All Anointed Children

Surely God Is In This Place
May 1, 2016
Holy Conversations
May 22, 2016

“All Anointed Children”

Watch the sermon here.

In his most personal letter, the Apostle Paul writes to his friend Timothy about how his mother and grandmother, Eunice and Lois, helped instill in him the faith to become a follower of Christ. 

It underscores the importance of mothers in our lives.  How the example our mothers set for us and we as mothers set for children helps guide who we and they become.  It is the grace of our mothers which helps reveal the heart of God.

Paul also refers to Timothy as “My beloved child,” reminding us that many who haven’t experienced physical parenthood still have the joy and privilege of being a mother or father in faith and life.[i]  What is needed is grace.

This morning we finish our sermon series on grace.   We celebrate that God’s grace means we all are all free to be part of God’s family. 

And we have a responsibility to make sure all know they are anointed as beloved children of God.  Let us pray.    

Loving God, we give thanks for the presence of your grace.  Fill us with grace.  Convict us.  Consecrate us, until we are fully yours.  Amen.

In 1983, I went to Scotland for the first time with my mother.  It was a trip through our church at the time and was almost the same itinerary as our upcoming church trip in June – Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Iona, etc.  I was just a bit older than our sons will be when they go to Scotland for the first time this year.

When I asked my mother recently what she remembered about that trip, I thought she would wax eloquent about the heather on the hills, or be nostalgic for the shortbread at some castle.   However the memory that was most clear in her mind was that I wore a coat and tie every night for dinner.  If my sons weren’t already at Sunday school today I’d say “Hear that boys?”  My mom recalls that Mr. Matheson on the trip commented on nice I looked as a young lad dressed in my best.  It was not how I probably had wanted to dress, but it made an impression on my mom.

What I remember most about the trip was the woman with the red umbrella.   We had a petite, feisty, knowledgeable tour guide and her distinction was that she held up a red umbrella just over her head wherever we went that as a signal for us to go to her.  It was her identity.  It distinguished our group from other tour groups.

The tour guide held up the umbrella so we could identify her.   So we didn’t get lost.  It was her calling card.  That red umbrella was unique.  It helped us know we belonged each time she placed it on top of her head.

Putting something on one’s head has long been a symbol of identification. 

The Holy Spirit anointed heads in the Bible.  The Psalmist famously wrote in Psalm 23 that the Lord anoints his head with oil.  Israel’s kings were anointed.  Our new elders and deacons here are anointed.

Paul writes to Timothy that the gift of faith came when the leaders lay their hands on him.  That was often done in ancient times by placing one’s hands on a person’s head.

In the Christian faith, it all starts with baptism.  The sign of the cross with water on a child’s head carries on the tradition of anointing.

The identification of a child with God at the start of life is an identification with grace.  When we baptize a child we say, “Child of the covenant,” I baptized you…..  Child of the covenant means the covenant God began with God’s people long before Christ which is culminated in the new Covenant sealed in his blood which we celebrate when we pour the cup on communion Sunday.   That is the covenant of grace.

What is grace?  Paul wrote of God’s grace in several letters, but there may not be one definition.  St. Augustine who has been called the “Professor of Grace,” said, “It is only by God’s grace that God has melted away the ice of my evil.”

Calvin believed faith was the certain knowledge of God’s grace towards us.

One of the great Presbyterian scholars Donald McKim of John Knox press, defines grace as the “pure, unmerited favor of God.”

To me, grace is God loving us completely as a mother would a child

What I think explains it best is actually a metaphor used in the Westminster Confession, a Reformation era confession that is often used to exclude.  Not this time.

It says, “In and for Jesus Christ, to make us partakers of the grace of adoption, we are taken into God’s number to enjoy the liberties, privileges and responsibilities of the children of God…  For all of us are the children of God, we are all God’s offspring.”

What exciting news.  We are all children of God.  Anointed and adopted.  Once we realize that we are loved, accepted, forgiven, affirmed, cherished, it transforms who we are.  That transformation is grace.

But we have to rediscover it every day.  We have to accept the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ. 

