EACH OF US, BORN TO
GREATER THINGS

January 12, 1997

Mark 1:4-11

 We don't know much about the first three decades of our Lord's life. Matthew and Luke offer their birth narratives. Luke refers to ritual circumcision and describes a prophetic encounter in the Jerusalem temple during Jesus' twelfth year. Other than that, we find our Lord's childhood, adolescence and young adulthood shrouded in shadows. Speculation abounds, of course. We see a boy who, like his father, becomes a carpenter. We assume relatively close family ties, a young man profoundly immersed in Torah. Yet, of none of this can we be certain.

 But near his thirtieth year Jesus of Nazareth goes public. He leaves his hometown, lays down his shop tools, bid's goodbye to his family. He travels South from Galilee and joins an itinerant band wandering the desert, following a wild and woolly prophet called John The Baptist. John proclaims the coming of a new world. He baptizes candidates for this new world. And one day, Jesus of Nazareth, preparing to commit himself to this new world comes to John at the Jordan River. Indeed, Mark, who describes this incident, believes Jesus himself bears the new world.

No longer do we see just an up-country carpenter. At his baptism, Mark presents us with Jesus grasped by the fullness of a challenging, gracious, renewing vocation. Mark shows us a young tradesman making choices about his life, realizing he is born to greater things.

I

 Born to greater things: this theme emerging from our Lord's discovery of a Divine vocation on the occasion of his baptism bears, it seems to me, a message of hope for all of us. It reminds each of us of continual possibilities for growth, change, reversal, a new start. It insists things never need stay the way they are. It calls us always to higher aspiration.

 Heaven knows, for instance, as we read the news each day that this world of God's - this creation, is born to greater things. The hostility among individuals and among nations and creeds and races haunts us day in and day out. This conflict in Hebron, for instance, symbolized on the one hand, by a statue outside the city memorializing Baruch Goldman who slaughtered 24 Palestinians at worship a year or so ago, and the mother of two Arab boys wounded in another wild shooting foray last week, commenting on her Israeli antagonists, "They should all be slaughtered." Revenge, cynicism, despair: all of this creating a pathological wall virtually resistant to compromise, accommodation, much less, forgiveness.

 We see a similar situation in Ulster where Guerrilla violence gives one political observer the sense "the war has stared all over again." We see it among the Sikhs and Hindus in the Kashmir. And sadly we see it in our own land as public policy tends to turn the ratchet on the most vulnerable and powerless among us. Somewhere, Carl Jung put his finger on the problem. He labeled the terrifying power ripping our human fabric apart as "fear of the neighboring nation supposedly possessed by a malevolent fiend." And Jung goes on to suggest that each of us is no less possessed by demons than our neighbor and part of our own possession - a piece of our own demonic self deception - lies in assuming and resisting what we interpret to be our neighbor's demonic possession. "Only the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas enlisted in a sacred cause can resist the enemies demons, "Jung writes. "All one's neighbors," he continues - "all one's neighbors are in the grip of some uncontrollable fear, just like oneself. In Lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than from rage of hatred." The human family, as troubled and fearful and we may be, is born to far greater things.

 This Wednesday, you know, marks the birthday of one of our nations most remarkable figures, Martin Luther King, Jr. What was it about his life that inspires so many of us? What about him touched the world? His inspiration lies for me in a short pan of his life lived in the staunch and steadfast conviction that individuals, races and nations were born - born! - to great things. He expressed this conviction brilliantly in Oslo in 1964 while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Looking out on a strife torn world he said, "I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up to the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him.

 I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."

 And then refusing to surrender to cynicism and perpetual war he finishes "I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day in their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

 I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and non violent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. 'And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall be afraid.' I still believe that we shall overcome." There's confidence! There's hope. There's faith we in this world are born to greater things.

