Ephesians 4:1-16
Sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Donald Ng, Past President of American Baptist Churches, USA (2016-17) at Chinese Baptist Church, Seattle, WA, April 30, 2017.
Do you remember your baptism?
I was baptized at my home church, First Baptist of Boston, the fourth oldest Baptist church in America when I was in high school. Frankly, I don’t remember the actual date but it was some time after my friends were baptized. When they went forward, I felt I wasn’t ready. But as the time went by, I began to feel pressured not so much from my pastor at that time but by an inner, personal time clock telling me to make a decision before it was too late.
I remember I was baptized at the same time as one of my older cousins, Donna, two years my senior. There were just the two of us. It probably was Palm Sunday and I felt I was walking 6 inches off the ground when people congratulated me and I received my certificate. But after about a week has passed, I suddenly realized that I was still having the same kind of selfish thoughts that I had before baptism. I felt I was backsliding! I was disillusioned and felt that I was not as much of a Christian as I thought I was. I thought I would be more saintly but I was not. I went back to the pastor and he invited me to take more discipleship classes with him. It was only after this extra study that I discovered the real meaning of a lifelong discipleship that I have now entered.
A theologian once said that, “We give only as much as we are willing to give to the Lord at any moment. Throughout life we continue to give more and more of ourselves to God until that time when it is the very end, we give it all.”
Do you remember your baptism?
Some of you got yoked when you got married. And I prayed that your marriages are healthy and that your spouse treats you well because you first respected and treated him or her well. Some of you who are single or widowed may be yoked with significant others.
Baptism is when you got yoked to the church. In Baptism, you were adopted, brought into the family. No one is born into the church. As someone has said, “God has no grandchildren.” There really is no such thing as second-generation Christians because each of us has been adopted, brought into the church, fresh and new, by baptism. I received a baptism certificate to prove that I was adopted.
What is amazing is that this faith makes relatives out of perfect strangers! Speaking about being strange, how strange is the church? Don’t you think it’s strange when most of Seattle is asleep and we are here? That’s strange. Most people are anxiously waiting to watch the Mariners play than the preacher preach. But we are here and that’s strange!
As Past President of American Baptist Churches, I am often asked to give a report on the state of the denomination. What does the future look like? Will we be around in the next few years? I hope we will, but in depends on our baptism.
We live in a world fragmented into caucus groups, private interests, clubs, fraternities, men’s groups and women’s groups, subcultures, lobby and pressure groups and we wonder how remarkable it is that the church attempts to bring unity amidst such diversity. Admittedly, we in this congregation are a rather homogenous lot. Looking at us this morning, we all look much alike on the surface even with me from San Francisco!
But of all the human institutions of which I am a part, there is more diversity here than elsewhere: young, old, rich, poor, whole, and infirm. It’s not easy to get it together or keep it together here at church but you are doing it. You must keep on doing it!
In our congregational disagreements, we fight hard for what we believe. But how is it possible for us to worship on Sunday morning with people with whom we had such sharp disagreements such as at the board meeting last Wednesday night? How on earth do we keep it together?
Some have proposed that as long as we have sound doctrine that is biblically based and adhered to, we can remain together. Maybe it’s an effective and talented preacher or success in raising money or fun-programs for the kids.
This morning we ask, “How can I be united with you when I am an American-born Chinese, male, seminary trained, originally from Boston?” Already the walls are starting to form—all the things you know of Asian Americans from San Francisco are setting up barriers revealing our differences from making us one. How do I know I can trust you? Can you trust me? In our differences, arguments, disagreements and misunderstandings of life together, what on earth could make us one?
As human beings, we can have warm feelings of friendship and mutual respect but my warm feelings are not enough to self-sustain love for you. And I know that you could never have enough goodwill to love me always!
What brings us together or keeps us together? It must be something, someone greater than ourselves, some great cosmic wholeness, someone who is the source of who we are and who we are meant to be.
The trouble with many of our efforts at unity in the world is that our unity and community are based on sentimentality. I like you because you like me. I like you because you look like me. What sort of unity is that? It’s superficial and temporary.
What makes the mark of the true church is its unity in Christ. “See how they love one another,” outsiders said of the first churches.
What we need is some way to be together despite our differences, something greater than our differences, some great cosmic wholeness.
