| Sermon preached by Evanston Deanery Confirmation
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In the city of Nazareth, in the oldest part of the city, there is a chapel that is identified by many people (and certainly by the Israeli tourist board) as the home town synagogue of Jesus, the very place where this story from the gospel according to Luke we’ve heard this morning took place. We do know that Christians have been gathering in this spot since at least the sixth century, and probably very much earlier, and have regarded it as the synagogue Jesus would have known and where he went on this Sabbath day and read from the prophecy of Isaiah. It’s maintained today by the Greek Orthodox church and I got to visit it a few years ago. It’s a remarkable experience. The group I was with just stood there in silence for a while until someone got out a bible and quietly began reading the passage from Luke we just did. It’s not a very big room – I’d say you could fit 50 people in it maybe. It’s rectangular, with benches built into the walls as I remember. It’s kind of dark with barrel vaulting overhead in the ceiling. The thing I remember most though about this synagogue chapel is the way the walls tell their own story. The stones in the walls come from different historical periods. You can see the whole history of this little room in those walls, the way the building must have fallen down, or been destroyed and rebuilt through the centuries. It’s like a layer cake: there’s the bottom stripe of one kind of stone from the earliest construction (maybe even from the first century), the next layer up probably from the time of early church in the fourth century or so, the next from the fortress-building crusaders in the middle ages and on up. You stand there in the midst of all those stones and the stories they could tell and then you realize that the building is not done, the story is still being told. The words are still bouncing off those walls. The words are coming from living, breathing people. They’re coming from you. They’re coming from me. We are the words. We are the story. We are the living stones. That’s the really astonishing claim of the Christian faith. It’s the heart of the faith we’re here to proclaim today. It’s the whole point of the way we have kept the fasting and feasting of Lent and Easter, the point of looking forward to the great celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We do not celebrate all this as some kind of interesting historical thing that happened to Jesus and his first friends, and, oh, wasn’t that nice for them. We’re not here just to remember it all like dusty old Sunday School stories. I don’t think that’s worth getting all dressed up for and coming to church on a perfectly good Saturday morning when we could all be doing lots of other things. When Jesus announces that Isaiah’s prophecy is being made real right in front of them, right there in the synagogue in Nazareth, that he himself IS the fulfillment of God’s promise, he started something that has gone on through the centuries and is still going on. It’s going on in us. In you and me. That’s what baptism does. That’s why we’re here to celebrate it and renew our commitment to this way of life we call Christian. Jesus Christ is alive. God’s promise to come and set the prisoners free and heal the brokenhearted and set things right in this world is going on in us. God is going on in us. Jesus is going on in us. In baptism we are made limbs and members of the living Body of Christ.
I believe that. It is the faith of the church and it is up to us to put that faith into practice. In fact, I think that’s what faith boils down to in the end … it is make believe. Make believe. Make believe. We are called to live the words we say, to shape our lives according to the example of Christ. We are to make the love and mercy of God real for our sisters and brothers in this world who cannot believe such a thing could ever exist. We are to feed the hungry and house the homeless and open the eyes of the blind. That’s why at the center of our liturgy today are those baptismal promises. Notice, they’re not simply about believing a bunch of things about God and Jesus and the Christian faith. They’re about living in a certain way, doing certain things, practicing particular behaviors. “Will you do these things?” I’ll ask. And we all stand together to answer, “We will, with God’s help.” It’s not enough to say to someone who’s starving, “God loves you.” Feed them. Show them. I’m so glad you are all here this morning. I’m so glad we’re here together to do these things, to promise to follow Jesus in loving the world, in giving ourselves to the service of others, to try to be the good news we preach. I think the world is dying for this. We live in a time of extraordinary challenges, a world changing faster than we can comprehend. Climate change that may dwarf anything else we can imagine. Economic collapse that baffles us with the results of our own consumer addictions. Hunger. Wars. Global illnesses that appear out of nowhere and spread as fast as international air travel can take them. You may have seen all the press reports lately about a major study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trust on the changing face of American Christianity. Although Americans still overwhelmingly believe in God, most of us claim that some kind of religious faith is important to us, fewer and fewer of us are actually attending church. The institutional decline of traditional churches like ours is obvious and represents a deep shift in our society. Well, I’m convinced that part of the reason is the failure of many churches to be what they say they are. People who are anxious or frightened or hurting or hungry have little patience for empty words. They need to see if we mean it. I had a conversation once with a man who was dying. I came into his hospital room and he said to me, “You know, Father, I’ve never been much of a church goer … I always saw a lot of people there who were pretty good at worshiping Jesus, just not so great at following him.”
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