PAST SERMONS
Sermon of October 21, 2007 by The Rev. Rosalee Glass
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Camden, Maine
October 21, 2007, The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
Holy Baptism and Eucharist
Assigned Scripture: Genesis 32:3-8, 22-30; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3: 14-17, 4:1; Luke 18:1
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Sermon by Rosalee T. Glass
Alleluia! Here at St. Thomas’ today we are privileged and blessed to be celebrating five Baptisms. Baptism is not the subject of today’s appointed lessons. However, the Old Testament story of Jacob’s new relationship with God and his community has strong resonance with the new relationships to God and community that we are called to in the Christian Sacrament of Baptism.
We know that, in Baptism, water and the Holy Spirit of God give new life. It is a new life in the Body of Christ. The new life we receive brings relationships of trust and love of God in the context of community.
And this new life is necessarily in community and it moves us from isolation to involvement, from indifference to caring, from self-complacency to service to others. Of course being baptized into Christ’s body does not exempt us from sin or conflict, BUT with God’s presence before us and in us and around us, there is always hope of reconciling love and forgiveness.
This was the case with Jacob’s life. In today’s Old Testament story, Jacob is returning home from exile. He had been in exile for many years in order to escape Esau, his brother, whom he had wronged and whom he feared would kill him, and justifiably. After many years, God had called Jacob back home from where he was living in exile. But first, Jacob had to settle many scores with his father-in-law, Laban, whose daughters he married and in whose household he had lived and worked. Laban had been keeping him from leaving. Now finally he is on his way. But he goes with great dread because of having to confront his brother, Esau.
It didn’t help him in this crisis to be told that Esau was approaching with four hundred men! Jacob does not trust God or God’s earlier promise of care and protection, and he is struggling against doubt and fear. Jacob’s wrestles all night with God, who is in the form of a man, at the River Jabbok. The struggle is finally resolved, and results in a new relationship between Jacob and God. God gives Jacob the blessing he has requested. He also gives him a new name. In Old Testament tradition receiving a name means having a new identity and a new life.
Jacob now is shocked to realize that he has a new relationship with a God whose nature he has never really known. He says, “I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.” In Old Testament tradition, to see a face is to see the essential identity of the person whose face it is. But this situation is surprising because it was thought that God’s face was hidden and that to see it would mean death. Now here is in the midst of one’s life was the possibility of a new relationship of intimacy and trust with God, a God whose identity is merciful and loving.
The dramatic moment when Jacob and Esau meet, the moment so feared by Jacob, is not included in our reading today, but should be mentioned. Esau runs toward him, but it turns out that Esau was not there to kill Jacob, but to embrace him. In the forgiveness and reconciliation, Jacob is welcomed into community. Jacob makes the connection between the love he experienced with God and what he is experiencing with Esau. The story tells us that, when they meet, the identity of god is mirrored in the human face of his brother Esau. He says, “To see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favor.”
This statement is quite extraordinary. It is from a story passed down from a time that is thought to be almost two thousand years before Jesus Christ. Yet it sounds a lot like what many Christians say in our own time about seeing Christ in the face of all people. Or seeing the loving face of another human being is like seeing the loving face of God.
I return now to the resonance between Jacob’s new life of relationship to God and community in the Genesis story and the new life and relationship to God and community that we are given in our Christian Baptisms. Like Jacob, in Baptism our old, alienated identity dies; and, with water and the Holy Spirit, our new identity, the self that sees God face to face and sees God in the faces of others, is born. And like Jacob, in Baptism we are adopted as God’s own beloved, and we are blessed and named.
If we are inclined to ponder the meaning of our own past, present, or future Baptisms, we understand that it is about being infused with God’s love. We understand that we are called into fellowship with others in God’s love. And we understand that, when in Baptism we are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, we will never, ever be orphaned. We understand, in the words of St. Paul, that we are “no longer strangers and aliens, but citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.” AMEN.