforms us define who we are. It means simply that the family is not God’s
most important institution on earth; the Church is. The family is not the social agent that most
significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians; the Church is. The Church is the primary vehicle of God’s
grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world and allegiance to God’s kingdom
precedes allegiance to your biological family.
That’s why Jesus tells Nicodemus that a disciple of Jesus has to be born
again, to know that it is that second birth that redefines their identity and
admits the disciple to God’s family, a community that will nurture their new
identity. At the end of the baptism
liturgy in the United Methodist Hymnal is a question directed at the
congregation: “Do you promise to nurture these persons in their faith?” And it’s why Paul wrote in his letter to the
Romans that believers have a new identity because they were baptized into
Christ and, therefore, adopted by God. Baptism
means that the Christian’s new parent is God the Father, our siblings are other
Christians, our new name and most fundamental identity is simply Christian, beloved
child of God, and our new inheritance is freedom, community and resources
provided a hundredfold over. It means that one’s conversion to
Christianity is profound and thoroughgoing because it creates a new
person. The biological family is not
despised or useless but is no longer the primary source of our identity,
support, and growth.
For some of us, this
is not easy. Some of us have great
families and supportive parents and spouses.
All I’m saying to you is that your family is bigger, because it is God’s
family, and you have more brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and parents
and kids than you ever dreamed of. And
for some of us, knowing that our family is God’s family is good news. Those of us from abusive homes, orphaned or
disowned by our families, or having to keep our distance from our families in
order to keep our mental and emotional health, for these brothers and sisters
this is good news because it means you do have a family, a church
family. And while our brothers and
sisters aren’t perfect, God our Father is.
As far as my dog
goes, Lee and I are her new pack. Her
primary loyalty is to us, not to her parents or any of her siblings in her
litter. I’m sure she’d be overjoyed to
see the family she used to live with before they gave her up, but she knows her
pack is now with my husband and me and we are her pack leaders. She listens to us, she obeys us (unless there’s
a squirrel around – SQUIRREL!) and we take care of her without smothering
her. So, for all of us, the Church is
our new pack. We were adopted into it in
our baptism. And our primary loyalty
lies here.
As none of us are
natural born members of this family, this place does not belong to us. This table we’re about to come to does not
belong to us. We are in God’s house and
this is his table, instituted by his Son and empowered by his Spirit. We do not have ownership over this table and
we do not get to say who comes up to eat with us. Everyone is welcome and everyone is included,
because that’s how God works. We are all
God’s children. We all come as equals,
not at the mercy of the immigration office but at the prompting of the Holy
Spirit, the one who testifies with our spirit that we are indeed children of
God.
