May 11, 2003 - Christian Family Sunday - Baptism

 Sacrament of Baptism

Stuart John George Hardiker (adult) 

            Addendum To Mission Moment

When you give to the Mission and Service Fund, sometimes it seems like the ministry it covers is a world away and may even have little to do with us here in southern Alberta.

 There is a real connection with Indore, India and Westminster United Church. Alice Bitz, one of long time members had a sister, Francis Buckles, who spent most of her life training nurses at Indore.  Francis was raised in Redcliff and was a friend of the Luyten family. She came and spoke at Westminster on the few occasions that she returned to Canada. This is her photo album of India and you are welcome to view it at lunch. You may even wish to speak with Dave Luyten about his visit to Indore when he was a teen…I’m sure he will have lots to share with you.

Remember, that in your gifting you can never know how your gift will touch another and who that other may turn out to be. Let us now present our gifts with joy.

 Addendum to this note: Alice Bitz died today at 1:30 pm. 

Why Celebrate Family?

 As a church we believe that all persons are created by God to live in caring, just, and loving relationships. We know that, for many, the family provides a foundation in which to experience such relationships. The family can be an important arena for developing and experiencing caring relationships, but sadly, we know that some experience their family as a place of destruction.

We also acknowledge that, for many people, contemporary family life is in a state of flux, changing in form and function.

Whatever your family configuration on this Christian Family Sunday, we who share in worship leadership would like to encourage you to take some time to celebrate what is good in your family, to grieve for what is missing, to challenge that which limits, and to embrace the opportunities to grow together to become the wondrous, unique creations God created each one of you to be.

What is good in your family?

One of the things that I have been doing over the last couple of years as time permits is to digitize my photos and slides. As many of you know, it is an arduous task. From the time I was a teen I captured a lot of images and many of them were on slides.

My rationale for that back then was that slides produced better colors than did prints …and while that is true, what do you do with all those slides? Who ever gets a chance to see them? Who wants to see them? So I gathered my binders of slides together and took photos of each one with a digital camera…that way they could become digital images that I can send by email…put together into a PowerPoint presentations, even print on a printer if I need to.

Then it was time to recycle nearly 10 gallons of slides… I know there were that many because after turning them into digital images I tossed all that were not completely essential into a 5 gallon bucket and nearly filled it twice. Perhaps some confused Recycle person is looking at them as I speak?

What’s your point James?  Well, glad you asked…the process of revisiting about 30 years of images reminded me of where I have come from. It was a process of engaging my life within many families.

Through those images I was able to revisit my teenage buddies, most of whom I have lost touch with, but each of whom has contributed to the rich mosaic of my life.

I have been able to revisit the experiences of Christmases and birthdays that I shared with my family of origin and some of the families that I have joined along the journey…people who have invited me to share in their lives.

I was able to recount my journey with my sons whose lives I first encountered when they were 10 and 13 and who I have been privileged to watch become remarkable young men.

This kaleidoscope of images of many types of families throughout the years, reminds me of all that is sacred in life. And worthy of celebration.

I have no illusions about my family of origin…the relationship which my parents shared was strained at best. But even in that experience, many moments of joy were shared…many of those I now have as photo images to remind me of the “good times” in my early life. Many more of the images simply remain just part of my failing memory.

But, once again, all of them connect me with my roots and for that reason are worth engaging.

What is missing from your family that you can grieve?

For me, I can offer certainly a few things. I read once that it doesn’t matter how old your parents are when they die you will miss them. That’s certainly true. But like the comfort I seek to offer others in services of remembrance, I need to uphold for myself that the comfort of knowing that loved ones are at home with the God who created them is also mixed with the sorrow of saying goodbye when they die.

Looking back over those years, I certainly could grieve that some of the relationship issues at the Farrell household were not what one might like them to be…and it is not sour grapes or whining that invites me to think of those things, it simply is the reality of the way things were. Remembering and being honest about the grief of those things gives me the power to move on.

When it comes to family life, “no grieving” means “no movement” and the curse of being stuck where God can’t even offer gracious growth. So, for our health: spiritual, emotional, and probably physical, we need to allow grief to be a regular part of our living…it is like the winter periods in our lives that prepare us to engage the spring times of our existence.

The seasons of life are God's gift to us for wholeness, and how well we engage each of our life’s seasons determines how healthy we may be in our spirits, our emotions, and even our bodies.

I suspect that we all want to live so empowered by God that we are free to look back on full lives, lived in the presence of God. To do that means to be honest about what is really going on in our lives throughout the journey.

James Taylor paraphrases the 23^rd Psalm and gives it the title: Looking back on a full life…it captures what we seek as family and as individuals of faith.

God has walked with me; I could ask nothing more. God has given me green meadows to laugh in, clear streams to think beside untrodden paths to explore. When I thought the world rested on my shoulders, God put things into perspective. When I lashed out at an unfair world, God calmed me down. When I drifted into harmful ways, God straightened me out. God was with me all the way. I do not know what lies ahead, but I am not afraid. I know you will be with me. Even in death, I will not despair. You will comfort and support me. Though my eye dims and my mind dulls, you will continue to care about me. Your touch will soothe the tension in my temples; my fears will fade away. I am content. In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with me.* All through life,I have found goodness in people.When life ends, I expect to be gathered into the ultimate goodness of God. Everyday Psalms Wood Lake Books. 1994, p.35

Christian family Sunday is a time to reflect upon the growth that we have known in our families; to muse about the families that we have inherited throughout our lives, those we have come to know in the neighborhoods that we have lived in, those we encounter in our places of work, those we marry into or are partnered with and those we embrace in our places of worship.

Even in these places of health and vitality, we all need to challenge the things that limit the celebration of life that God gifts each one of us with. I say that because limiting factors are all around us.

>The limits we experience may be the things that hold us back…the assumption, for example, that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and therefore we are apt to repeat the same things that detract from our living that we may have witnessed in our families of origin. These are assumptions that need challenging!

The wonder of God is resurrection. Life can emerge from the deaths that we grieve, even the death of a healthy family image. The grace of God and the wonder of the spirit of God is that we can rise up with wings like eagles out of places that may seem quite confining.

Our celebration of baptism today is confirmation of that promise.

For the first followers of the life-giving message of Jesus, baptism showed they had decided to live as people who actively sought to encounter God's way in their lives.

Because Jesus was baptized, Christians are also baptized.

In our church family, baptism symbolizes many things: for some, it symbolizes forgiveness or being washed by the love of God; for others the strong identification with Jesus who commanded baptism means that our action not only upholds our belief in Jesus and our desire to do right by him it also embraces our willingness to publicly make that proclamation that says we follow in his way. For others it is the claim that in baptism we die & are raised with him spiritually.

Baptism is also a sign of wanting to change; to engage the promises we make by living as those who believe that what we say matters, that the promises we make are also the precepts that we live by. So in this action church members promise to help a person follow Jesus and his teachings; parents promise to help a baptized child know Jesus and grow in the grace of what Jesus teaches.

Being baptized is not the end, it is the beginning. We go out from our baptism to be God’s servants in the world, to try to live as we should, to share our faith with others, and to grow as God’s children willing to embrace the families that we encounter on our journey. We do it because in God we are all part of the human family and as John says, it is God's love living in and through us that testifies to the spirit of God being active and working in our lives. Amen.