Day: January 12, 2025

January 12, 2025  First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

In the lectionary, the master calendar of Bible readings we follow, this is the time each year when we remember the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – his baptism at the hands of John the Baptist.  And at the same time, we remember our own baptisms, and think together about what it means that we, too, have been set apart for service to God.

The lessons we’ve just heard are attempt to describe the meaning of baptism.  They’re not literal descriptions, of course… the waters we pass through, the fires which consume are the trials of everyday life – wars or peace, trials of family life, work challenges, election results – whether good or bad, and all those other things that can fill our hearts with pain.

Baptism starts with water; in its most literal understanding, it is as if we are buried in the water and then brought out of that water into a new life…. We have been “saved” for a purpose.

I have to add that it is true that we, like many Christians, have – over the centuries – abbreviated the amount of water considerably.  There have been many reasons for this, and this isn’t the time and place to go over them – it’s better done as a coffee hour conversation, I think – but I want us to be clear, when it comes to the meaning of baptism, or its effects, or how we can understand it in the light of our lives – the amount of water doesn’t matter.  In our baptisms, we have been dedicated to God’s service.

On Thursday, here in this space, we honored the memory of John Hilker.  At almost the same time, down in Washington DC, they were honoring the late President, Jimmy Carter.  President Carter is for us an example of one life dedicated to living out a baptismal call to be a good person.  President Carter may not have been the greatest President the US has ever had, but there has never been a President more dedicated to doing good for as many people as possible, or a President less impressed with himself and his glory. 

A day or two after the service, I had an opportunity to read the eulogy President Carter’s grandson, Jason, shared.  Jason told folks his grandfather, a nuclear engineer by training, struggled to learn how to use a cell phone, that he still lived in a normal-sized house where the phone was connected by wire to the wall… but just listen to what Jason said:

Maybe this is unbelievable to you, but in my 49 years, I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one. He was the same person, no matter who he was with or where he was. And for me, that’s the definition of integrity.

That honesty was matched by love. It was matched by faith. And in both public and private, my grandparents did fundamentally live their lives in effort, as the Bible says, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

Sometimes I feel and felt like I shared my grandfather with the world. Today is one of those days. But really, he shared the world with me. The power of an atom. The beauty and complexity of a south Georgia forest. When we fished, he celebrated the majesty of everything from the smallest minnow to that grand circulation of waters. And he shared this love with my boys, taking these Atlanta public school kids out into the fields to show them about row crops and wild plums.

In the end, his life is a love story. And of course, it’s a love story about Jimmy and Rosalynn and their 77 years of marriage and service. As the song says, they were the flagship of the fleet. And rest assured that in these last weeks, he told us that he was ready to see her again.

But his life was also a broader love story about love for his fellow humans, and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. I believe that that love is what taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people, but for all people. It focused him on the power and the promise of democracy, its love for freedom, its requirement and founding belief in the wisdom of regular people raising their voices and the requirement that you respect all of those voices, not just some.

That’s the way of the baptized, to be love wherever we are.  And you don’t have to step aside for the famous or powerful, like Jimmy Carter.  There’s a place for each of us in God’s vision of the world; so here’s a story of a woman I knew and admired greatly: 

When I first moved to Rutland, Vermont, I wasn’t any kind of church person. My husband and I were looking for a new place to set down roots after his retirement from the Marine Corps and Rutland was the place for us.  And then life interfered.  My marriage broke up and one Sunday I found myself sitting in a church, Grace Congregational UCC.  As I looked around I recognized a number of the people I saw there – particularly the kind, sensible ophthalmologist I’d been to when I failed the DMV’s vision test… and that woman from the First National Grocery Store, the one whose line was always the longest in the store.

Dot wasn’t a slow checker, not by any means.  In fact, the reason her line was always so long is that people wanted to go through that line – because when you brought your groceries to her, she took you seriously.  When she said hi and asked how your day had gone, she really wanted to know.  It wasn’t empty words.  After I got to know her she told me that she’d early figured out that for many of the people who came to that store, she was the only human being they knew, the only person they talked to in the week.  It was Dot who taught me about the hidden poor of Vermont, the men and women who lived alone, who survived on cat food tuna.  Dot paid attention to the people who came through her line; she lived out her baptismal call.

On this day, when we remember that we are baptized followers of the way of love, the challenge laid out before us is clear.  How can we live out our lives so that we are, like Jimmy Carter and Dot Potter, people who radiate God’s love to all?  What will we do, today, this week, this year, so that our world knows that it is the power of love that will  create a better world?

Amen.

© 2025, Virginia H. Child