6th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 9B

6th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 9B July 8, 2012 A letter upon the occasion of the baptism of Clark Seemann and Tucker Wicks. Dear Clark and Tucker, Today we are baptizing you into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we are claiming God’s place for you within the sacred story that is the love story between God and God’s people. As you live and grow among us, we promise to teach you about this story, and to help you know and discern who you are called to be within it, and we hope and expect that you will do the same for us. In our story for today, we see that the Apostle Paul is still hard at work on the people in the church in Corinth. All throughout this 2nd letter to the Corinthians, Paul has been fighting against what my New Testament professor called the “super-apostles”. These are teachers who have come to Corinth and are trying to sway the church toward following an easier path to Jesus than the one that Paul has been teaching. These super-apostles use boasts about their power and their visions to sway the people of Corinth, and in an attempt to counteract their propaganda, Paul writes to the Corinthians about some of his own spiritual journey. Paul writes of how he was given a vision of being taken up to heaven where he “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” But to keep him from being too elated, he writes that a thorn of the flesh was given to him…What this thorn of the flesh is, we do not know…But Paul was worried that this thorn of the flesh that had been given him would keep him from doing his work of spreading the gospel of Christ, and so he prayed three times for this impediment to be removed from him. And the reply that Paul gets from Jesus is the central core of Paul’s own understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Jesus tells Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness. What on earth does that mean? It makes no sense and even sounds a little bit crazy. Are not power and weakness mutually exclusive? It’s almost as crazy as taking you two perfect, beautiful baby boys and drowning you in the waters of baptism. It’s almost as crazy as your parents standing up before God and everyone and essentially relinquishing their claim over you and stating that from this day forth, you will belong to our Lord Jesus Christ, attempting to follow his way of life, and be marked as Christ’s own forever. And then we make our promises to you that we will show you and teach you the truth of this story, about how we find God’s grace to be sufficient and how God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. We will show you and tell you and you will teach us about this great mystery in which we try to live but never fully understand as followers of Jesus: that when we are at our most humble and our lowliest, then the power of Christ often reaches its fullness within us. We are most fully ourselves when we are least full of ourselves. We will try to help you to remember this and ask you to help us remember as well. And we will gather with you week after week and we will all celebrate together the feast of thanksgiving for all that God has given us. We will celebrate and together we will be a resurrection people, a people who know and experience suffering but who also know and experience and proclaim the power of Jesus’s resurrection: that no matter what happens, God’s love and God’s power are stronger than absolutely everything—even death. On this special day, we thank you for being an example and a reminder for us of the beauty and innocence and goodness of human weakness in your tiny baby hands and feet and selves, and we celebrate God’s power which is made perfect in your own weakness now, and even into the future, when you grow big and strong. We rejoice in your presence among us, and welcome you as our new brothers in Jesus Christ our Lord. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+