One Baptism
In Ephesians 4, Paul refers us to baptism. In baptism we see, “There is one body and one Spirit…one hope…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in all.” You can imagine that this verse might have been part of an early baptismal ritual. In total, Paul repeated the word, “One” seven times. If we want to emphasize a point, we may repeat a point seven times too.
The principal mark of the church is unity—oneness, and the calling of Christians is to build up the body of Christ in all that they do. Christ’s church is to be unified. The metaphor of the body is organic and dynamic, not static or rigid. The body of Christ is always living into its calling, but the vision of unity is clear.
Then Paul lists all of the officers and leaders of the church and says that all these leaders have one main function—building up the body of Christ, helping everyone grow up into unity. That’s the main role of your pastors and moderators—to help build you up in unity. This is my role as the ABC Past President is to call you into unity by building up the Body of Christ. That’s the main role of the leaders in the church—to help build you up in unity as the Body of Christ.
We’re like a body, says Paul, a body with many different members, many differing parts yet the body is one.
When we “equip the saints for ministry,” it’s not about personal achievements or successes but always to be used for the good of the whole. The equipping is not about accumulating skills or knowledge. Rather the word, “equip” comes from the Greek noun kartartismos meaning “the setting of a bone.” To “set bones” means to restore, to create, to prepare, to reconcile in order to grow in one’s ministry and to align oneself with God’s intentions, both individually and corporately, and to avoid being “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine” (v. 14).
When every bone of a body is properly fitted and in working order, the body functions the way it was intended.
As a person grows into the likeness of Christ, his or her ministry adds to the growth of the body of Christ. There is mutuality between the individual and the corporate. I can become my true self only in relation to you. You can become your true self only in relationship with me and with others in this church.
Moreover, as a follower of Jesus aligns his or her life with God’s purposes, he or she grows into becoming a disciple, and this individual transformation aids in the corporate transformation of the world into the kingdom.
We are to build up “the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (4:12-13).
ABC
American Baptists are a very diverse group of Baptist Christians. If we were to use any of the typically human defining characteristics of who and what people are, we would not be a denominational family. There are not the typical Facebook likes that would make us friends. You don’t have the ability to ignore or decline the invitation to be a friend. But because of our one Baptism in the Lord, we are here together.
Think of the people right here in this congregation whom you would not have known if you had not been baptized into the church. Think how much poorer your faith—your life—would be without these adopted brothers and sisters.
Growing up at FBC, Boston, I knew people outside of my immediate immigrant family that came over from China. I could have just remained in the Chinese American ghetto but the church expanded my world and I discovered who I am from my third-grade Sunday school teacher Mrs. Beatrice Wyatt who made us memorized 1 Corinthians 13 or our Sunday school superintendent Mrs. Margaret Jordan who taught us Great Is Thy Faithfulness or our BYF advisor Millie Brooks who took us to North Livermore, Maine to meet other Baptist youth or my high school pastor Rev. Charles Griffin who gave me my first paid church job of riding a yellow school bus through the streets of Boston picking up kids for Sunday school that paid me $10 a week! I was adopted by these Baptist mentors.
In fact, I think one of the reasons why marriages and families are in trouble today is because we have a far too limited a definition of family. People are trying to stay married with nothing more to sustain them than their marriage vows on their wedding day. They are putting far too much emotional weight on just one other person and their marriages are cracking under the strain. Likewise, we have families who are so turned in onto themselves; existing for no one other than for themselves that they are collapsing.
At First Chinese in San Francisco and I assume that it’s true here at Chinese Baptist, Seattle too is that we are all aunties and uncles of the children in the church. We are responsible for them besides their parents.
Baptism tells us that God did not mean any of us to exist alone. Baptism is God’s idea of “family values,” a family not gathered on the basis of common race, nationality, language, or geography, but a family by virtue of baptism in the Lord.
And if the American BAPTIST Churches can’t remain together, unified in Christ, I wonder if anyone else can!
Genesis tells us that the world was created when God’s Spirit hovered over the waters and brought forth life out of nothingness and chaos. Creation came forth from the waters. Every time we baptize someone it’s like creation again. It’s Genesis 1 all over again, here at this church, all around the ABC family. From these waters, life is being brought forth out of chaos; strangers are being made into family.
