Old South Sermons:

Marked by Water for a Land of Grace
 
a sermon by Nancy S. Taylor, Senior Minister

April 20, 2008 - Fifth Sunday of Easter

Preached on the occasion of the Blessing of the Boston Marathon Athletes
and the baptisms of three infants.

Based on Genesis 1 (portions of verses 1-31)

Listen to this sermon

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John Romero recalls his experience of running in the 1973 Boston Marathon[1]. The weather was hot that day. By the start of the race the temperature had already climbed to 76 degrees.

Two miles into the race, as he reached Ashland, Romero found himself in the midst of a large clutch of runners. Every single one of them was thirsty … and there was no water in sight. His heart sank as, rounding a corner, the runners were greeted with applause. Applause meant the bystanders’ hands were empty. They held no cups of water to dispense.

The runners, competing now not to win the race, but to be the first to reach water began weaving from one side of the road to the other … scanning the crowds for any signs of liquid.

Spying three boys with water pistols they sprinted toward them barking: “Shoot, shoot!”

Six miles into the race, with serious cotton-mouth and a pounding head, Romero began to loose heart and wondered if he could finish.

Orange peels lay strewn all over the ground, but there were no oranges to be had among the bystanders. There were several hundred runners ahead of him and he calculated they had sucked up every drop of water and sucked down every orange in sight. The runners were a 50-foot swath of bone-dry sponge, absorbing all moisture from the land. 

“We weren’t runners in a marathon,” he later wrote. “We were desperate animals foraging for water. The spectators were the prey.”

Somewhere past Wellesley there was a man with a hose. He was spraying it on the runners. Romero made a dash for it.The water hit Romero’s body and made his eyes pop. It was icy but wonderful. He jogged in place, gulping water down his throat and turning pirouettes, revolving in place like a pig on a vertical spit. He took off his hat, filled it and put it back on his head.

Baptism. It was baptism … a gift of grace. Surprising. Luxurious. Delicious. Cooling. Refreshing. Life-giving. Life-saving.

Human life holds many rites of passage: major ones and minor ones, sacred ones and secular ones.

For many runners, completing the Boston Marathon is a major rite of passage. It is such a large challenge … one for which the runner has so long prepared … and for which the runner and his or her family has sacrificed. Merely to qualify, let alone finish, is a mark of personal triumph and achievement.

For, to qualify for the Boston Marathon is to have taken on the habits of a community of practice … some would say an odd community, a community of those who willingly and knowingly submit themselves to pain and exhaustion, a community marked by disciplined practices around eating, sleeping, stretching, weight-lifting, running and, yes, the intake of fluids.

In the life of the Christian, baptism is among the most significant of our rites of passage.

After all, from start to finish, we are a people habituated to holy waters. As children we dip our young toes into the story of Noah and his animal-filled ark: two of every kind. With crayons we color in line drawings of the infant Moses floating in his basket among the bulrushes, and, then of the adult Moses parting the Red Sea waters to escort former slaves to freedom. With Sunday school classes we wade into the story of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordon River. We giggle as Jesus washes the smelly feet of his disciples but then, wide-eyed, we follow the map as they are led out on clean feet to baptize all the nations by water and the Holy Spirit. As adults we marvel, in riveting wonder, at the story-scape of God’s artistic spirit hovering over the waters at the dawn of creation.

Christians are a people of holy waters: borne across waters to freedom and water-born at the time of our baptism.

Not unlike the community of long-distant runners, ours, too, is a community whose practices are not, frankly, for everyone. When the earliest followers of Jesus submitted to baptism, they threw in their lot with one who had been executed by the state. To submit to baptism is to become a marked person … marked by water, but marked.

Christian baptism is a rite of passage that transports us by water into a strange new land. It is a land in which peace-makers are blessed and the poor are treated as kings and the hungry are fed whether or not they have money in their wallets. It is a land in which God loves and liberates slaves and death – not an end – becomes its own rite of passage into something more.

The practices of this new land of grace are baffling to many and – make no mistake about it –

they are painfully difficult to master: practices of loving one’s enemies, forgiving those with whom we have complaints, giving away whole portions of our incomes, engaging in prayer and study, turning the other check, pursuing peace.

And so it is that we come to the waters of baptism again and again. Because once is not enough … because only through daily practice, do we have any hope of learning how to live in the land of grace.

You may have noticed that the babies we baptized today did not, in fact, speak a single word on their own behalf. Indeed, they were relatively quite. I suspect that one or two of them may even have slept through most of the proceedings. It is obvious that this rite of passage to which we submitted Carson, Blakeny and Eloise, was as much for us as for them.

You and I were the actors. We spoke. We blessed. We sprinkled. Carson, Blakeny and Eloise were, in the end, carried along in our wake.

But that is as it should be. You see, in the presence of these holy waters, we were remembering and we were rehearsing our behavior, our practices, in the land of grace.

We promised these babies – and we promised their parents, and their parents promised us – (and by the way, God was listening in on all these promises) we promised to practice, to rehearse, to train for the land of grace.

And here is what we are training for … (here it is; here is our Marathon moment, our big test, the trial of our lives): We are training now so that by the time Carson, Blakeny and Eloise are old enough to notice the difference we will be in peak Christian condition … so much so that they will say to themselves: “I, too, want to live in the land of grace. I, too, claim to have been marked by this water.”

It is a harsh world into which Carson, Blakeny and Eloise have been born. Despite every good effort on the part of their parents, they will bear their share of pain and disappointment. But we are here to claim that at the worst moments of drought and despair, God will surprise them with oases of grace. God will refresh them with living waters.

In 1973 a man stood in his front yard. With nothing more than a garden hose, he gave to desperate, water-starved runners the gift of life and grace … the capacity to continue.

Here, at this font, we freely dispense the waters of God’s grace and love, because they are not ours to keep for ourselves.

The waters of baptism are living waters. The waters of baptism will quench your thirst and flood your soul. They will drench your dryness and make you whole.[2]

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[1] “Back Among the Legions,” an essay by John Romero, from Boston: America’s Oldest Marathon, ed. by Ray Hosler, Anderson World Inc. (1980), page 10f.

[2] Adapted from the last verse of the hymn, “Crashing Waters at Creation”.

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