We have to believe we are God’s grace filled creations.  Then the liberties, privileges and responsibilities are ours.  The liberties, the privileged freedom of a child under the protective wing of a mother.  The responsibility of treating others as children of God.

This is a day to reaffirm that we are children of God.  When we give thanks for our mothers we affirm that caring for, nurturing, protecting and growing, is a holy calling.

In his article, The Moral Bucket List, David Brooks writes that activist Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.” 

That kind of love, that grace filled faith, that way God looks upon us, is the way every child deserves to be treated. 

On Thursday, my mother told me a robin had laid an egg outside her window.  The mother robin left and hasn’t come back.  Each time my mother looks at that egg she feels a calling to put something on it to keep it warm.  And a prayer that the mother robin will come back.

Rabbi Howard Kushner, commenting on the phrase in the 23rd Psalm “He anoints my head with oil,” expresses the ideas that it is the job of society, of every one of us, to make sure every child is anointed, that is that every child knows that he or she is somebody.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that to be somebody is the experience of grace.   King wrote that our identity of grace is given by God.   King believed that identity was critical to the civil rights movement, many years after identity had been torn away from some people.

Today 22% of American children live in poverty.  38% of African American children live in poverty.

Too many children grow up without support or parents or without believing they are worthy.  That a parent who is abusive or not present or not involved doesn’t love them. 

Or that even when things are ok and there is love, too many believe that they don’t stack up.  They have started to patrol the train tracks in Palo Alto, CA, one of the most highly privileged communities in the world, because teen suicide rates are so high.

Montgomery County is at risk perhaps as well.  I wonder the background of Friday’s shooter at the mall?

Here in this place we come to God looking for love.

We all can bring to God our experiences.

We can bring to God anything that troubles us about our relationship with our mother. 

We can bring to God the unrealized hopes for a family.  Or a prayer for a missed child.

We can bring to God those memories of a mother or grandmother who has died.

We can bring to God our gratitude for our mothers.

We can bring to God our concern about whether we fit in.

We can bring to God our anxiety that we have not been to church for a while and wonder if God still remembers us and cares.

We can bring to God our fear that we are somehow not in the club and we aren’t good enough to deserve God’s love.

We bring all of these to a God who loves each of us just as we are; that, we are children of God, anointed and adopted.  Children of promise. 

I love how Henri Nouwen, put it, “Somehow, we think we can only enjoy being loved by God if others are loved less.   Yet God loves all human beings with the same unlimited love, while at the same time loving each of us in a totally unique way . . .”

We live in a time when religion and race make it possible that we don’t feel we belong.   Last Saturday I was rushing to the interfaith banner dedication here with Jewish and Muslim friends.  Right before that I was at Brendan’s soccer game and he had children of every color and religion playing.  Children of every background there.  All belonging.

Then I came here to dedicate our banner to interfaith understanding and love.  It makes me think about our opportunity as a congregation to do something to extend our grace to others, perhaps in helping a child of a Syrian refugee family?

We are anointed in our birth, in our sacraments and as children of a new covenant of grace.  The challenge to us is to accept it, believe it and to care for the children of the world.

I remember a time on our trip to Scotland when my mom and I visited a family gravesite in the southeast of Scotland.  On my mother’s side the Scottish roots are in Duns southeast of Edinburgh and in borders area.  I was tired, it was a long trip.  I would walk a bit around the ground but I was lonely.  I was by far the youngest on the trip.  I wasn’t sure I belonged.  I can remember standing in the rain beside gravesites from hundreds of years ago with the small group there and not really thinking I belonged.

Then my mom took hold of my hand.   She told me stories about family, which I wasn’t really listening to.  I just remember holding her hand.  As the light broke into the dark Scottish sky I felt that I connected, that I was part of something bigger than me, that I belonged.

Then soon after the women with the red umbrella reappeared.  She brought me back to the tour again.  As I held my mother’s hand I didn’t soon forget that I belonged.

May we all, whatever our circumstance, take hold of God’s hand this hour of worship, discover we belong, and find our way to extend our hands.   May it be so.  Amen.


[i] William Barclay.  New Daily Study Bible. Timothy.  P. 160.