Dawn

Sermon for Green Lake Church, a Seventh-day Adventist congregation

December 1, 2012

Text: Matthew 4:12-17

Note: This will be my first sermon as the senior pastor of Green Lake Church. I will miss my North Hill Adventist Fellowship congregation immensely. On the other hand I'm excited about the prospect of ministry in the Wallingford, Freemont and University neighborhoods of Seattle.

Years ago in Akron, Ohio, a woman approached me after church. Could I baptize her daughter, Annie?

I should have been a little less enthusiastic. The question fleetingly crossed my mind: why was Mother asking me about baptism for a daughter I had never met? But I was so excited by the prospect of giving Bible studies and preparing someone for baptism, I took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Could I baptize her daughter? “Sure. Of course. I'd be honored. Let's set up a time for Bible studies and we'll prepare Annie for baptism.”

“You don’t understand.” Mother responded, using the language of that time and place. “My daughter is retarded.”

“No problem.” I answered. “I'll make it real simple.”

“No, you don’t understand. She’s severely retarded. She can’t talk.”

This was a problem.

Mother gave me more information: Annie was twenty. She was about two speaking developmentally. She was still in diapers. The reason I had never seen her was that her mother did not bring her to church. Annie was given to spontaneous, loud vocalizing and erratic movement. Rarely she had seizures. Ruth didn't feel comfortable bringing her to church. But could I baptize her? Could Annie join the church?

Mother knew her request was against the rules. Adventists practice “believer's baptism.” We do not baptize children at the mere request of their parents. Instead baptism is our recognition that persons—whether they are little people who have grown up in the church or big people coming to church as adults—have the capacity to choose to accept grace, to choose to cooperate with God, to participate in goodness. Believer's Baptism expresses our profound commitment to freedom.

We do not baptize two-year-olds. Our doctrine precludes baptizing babies in diapers. Still, Ruth was asking me to baptize her twenty-year-old baby, Annie.

Mother tried to minimize the violation of the rules. “I tell Annie all the time that Jesus loves her. And I think she understands. Sometimes I think she says Jesus. It's not very clear, but I'm pretty sure that's what she is saying.”

What to do?

Church doctrine is unambiguous. Church policy is clear. Equally clear was the desperate longing of this Mother's heart. For her, baptism was the doorway to the kingdom of God. The idea that Annie would be excluded from the kingdom of heaven was a darkness too heavy to bear.

So, in a private ceremony, we broke all the written rules. Overriding tradition and doctrine and policy, we baptized Annie and received her officially as a member of the church.

That Sabbath afternoon was a fulfillment of our scripture reading.

"Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, hear this: the people sitting in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the territory of the shadow of death a light has dawned. Matthew 4:15-16

We see Jesus lighting a mother's life in a fantastic story in Matthew 15. Jesus was on a private retreat with his disciples. He had actually left Galilee and gone across the border north into a non-Jewish town to escape the press of the crowds. Somehow a pagan woman finds out Jesus is there. She accosts Jesus and company, begging him to exorcise her daughter. First Jesus ignored the woman. When that didn't work to get rid of her, he told her that her request was inappropriate. In fact, Jesus said, she was asking him to go outside the limits of his divine commission. To state it as bluntly as possible, Jesus told the woman, “If I do what you are asking, I would be acting contrary to God's calling.”

Then what did Jesus do? He granted her request! He brought into her life great light. Jesus regard for actual human need was so intense, that it prompted him to step outside the ordinary limits of his divinely-given mission. (See Matthew 15:22-28.)

Certainly for that mother, Jesus arrival in her neighborhood was the dawning of a great light.

I'm intrigued by the cryptic words at the beginning of this verse—Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. Zebulun and Naphtali were two of the twelve tribes of Israel. They are not particularly famous or infamous for anything. They were the nobodies of Israel, or maybe I should say, they were the everybodies, the ninety-nine percent (or more accurately the sixty-five percent). They had no connection with the monarchy. They were not priests. They weren't famous as warriors. They were just plain folk.

Metaphorically, Annie's mother was one of those Zebulunites. She was a nobody. The only person in her family active in the church. No connections to the important people in the congregation. No college classmates at the General Conference. A true believer living in faithful obscurity.

The darkness referred to in the prophecy was not “special darkness.” It was not extraordinary, newsworthy horror. It was the prosaic darkness characteristic of the human condition. It is the darkness that arises from our fear of alienation. Our suspicion that we are not included. The darkness that haunts a mother's heart when she wonders if there is place in God's church, in God's kingdom, for her special-needs daughter.

Let's go back to our scripture. Matthew described the beginning of Jesus' ministry using the language of Isaiah: Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, Galilee of the Gentiles, hear this: The people sitting in darkness have seen a great light. Those are the words of Isaiah and Matthew.

Jesus used entirely different language: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent.”

The “great light” of Isaiah and Matthew is the news that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. It's close. Real close. It's right here.

It is so close, so available that repentance makes sense. It's doable. It's possible.

“Repent” is fancy religious language. It would be better translated, “Turn.” or “Alter your life.” Make a good change.” Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, so turn, enter. The door is right here.

Jesus does not tell people to adjust their lives in an effort to attain the kingdom of heaven. Rather he tells them, the kingdom of heaven has moved into your world. It's here. It's available. So turn. Turn now. Turn here. Turning is not a desperate, Hail Mary, long shot, aiming at some unlikely goal. It is the confident turning toward the welcoming presence of God.

