CELEBRATING:
SERMONS
22 - Nov 2009
A sermon delivered by Rev. Gordon How
"Baptism and Gardening"
The Church has long held that its mission is to proclaim
the Good News of the Kingdom of God and to "to
teach, baptize and nurture new believers'. On a day
when we have four families celebrating baptism, I wanted
us to think about the "teaching, baptizing and
nurturing" aspects of our mission.
I love visiting gardens and smelling the roses; I love
visiting ornamental gardens, desert gardens, Japanese
gardens, and wandering around the grounds of stately
homes; I love walking along the paths beside the still
waters of huge and gracious landscape parks, and I enjoy
investigating a productive vegetable garden.… I
have a photo file with hundreds of flower garden photos
… I enjoy beautiful gardens. However, if it's down
to me to be the gardener, well, my favourite horticultural
species is the paving stone.
I know this is shocking to some of you who love your
gardening, but I should remind you that according to
Genesis 3 gardening - or tilling the ground - was a
punishment inflicted upon Adam as a result of his sin!
A punishment. And I fail to see how you can make a pastime
out of a punishment.
I remember hearing about the man who was coming home
from the airport after a business trip and he stopped
at the local convenience store to buy some roses for
his wife. When he arrived home he gave the roses to
his dear wife and soon suggested she put them in some
water - and that is when she pointed out to him that
they were artificial. Well, that just proves my point
- why spend all that effort to grow roses when you can
get convincingly real ones in a convenience store!
But I do have a kind of vague awareness of some of
the basic principles of this business of gardening…
planting, watering, weeding, pruning and so on. I know
those things have to be done at the right time in the
right way if you want to stand any chance of growing
something that you want to grow and of which you can
be proud. I also know it's a hit and miss affair whether
plants and shrubs and vegetables grow at all because
of unpredictable weather, nasty things like slugs, snails,
mites, moss, blight and fungus and goodness knows what
else inhabits our gardens.
And the watering - at sunrise or late at night, only
2 days a week, moving hoses from one place to the other;
how can it be worth all that effort? And I haven't even
mentioned mowing the lawns or trimming the hedges or
fighting the skunks over chafer beetles.
Have you noticed that a lot of Jesus' illustrations
of the growth of the kingdom of God are about things
that grow, and need cultivation? About seeds being sown,
weeds and wheat growing together and being separated
at harvest. The tiny mustard seed that grows into a
great tree. The seeds that fall upon poor soil or good
soil …and most famously, Jesus said to his disciples,
'I am the vine and my Father is the gardener…I
am the vine and you are the branches'.
Christian faith and discipleship - through which we
share in the life of God's kingdom - need to be tended
and nurtured, and it is an essential mark of the Church's
mission.
Do you remember the story of Jesus on the Road to
Emmaus. Here were two disciples whose faith in him was
at a critical state. They were probably on the point
of giving up, after the heartbreaking events of the
death of Jesus. They could make no sense of the reports
they'd heard about the resurrection. They had separated
themselves from the other disciples, and were perhaps
traveling back to the former lives they had before they
even met Jesus. But Jesus came alongside, answered their
doubts and patiently, beginning with Moses and the prophets,
interpreted to them all the things about himself in
the scriptures. When he had finished and disappeared
from their sight they said to each other, "Were
not our hearts burning within us while he was talking
to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures
to us?"
Faith needs opening up, tending and nurturing. That
process needs patience and can be full of frustrations,
like it is with gardening. Sometimes faith dies, often
it flowers gloriously or bears much fruit. Teaching,
baptizing and nurturing new believers is a shared task
for the church. It is a vital part of God's mission
that God invites us to take part in.
Those three verbs: to teach, to baptize and to nurture,
echo Jesus' instructions to his disciples recorded at
the end of Matthew's Gospel: "Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded
you." The three verbs each point to an important
part of the process.
'Teaching' enriches the mind to believe, in a way
that allows the heart to trust. When a person can say,
'I believe and trust….' then we baptize.