So when one of our older members is incapacitated and can’t get to church, you can’t say, “Well she’s somebody else’s mother, somebody else’s problem.” In baptism, we’re family. That’s your mother in need.
So when one of our teenagers is going through a rough time in life and need help sorting things out you can’t say, “Well, his parents really have a problem on their hands with that boy.” No. That is your child there too. At baptism, you assumed responsibility; you participated in the adoption. That’s your child in need.
So when African Americans are incarcerated more than the percentage of the population and that police often targets Black men, you and I can’t say that these are not our problems. In baptism, the entire American Baptist family is grieving over lost lives and angry over injustices and convicted to work toward respect and a true beloved community we know in Jesus Christ.
So when tens of thousands of refugees are streaming from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to Western Europe, we can’t say that it’s only a European problem, it’s a United States responsibility too. These are God’s own children. At baptism, you and I assumed responsibility for all the people in the world.
So when the 10 million undocumented workers who pick our fruits and vegetables, cook and serve our meals, clean our houses and care for our children when we go to work, these are not just strangers and faceless expendables, these are just as much God’s own children like you and me. At baptism, you and I must have compassion and advocate for their safety and citizenship.
And when one of our ABC churches is struggling to find a new direction and is now facing financial problems you can’t say, “Well, that’s their fault and the regional office should do something about it.” No, that is your sister church and at baptism, you are now yoked as sisters and brothers in Christ. That church needs you.
Do You Remember Your Baptism?
I started this message with a question: “Do you remember your baptism?” Here, at the baptistery, multitudes of strangers gather. Amazingly, their differences seem to fade in these waters.
We’re all babies here—everybody’s a beginner, everybody needing someone else in order to survive. The old distinctions—male, female, black, white, brown and yellow, rich, poor—don’t seem to work anymore as one comes up dripping from the waters. Here we are, people still being born, still being cleansed of our separations, people with no earthly reason for being able to live together without cutting each other’s throat, except that we have each heard the same call, answered the same name, come forth from the same baptistery to follow the same one Lord.
I am reminded of what Martin Luther once said when he had bouts with the devil, when he felt himself sinking into the depths of despair, when he probably felt like cutting someone’s throat, he found it helpful to touch his forehead whereon the sign of the cross had been made at his baptism, and to say, “I am baptized.”
Remembrance of his baptism recalled for Luther God’s determined ownership of him, which provided comfort in distress.
In light of today’s scripture from Ephesians, perhaps we ought to take our cue from Martin Luther and, whenever we encounter differences and divisions in the church, we ought to touch our foreheads and repeat the words, “I am baptized.” This means that there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” and therefore we have the gift of unity.
In the church when we are addressing the sin of racism, remember, “I am baptized,” means that I am not bound by the traditional categories of insiders and outsiders. The old, painful external distinctions made between people have been washed away in the waters of baptism.
In struggling with injustices committed against women down through the ages and still today, remember, “I am baptized,” means according to Galatians 3, there is “Neither male nor female” in Christ. Gender is not the fundamental identity of Christians.
When living in a world where people are often judged by the clothes they wear, the make of automobiles they drive, the size of their house, remember, “I am baptized,” which means that deep distinctions between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, have been rearranged, disrupted in Christ so that we come to see those of us who are rich in things as often poor in spirit and those of us who are poor in things as rich in spirit.
I am baptized. That makes all the difference.
Go ahead and look at those people sitting next to you today. Look at them and remember your baptism. That is, remember that we’re all in this together; we’re all family.
I think that’s what Paul is getting at when he begins this morning’s passage from Ephesians by saying, “I therefore…beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope…one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
He is begging us to remember our baptism by the way we live together, listen to one another, bear one another’s burdens, care for one another’s sorrows, celebrate each other’s joys. Remember your baptism—one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
Let us pray.
O God, forgive us for our blindness that we have not seen the beauty of your people. Remind us again that in our one baptism, all of us are now joined into the Body of Christ in which you have called to be an instrument of reconciliation in the world. Teach us to care for others as you have cared and loved us. In our baptism, we pray that we will take up our responsibility to bring hope, love, joy, and peace. In Christ, we pray. Amen.