This sermon was preached for Sunday, August 4, 2024 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in East Longmeadow on the occasion of the baptism of Finley Oscar. The texts for this sermon were: Psalm 51:1-13, Ephesians 4:1-16, and John 6:24-35.
A couple years back, my mother-in-law gave me a bread-baking book for my birthday. It’s a really nice book and I love baking bread so I was really excited. But then I opened it up and started to read and got quickly overwhelmed. Turns out it’s a Whole Wheat bread baking book, so the recipes are absolutely delicious and fairly nutritious. But holy cow, I had no idea how much more time and expertise whole wheat flour bread takes to do properly - several risings and just-so kneading and all these precise measurements whose ratios you’re supposed to experiment with over time to perfect for your particular oven and elevation. It’s so much work and so much time.
So, I have to admit that, for now at least, I’ve been sticking with my cheater white French bread that takes less than two hours and is basically just white flour, sugar, yeast, and water. Hits the craving, nice and fluffy, great with butter, but has no nutritional value whatsoever. We always go right back to feeling hungry not too long after eating it.
After Jesus miraculously feeds five thousand hungry people on the mountainside with just five loaves and two fish, the crowd clamors after him, demanding more answers about who he is, why he is here, and how they can, too, perform such miracles. Jesus warns them against chasing after everyday bread “the food that perishes.” They should instead seek “the food that endures” - the bread of heaven, the bread of life. It is this bread that fills us up and sustains us for the journey.
Where can we find this bread today? We find it whenever and wherever two or three are gathered together in Jesus’ name. We feel it whenever and wherever people come together to bear each other up in love. For me, and maybe for you, that is church.
A lot of the New Testament writings are basically the earliest communities of Christians trying to figure out what church is and what it should feel like. According to today’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, a community of faith calls you to a worthwhile and meaningful life, and helps you live it. It’s both a source of deep affirmation and a source of personal and spiritual growth. It inspires you to become your most mature, most kind, most truthful self. Church should build you up in love.
But so often, for so many, church hasn’t been that. For many, church was the place they learned a twisted kind of love, love dominated by fear, judgment, and shame. But I think for others, maybe more commonly, church just never really had anything particularly meaningful or relevant to offer them. An hour a week with no impact on the rest of their lives - nothing to chew on, nothing to grow from, nothing of substance.
Just like you can taste the difference between nutritious, substantial bread, the kind with whole grains that fills you up - and empty-calorie, white, fluffy Wonderbread - you can feel the difference between nutritious relationships and empty ones. There are relationships - family, friends, lovers, even colleagues - that sustain and nurture you, and then there are the relationships that leave you unsatisfied, more lonely, quickly hungry again for actual connection.
When folks come to church looking for a community that can indeed build them up in love and a relationship with God that makes a difference in their lives, particularly if it's a young family looking to baptize a small child, the temptation can be to present our tradition as a quick and easy, feel-good faith that won't ask much of them. We might worry, and for good reason, that presenting a complicated and time-consuming recipe for faith will turn already busy and overwhelmed seekers away.
And yet that's precisely what we do. We have new parents and new Christians gather around a font and commit to following the ancient formula for a worthwhile and meaningful life of faith. This recipe - our baptismal covenant - declares that sustaining faith and build-you-up love - whole-wheat, whole-grain, wholesome community - takes time and work. It takes commitment, it takes emotional and spiritual maturity. It takes saying no in order to say yes. It takes forgiving, reconciling, and persevering. Giving grace, repenting and returning, continuing recalibrating your measurements of humility, gentleness, and patience.
And yet, as we make this covenant, we also say, again and again, over and over: you won't have to figure this out alone. We’ll do this together, with God's help.
Life is too short to eat only Wonderbread. Life is too short to spend our time on relationships and in communities that neither build us up in love nor help us mature. But life is also too short to decide we are too busy for the time and work it takes to bake the love we long for. So when you find those places and those people that do build you up - that good bread of life - for goodness sake, hang on to them, do what it takes to make them endure.
Take a moment now to close your eyes and reflect. Who are the people who build you up in love? Where have you found the bread of life?
One of my favorite birthday gifts my twin sister Ellen ever gave me was a poster collage of photos of us as kids captioned with lines from one of my favorite poems. The poem is “Advice like youth is wasted on the young” by Mary Schimch and part of it goes like this “Understand that friends come and go but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”
This morning I’ll be baptizing Ellen’s youngest son, Finley Oscar. Traditionally, parents often ask their own siblings to stand up with them as godparents. Obviously, I'm playing a different role today, of course, as the priest. But more than that, for Ellen, choosing her children’s godparents represented an expansion of the community of love that will help her raise Charlie, Molly, and Finley. Ellen and Lawrence’s choice of godparents honors and recognizes the lifelong bonds that reach beyond biological family. But with the precious few you should hold on.
Finley’s two godparents, Traci and Olivia, are my sister’s oldest friends - going all the way back to kindergarten. I remember the three of them skipping hand-in-hand and chanting made-up songs on the blacktop, playing hopscotch and jump rope every day at recess, thick as thieves. For my sister, these two are the real deal, the build-me-up-in-love kind of friends, the bread-of-life kind of friends. The ones that have known her the longest and call her back to who she is at her best self. These promises they’ll be making to support Ellen and Lawrence in parenting, to remind Finley and his parents of their inherent goodness and belovedness in dark times, to share in their values and guide them back to love, they are promises these two godmothers have already been living out for Ellen.
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| Olivia, Traci, and Ellen |
Baptism is at its heart a celebration of family-like bonds made through chosen love. As we hear in the prayers and readings today, we are adopted as God’s children in baptism. We are made part of the Body of Christ, that’s all of us here and the whole worldwide community of God’s people. We belong to each other and to God forever.
Today, Ellen and Lawrence are committing to giving Finley, and Charlie and Molly, the gift that our parents gave to us when they chose to raise us up in a loving church. Here is one, crucial lifelong benefit: when a child comes week in and week out to a place full of adults who love them, who are committed to teaching them about what matters most in life, they learn what a loving community looks like and feels like right from the start. They know it exists, they know you deserve it, and they know how to recognize it later in life. Because for them, and I hope this is true for you, too, nutritious faith and substantial community, build-you-up love, feels like home.
After I baptize Finley, we’ll all sing a special hymn to him. It’s a song all about how God was there with him at his birth and how God will be with him no matter what, throughout his life. Now Finley’s a super smart one year old so I’m guessing he’ll pick up on some of the lyrics even now. But hopefully, especially by living these vows together, Finley will spend the rest of his life learning exactly what this song and its promises mean.
With these parents and godparents and this people of God, Finley will grow up knowing what that steady love feels like. He’ll know how to seek it out in church, in friendships, and in life.
He’ll know when he’s home.
Amen.
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