This sermon was preached for Sunday, September 17, 2023 for the occasion of the baptism of Michael James and Anika Mae. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 114, Romans 14:1-12, and Matthew 18:21-35.
I originally got this book (“Will it be okay?” by Crescent Dragonwagon, with illustrations by Jessica Love) for the church as part of my children’s pastoral care resources - books that I can lend to parents whose kids are going through a hard time - but my son Auggie liked it so much that I think I’ll end up needing to get a copy for my house, too.
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| "Will it be okay?" by Crescent Dragonwagon, illustrated by Jessica Love. |
For each of the daughter’s fears in the book, every “but what if...?” the mother character responds with a list of specific steps she can take to find her way back to knowing that it will be okay. When I first read the book with my son, I found its specificity confusing. The steps are so particular to the book’s character that they seemed to me to be unhelpful to the child reading the book.
“What if there’s snow? Lots and lots of snow?” “You put on your red leggings and your orange boots and your pink coat and your plaid scarf...."
...and I thought, but what if the child reading the book doesn’t own a plaid scarf?
On the second read-through though, I realized that this is not an instruction book. It’s a book about the practice of faith. In moments of overwhelming fear, finding our way back to God and hope isn’t just about willing ourselves to believe. It’s sometimes small, concrete steps shaped by the details of our life right now - finding and putting on the right clothes for the weather outside, looking for the beauty in the awesome power of nature, seeking out someone to help us, and making back up plans in case the seeds we planted don’t take root. There is always something that can be done to not let trepidation, anger, or embarrassment overwhelm you. The mother’s answers teach the daughter that she has a responsibility to figure out what those steps will be for her.
Faith is not just a set of beliefs - it’s also a set of life skills. In our tradition, we will never be handed an exact blueprint of what to do when. Our journey of faith is about discovering through trial and error what the steps back to steadiness might look like for each of us, in different seasons of our lives. We owe that to ourselves - and to each other.
Maybe your scarf has polka dots. Or maybe you’re not afraid of snow at all. Maybe there are other fears and worries that are pressing down on you right now. What do you do to remember that God’s got you through it all? And when I ask “what do you do?” I really do mean those simple, specific steps - reading scripture, taking a walk in nature, conversations with friends and mentors, silent prayer - that bring you back to the truth at the heart of our faith: you are God’s and nothing can take that away.
In our Romans passage today, St. Paul seems a little sick of people quibbling over how their particular faith practices differ from one another. So what if someone keeps kosher or someone is a vegetarian? So what if someone treats one day as holier but someone else treats all the days the same? What matters to Paul is that the person is convinced in their own minds, and that what they do, they do to honor God.
Whatever we do, it all comes back to this truth: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's.”
Whatever we do, we are God’s. Nothing can take that away. Not thunderstorms, not rejection, not failure, not even death. Do what you need to do to believe that - and live like you believe it, too. Our life in community may depend on it.
This is the truth we are here today to declare to one another in baptism. We are God’s, forever and always, no matter what we do. In a moment I'll say as I anoint Michael and Anika, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever. Nothing can take that love away.
When we baptize young children and infants, we make promises on their behalf. These promises are big and broad on purpose - but living them will require specificity. Today, Michael and Anika’s parents and godparents will commit to guiding these children to discover for themselves what each of the baptismal promises mean and will look like in their lives. They’ll agree to give these children the skills they need to make this faith their own; how to remember the truth of their baptism whenever they forget it, or whenever the world tries to convince them otherwise; how to figure out the specific steps they can take until they believe again that they are God’s, that they are loved, and that it will be okay.
And, and our faith is not just about getting ourselves to feel okay again when we are scared. As our six baptismal vows remind us, we also have a responsibility to share that steadiness with others. What does our certainty in God’s grace and love allow us, prompt us, require us to do for others?
This is where we come to the parable for today. Jesus tells this parable in response to Peter’s question, “How often should I forgive?” In the parable, a king is about to call in an absurdly large amount of debt that his slave owes him but decides to forgive the debt completely. That slave, as he is literally on his way out the door from being forgiven, encounters another slave who happens to owe him money. The original slave immediately and violently demands that this other slave pay it back right away. We don’t know the reason for this forgiven slave’s startling response. But we do see that the king is surprised and angered to hear about his slave’s cruelty. In the king’s opinion, the proper response to receiving mercy is to give mercy to others. The response to receiving freely-given, unearned grace is to freely give grace away.
The text doesn’t tell us why the slave reacted this way, but I found myself wondering about that all week. I wondered whether it had to do with shame - was the slave so ashamed of the amount he had owed, of having to beg, that it overwhelmed his ability to feel gratitude? Did shame make it so all he could do was lash out in fear?
I wonder, too, if the slave didn’t really believe he was truly free. Maybe he was so afraid of being sold or ending up in that place of humiliation once more that he would do anything to prevent it from happening again. And that fear - that doubt that his debt was really and truly gone - perhaps it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, at the end of the parable, the slave ends up right back where he started, in debt and chains.
Perhaps there is another version of this story somewhere. Perhaps there is a version in which the slave hears and absorbs the grace so fully and so completely that he allows himself to be changed by it. One where he turns and gives that grace away and forgives the one he encounters.
Perhaps Jesus' version of the parable about what happens when we do not take those steps to really absorb and believe the grace we have been given in baptism. Perhaps it's our turn to write the story another way.
See, in baptism, we remember that our faith comes with responsibilities. These responsibilities are handed down to us and we grow into them all throughout our lives. They include the responsibility to go and do what we need to do to access the part of ourselves that tells us: I am God’s, I am forgiven, I am loved. What you do and what I do, it’ll be different. Maybe for you it is actually listening to a frog, or drawing pictures while sipping cocoa. Maybe it’s writing out a plan, talking things through with a friend, deep breathing. Or maybe it’s coming here every week, to this table.
This process of working to believe that grace and love; all the steps we take to fully and truly, absorb it, unshakably, into the fabric of our being, an indelible mark in oil; they point us to another responsibility. We are called to let the truth of God’s unshakeable love and our unearned grace change how we treat others.
In the book, Crescent Dragonwagon's daughter character asks her mother, "But what if you die?" The mother responds, "My loving doesn't die. It stays with you, as warm as two pairs of mittens, one pair on top of the other. When you remember you and me, you say: What am I to do with so much love? I will have to give some away."
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