'Baptizing' gives an outward visible sign of the inward
and spiritual grace of faith. Baptism plays an immensely
important part not only in the life of the person baptized
but in the life of the church. It is evidence that the
Church has life for the future.
'Nurturing' is the bigger picture of tending with
care the faith of the newly baptized and indeed of all
believers. Nurturing includes teaching, but also encouragement,
pastoral care, giving opportunity for gifts to be developed
and many other activities that help the whole person
grow into maturity in the faith community.
All of these are important. In gardening, I think,
it's no good being a perfect planter if you're a worthless
weeder, it's no good being a precise pruner if you're
a willy-nilly waterer. Your plants need total, all-round
care. How sad for me last week to see my dad's garden
in West Point Grey - he left it 15 years ago in immaculate
and colourful condition. Now, it is an embarrassing,
overgrown wasteland.
So does Christian faith. It needs nurture. That was
fully appreciated by the Apostle Paul as he kept in
communication with churches he had founded or visited
right across the Mediterranean. He wanted to be sure
that proper arrangements were in hand for the nurture
of believers. Hence, for example, the letter to Titus,
read from this morning, sent to a Church leader in the
island of Crete. Titus was dealing with a tricky situation,
and so Paul urged him to teach, to give moral guidance
and encourage discipleship in every way.
It's a particular task of leadership to nurture the
faith of all. And especially new believers - which includes
young people, of course. Peter exhorted church elders:
'tend the flock of God that is in your charge'. But
we all should recognize this as a dimension of God's
mission that we have a part in. Because we nurture one
another in faith and discipleship - perhaps more than
we realize we do. I can think of a few ways in which
believers are nurtured in the church, and the first
and perhaps most important is through relationships.
It is through knowing other Christians, walking with
them, sharing with them in joys and sorrows that we
experience so much growth. I look back at the time of
my life when I was in need of encouragement and nurturing.
I remember well a university chaplain and a college
professor. I can't remember what they said. I can't
remember what their lessons were about. But I can remember
those two people, and I can remember their nurture of
me, and I can remember growing. We have this great responsibility
to one another in the church. To set an example to one
another; to share our Christian journeys. That's where
so much nurture takes place.
A second valuable focus of Christian nurture is in
small groups in the Church, where relationships extend
to a wider circle. When you stay away from such opportunities,
others miss out on what they can learn from you as well
as the blessing you can receive from them.
And there is another important means by which our
Christian lives can be nurtured - in the broadest description,
I call it the Christian Media. Books, magazines, the
internet …. We are saturated with messages from
the media, much of it quite markedly anti-Church and
anti-faith. We get bombarded with misleading, unbalanced
and even untruthful stories disparaging the church.
But the balance can be redressed by some excellent resources:
- there is the United Church Observer - our monthly
national magazine which continues a long tradition of
teaching and inspiring discussion as well as reporting
on the life of other United Churches across Canada.
For example, the most recent issue has an excellent
Charles Darwin article that puts much more balance to
Darwin's story than yesterday's article in The Sun.
Remember too, there are wonderful resource books to
read - just check out our fabulous church library every
time you come here and take home a new treasure for
your own nurturing in the faith! Another medium in Christian
media which I often use now are some websites that relate
news, stories and opinions that are valuable and helpful.
If you would like to know about them, just send me an
email and I'll send you the links…
There are many other ways, of course, in which the
teaching, baptizing and nurturing continues in the Church.
Like gardening it's a painstaking process that can't
be neglected if it's going to produce results. On a
morning like today, with four families celebrating Holy
Baptism, we have a wonderful reminder that we should
regularly re-commit our life and work as a congregation
to being a learning and nurturing, faith-growing community
for all ages.
++++++++++++++++
Matthew 28: 16-20; Titus 1:4,5; 3: 1-7.
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Shaughnessy Heights United Church
congregation is a Christian faith community respecting
each other in our diversity and reaching out to all
who seek God’s love.
1550
West 33rd Avenue,
Vancouver, BC V6M 1A7
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Tel:
604-261-6377
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