The story of Annie's mother awakens our sympathies. We are all happy together that Annie was welcomed, that the rules were adjusted so Annie's mother's heart was filled with light.

Sometimes darkness haunts people whose vulnerability is much less obvious than Annie's. People like Nicodemus and Thomas. People like Bob.

When Bob and I met he was taking his first tentative steps back toward some kind of connection with church, unsure whether there was really a place for him.

We shared significant interests outside of church. We became friends. I heard his story. When he first encountered the Adventist Church it was perfect medicine for the chaos and dysfunction in his life. It made sense. It helped. He embraced it completely, zealously. A couple of decades later he was a leader in his church. A paragon of Adventist virtue. Then he found some cracks in the edifice.

Twenty years of obeying all the rules had not transformed all of his unruly impulses. It seemed to him, he was essentially the same person he had been when it all began. He was obviously had not become good enough to pass the heavenly inspection.

He was going to be lost.

The final proof of his hopelessness was his inability to believe the world was 6000 years old. When he had joined the church, he happily set aside everything he had learned in his geology classes and embraced the doctrine of the church. Twenty years later, he could no longer do it.

The church taught 6000 years. He did not believe it. Could not believe it. So, he had resigned himself to being lost. There was nothing to be done about it. He lived in darkness.

As you would expect, I argued. Certainly, the official doctrine of the church was clear. Still, just because he did not believe that particular item in the church's creed, that did not mean he was excluded from church or from the kingdom of heaven.

Bob dismissed my words. “That's just you. We're friends, so, of course, you're going to say that. You're a liberal. No offense, but the people who really count don't think like you do.”

No, I argued. On this point, it's not just me. And I told him the following story.

In the early 2000s the General Conference organized a series of conferences on Faith and Science. I attended as an observer. In the third and final conference held in Denver, a number of conservative theologians called for the church to be more activist in rooting out every faculty member who evinced the slightest doubt about 6000 years. Two of the most pugnacious leaders in this camp were Michael Hasel and Fernando Canale. On Friday afternoon both were on a panel.

A pastor stood and addressed Fernando Canale, “I held evangelistic meetings some years ago. A scientist attended the meetings and asked to be baptized. He worked at a leading research facility in the area. I found out he was already attending church. He was keeping Sabbath at some considerable cost to himself. And he was paying tithe. However, he told me he had one problem. He just could not believe in a short chronology. My question to you: Would you baptize him?”

Canale responded: “That is not the question before us. We are here to debate the official doctrine of the Church. And on that we must be crystal clear. We are talking about what is to be taught and preached in our Church. The actual decision about baptizing someone is a pastoral decision to be made in light of a full knowledge of the circumstances and spiritual life of that person.”

The pastor would not let it go. “Of course, I understand we are debating theology here. But I want to know when I go back to my Church what kind of ministry you are requiring of me. Would you baptize someone who was keeping Sabbath, paying tithe and attending church but did not believe in six days/6000 years?”

Canale clearly did not want to answer the question, but to his credit he finally did. “Based on what you have told us, yes, I would baptize him.” Michael Hasel agreed with Canale.

“So,” I said to my friend Bob. “It's not just me.”

And so, I say to you, behold the astonishing power of the light that shines from the ministry of Jesus.

Canale and Hasel have spent much of their professional lives in the church fighting to exclude slightest hint of wavering in the church's doctrine regarding the age of the world. They believe any weakness in this doctrinal point would undermine the entire system of Adventist theology. Adventist identity and mission would crumble into nothingness if we gave an inch regarding geochronology. The very survival of the church as an institution requires absolutely unbending rigidity on this point. They have written this. In the Faith and Science Conferences they delivered passionate lectures along these lines. Then when confronted not with an idea but with a person—a particular human being, a scientist who held a repugnant idea, but still a person, a human being—in the face of this single person their entire bombastic crusade crumbled. Why?

It was the light that shines from Jesus. For all their doctrinal purity and theological certainty, they could not imagine making the argument that Jesus would exclude a man because of his opinions about fossils. They knew, as every person who is acquainted with the gospels must know, that every time Jesus confronted a conflict between preserving institutional prerogatives and caring for a real, live human being, Jesus cared for the person. Jesus welcomed the person. Jesus touched the person. Jesus defended the person. Jesus shone a great welcoming light.

If Jesus could welcome the tax collector Zacchaeus as a full-fledged son of Abraham, if Jesus could pronounce a Roman centurion's faith superior to any exhibited by the proper people of God, if Jesus could turn on its head an incontrovertible accusation of adultery, it is not possible to imagine he would shut the door of heaven to someone because of their opinions about rocks.

The light of Jesus welcomes my friend Bob, and Dan and Robert and Jean and all those others who have been driven by their own studies to question some element of the Adventist creed. By the rule book Annie's lack of cognitive development excluded her from formal inclusion in the family of God. By the rule book, Bob's hyper cognitive development excluded him from formal inclusion in the family of God. The light that shines from Jesus illumines a welcome into the kingdom that exceeds the power of any rule to exclude.

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, Galilee of the Gentiles: The people sitting in darkness have seen a great light. On those sitting in the territory of death, a light has dawned.

This Advent season, allow the light of Jesus to suffuse your mind. Then, as you are warmed and brightened, look for Annie's mother or a friend named Bob and share the light.