November 16, 2003 - Membership & Baptism Sunday

 Sacrament of Baptism

 Reception of New Members by Transfer, Reaffirmation of Faith & Profession of Faith

Jane Clarke: I present to you:  Mia Glasser, Tom Pragnell, Hector Schneider, Vi Schneider, Marg C. Smith, Ramona Stillar and Lisa Wirth so that they may be received into membership within this congregation.

 Reflection for Membership Sunday

I guess, one of the biggest questions on a day like this one, when children are presented for baptism and adults are committing themselves to the life of this particular church is why? Why join the church? Any church? What difference does it make?

Paul said… “Let us not give up the habit of meeting together, as some are doing.”

Why did he bother to say that? Do you think he had envisioned an institution and that if folks broke from the institution it would disintegrate? I really doubt that. My reading of scripture doesn’t present Paul in that light at all. Instead he truly had a heart for the people of God that he came to know through his connection with Jesus Christ.

Paul understood that gathering together was the surest way to allow the spirit to minister to folks who wrestle with faith issues. One translation for the reading from Hebrews says “don’t forsake the gathering together…”

I like that translation because we forsake most things at our own peril. If we forsake our families, our community, our church we cut ourselves off from our history, our present and sometimes seal our future endeavors in a less than positive direction.

Paul went on to say, “Instead, let us encourage one another…”

I think we are at our best when we learn and share and encourage in community. Isolation has never produced much that is wonderful… even in the height of monastic living, those who chose that lifestyle did so amid a community of others of like-mind and like-encouragement.

To be sure, we learn a more balanced approach to faith and life when we have the input of brothers and sisters to keep us honest to our quest and theirs.

In effect we covenant together to learn and share in community and we come by that model honestly. When God entered into covenant with the Hebrew people it was a covenant with the whole community and so we do too.

Moments ago, the questions that we responded to—whether as those gathered on the chancel or in the pews—upheld the idea of community and the responsibility that we have to one another to share the journey.>

Our adult confirmation class is studying Ralph Milton’s book This United Church of Ours. Each week we move through a chapter as a port of call from which we sail on with our own faith journey experiences.

This past week, we engaged the chapter entitled “This We Believe.” Ralph is clear that it is a chapter that is largely about what he believes and, of course, that means that we have to wrestle with what it is we believe too… not just what Ralph believes about what the United Church believes.

But having said that, he does offer some good insight…and just like any conversation that we may share…it is as one shares that another is able to reflect and respond and the process of doing faith is incarnated.

For example, he says, “Many people wonder if we really need a church in which to express our faith. Do we need all that organization, all that tradition, all the stuff that goes with a church? I can only speak for myself. I tried to take a “distance education” course once. “I don’t need classes and cranky instructors and all that stuff. I can work on my own!” Except I didn’t. After an enthusiastic start, it dropped off. The plain truth is that I need others to help me get where I want to go. I can’t make it on my own.

Ralph continues, “I also need a way of thinking about my faith, a way to talk about it, a way to express it.” And he illustrates, “A few years ago I heard some lectures by Rabbi Wosk of Vancouver. I asked him why Jews need all the stuff that is called the Torah—all the structure and background and rules and traditions. The Rabbi took the glass of water from his speaker’s stand. He poured some of it on the floor. “The water on the floor is the same stuff as the water in the glass. But to drink it, I need it in the glass.”

In other words,” Ralph concludes, “the church and its traditions provide the container—the structure—through which we can experience our faith. And yes, of course there are many different kinds of “containers.”(156)

Ralph is right. The church community is at its best when it allows the containers that have spoken to one…to be shared with another. I try to share the experiences and understandings I have of God. And many of those understandings have been shaped by you and the experiences that you have shared with me.

My faith has also been shaped by the experience of the church through the centuries. Still, Faith is living and active. Each of your experiences informs mine and become mine…that can only happen in community.

Indeed it is true that “God may thump you or me on the head with a particular experience or speak to us through a moment of grief or pain or joy. God communicates in a billion and one different ways.”(160) In our gathering as church, through worship, study and sharing, it is one of the very few places in life that we can share those journeys of the spirit.

Folks who gathered on the chancel here today know that “the Christian faith is not something you arrive at. It’s something you grow in. It’s a process. A pathway. A journey. We often call ourselves pilgrims. We’re on our way together, and we know we’re (generally) headed in the right direction, even though we may take a few detours”(167).

Membership…commitment to a community says, in essence, ‘I walk that path with you as my companion, sometimes my guide, sometimes my student but always as a co sojourner on the path of Christ.’

That’s why we bring our children, that’s why we commit to a congregation, that’s why we choose to be openly on a journey with others…because God reveals God’s self to communities. And for that we can all say, Thanks be to God. Amen.