II

And if our world is born to grater things, so is our church. It's so easy to get down on the church, to become discouraged, to treat it cynically, to illuminate its hypocrisy, it's warped priorities, its pathetic failures. We church folk have been around for nearly two thousand years and I suppose a good case could be made that the world is not a whole of a lot better because of us. As one tart observer remarked, "Organized religion has probably done more to retard the ideals that were it's founders than any other agency in the world." And another, cynically comparing us church people to Noah's Ark commented, "If it weren't for the storm outside, you couldn't stand the stench inside." Indeed, here we are, a body claiming a unity in the love of Christ, turning out to be one of the most divided, scattered and contentious bodies in existence. We can draw boundaries, build walls, arm fortresses with the worst of them. Some of you may have heard the NPR report earlier this week describing the brutal clashes going on over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It makes your blood run cold to learn of the fury, the visceral hatred, the terrible fears Christians hold for one another as we brawl over the birthplace of the Prince of Peace.

We're born to greater things! I have often thought the stated purpose of this congregation to be almost without peer. Talk about being born to great things! Listen:

"The avowed purpose of this congregation shall be to worship God, to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to celebrate the sacraments; to realize Christian fellowship and unity within this church and the church universal; to render loving service toward humankind; and to strive for righteousness justice and peace."

Can you imagine being born to anything greater than that? Encounter with the living God; the building of community rooted in mutuality, solidarity, trust, respect and forgiveness of one another; an urgent understanding of our social responsibilities and mandate to pursue them. To be sure, we blunder, we lapse into complacency, we suffer from bureaucratic miasma; we stumble over one another. For good reason, someone alert to the risks, dangers and furies of Congregational churches came up with that little sign sitting on my bookshelf, "God so loved the world that he didn't send a committee." But what keeps us coming and working together, and going to committee meetings and putting our money in the plate, discussing, E-mailing, talking, then worshipping, meeting, planning serving again rests in the heartfelt conviction that for God's sake we are born to great things.

III

Well, the world, the church and lastly, you and I have been born to greater things. Sometimes it's hard to grasp that. I remember a book not long ago asking the question, "Was there something I was supposed to do with my life?" That question at some point touches us all. Some of us here this morning have arrived at that point in life where we can sympathize with Judith Viorst, in one of her little pieces of blank verse - a favorite of mine - she calls it "Facing the Facts." She writes,

I'm facing the fact that
I'll never write Dante's Inferno
Or paint a Picasso,
Or transplant a kidney or build
an empire, nor will I ever
Run Israel or Harvard,
Or appear on the cover of TIME
Star on Broadway, be killed
By a firing squad for a noble ideal,
Find the answer
To racial justice or whether God's dead,
Or the source
of human unhappiness,
Alter the theories of Drs.S. Freud, C.G. Jung, or A. Einstein,
Or maybe the course of history,

In addition to which
I'm facing the fact that
I'll never compose Bach cantatas,
Design St. Laurents,
Advise presidents, head U.S. Steel, resolve the Mideast, be the hostess of some major talk show,
Or cure the cold,
And although future years may reveal
Some hidden potential,
Some truly magnificent act that
I've yet to perform,
Or some glorious song to be sung
For which I'll win prizes and praise,
I must still face the fact that
They'll never be able to say,
And she did it so young."

Hold it one second!! Let's get our heads screwed on straight, our spirits in tune with the Divine. As important as advising Presidents - and heaven knows this one desperately needs al the good advice he can get - as important as heading US Steel, or competing with Sally Jesse Rafael on your own talk show, or building an empire and doing it - yes, doing it so young!! - is this really the answer to the question, "was there something I was supposed to do with my life? Wasn't I born to greater things?" You and I know better. Being born to greater things means being born, not into the likeness of somefast track, people magazine hype-type, or making a bundle or have a gold plated address. Far from it.

It means being born - and to use a great Biblical image - being reborn and baptized into the likeness of Christ. In the words of Elizabeth Fry, that feisty l9th century British Quaker, impatient with her aristocratic and genteel, protected childhood, who plunged into changing the face English prison life, "I can say one thing...I believe I never have awakened from sleep, in sickness or in health, by day or by night, without my first waking thought being how best I might serve my Lord." Now that's being born to greater things.

How about you? How about me? As we imagine again Jesus making his trek from Nazareth to the desert to the banks of the Jordan River, we see one of us, another human being, opening to a new vocation - a vocation denied to no one of us. The promise of the Gospel lies right here: whoever we are, wherever we find ourselves, under whatever conditions we live, we can open ourselves to the living God and exercise a unique and special service for God's sake in this world. For in faith - in hope -you, me, this church, our world - each and all are born in Christ to greater things.