We live in a farming community, so we see evidence of being rooted and grounded every day. A well-rooted plant is more stable, better able to withstand tough periods. The psalms start with this image, and it may well lie in the background of the thoughts here. I love the idea that our lives are rooted and grounded in the love of God. Rooted in that love, our lives can blossom and flourish, and spread that selfsame love. Our spiritual vocabulary, rooted in Scripture, matures over the years.

 

Sin happens when we get uprooted from being rooted and grounded in love. Moved by lust, David forgets out his love and loyalty. David gets uprooted from limits.He is drawing upon a different source in his life. Then the weeds attack. He gets entangled in so many thorny briers that he becomes immured in them. He cannot disentangle himself from the thicket he has created with his power and cunning.Sin comes from a sense that we are missing out in the fullness of life, but in the end, it becomes a vapid sameness.It's similar to the sense of Tolstoy that all difficult families are the same, but that variety lives in a happy family, in a unique way. Another sense would be that it poisons our lives at the roots. I was told of someone using Mean Green on a plant, and it poisoned the plants. Instead of bringing nourishment, the root system brought poison to wither and die. Some herbicides work at the root level to destroy growth. Sin is the enemy of love at the root system of our lives and replaces it with eventually death-dealing poisons. We delude ourselves into thinking that it leads to a fuller life, but it leaves only emptiness in its wake.

 

God is with us in the heights of life. When we notice that, we celebrate and praise. In the vast breadth of our experiences, God is there.God is with us in the depths of life. The confirmation group's catechism says it well: that their is no "grief Jesus does not know, no burden that Jesus has not borne." We could take the sense of depth to be one that goes to the very core of our inner being, the bedrock of the self. No experience is too small to escape divine notice; nothing too great to exceed the scope of divine love. That is the sense of Ephesians fullness, perhaps even a cosmic sense that God's love radiates like light throughout our lives, or to use an image from Psalm 23, a love whose cup runneth over. Sometimes Christians overemphasize a decisive moment, such as a born-again experience, and by so doing downplay the sense that God follows us through the whole long course of our lives.I would encourage you to look for the hand of God as you chart some of the major events in your life. The writer speaks of God in exalted terms, that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge, that God is able to do more than we can possibly imagine, abundantly, exceedingly, immeasurably. Why worry if our prayers don't measure up? We are tapping into the riches of a constantly renewing resource in the love of God. At the root of our lives is God. On this Sabbath Day, hear this prayer from the New Union Prayer Book. "In the silence of our praying place we close the door upon our hectic joys and fears, the accomplishments and anguish of the week we leave behind. What we did must be woven into what we are. We walk the path of our humanity, no longer ride unseeing through a world we do not touch and only vaguely sense. On this day, our warmth and light come from deep within ourselves." Paul Tillich called God the ground of our being. He knew well that we are at our best when we tap into the Source of all that exists to live in the fullness of God's generous love.

 

 

I love being in a smaller church, as it allows us to emphasize a baptism. It allows us to see our baptismal promises and life renewed in the promises made this day, with this child as our focal example. Nicole is an innocent. As a human being, she will be capable of heights and low points.We baptize her in recognition of human nature. When she does wrong the same waters will wash her clean. Like a tree, the waters of baptism will nourish her.They will help her blossom and flourish as a spiritual being, as well as the other aspects of her life.  In another biblical image, we pray her life will be like a well-watered garden.

 

Baptism will follow her all the length of her life  One of the reasons we have infant baptism is that she will be rooted and grounded in love. As she grows, her roots in the faith can deepen. I pray that her life will be rich and full with a wide array of experiences. An old VBS selection sings of  fountain flowing deep and wide. The fact of baptism's invisible work is an indicator of the often deep streams in our lives, beneath the surface. No part of her life cannot be touched by the presence of god; no experience could be too small for notice, too large to be encompassed in the scope of the care and concern of God. One of the reasons that I've grown to appreciate infant baptism is that it is harder to overemphasize one experience, such as being born again that may lead to baptism to seeing God with us the whole long course of our lives.

 

Her name comes through Greek, by way of French. It means that she is part of a victorious people. She will not be guaranteed success after success, but her baptism is a testament to our conviction that no power on earth can match the power of the love of God. No failure is too great to be reconciled or forgiven in the divine arms. In her baptism, she surely is. In her baptism,she is given the keys to victory over death. Her middle name, Jean, by way of French from Hebrew, means God is gracious.God is generous. Our passage speaks of God being exceedingly, immeasurably more than we ask or imagine.In baptism, she is filled with the fullness, the abundance of the light and love of God that bursts all boundaries. We see a baby and are stunned at the potential. In God's eyes in baptism, this child is filled with spiritual potential. Together we help form that potential into actuality over the years. In the household of God, we take care of that need to learn of God.

 

Last week we spoke of the church being built up by the grace of God. The structure of the presence of God changed this morning as Nicole is added to the dwelling place of God. Baptism is an adoption service for the household of God. When her family was considering adoption, a sudden opportunity to adopt her during labor.From a late evening phone call on a Wednesday, to a trip to an attorney and Texas, back to Indy and then to having a new child in life took about a week. In a sense, baptism is an adoption service into the family of God. So, she is truly one of the elect, one who has been chosen. In our theology, baptism is a response to God's selecting this child as God's own. In her young life, she has been made part of 2 new households.In her young life, she has been saved in a multitude of senses.Together, we interlock into each other's lives. Together, the spiritual structure called the church expands, with each one of us a vital element of its make-up. In that sense our baptism place us all in the great reservoir of God's overflowing care.

1) This is a  a way around denial. By extending David's moral horizon past himself,Nathan then gets David to recover moral perspective.See Peterson's Leap,p.185

2)David recovers through an outraged sense of justice, an important virtue for aking.

3)Ps. 51 is linked to this story. I love that David can pray in the face of this calamitous set of wrongs.

4) David is punished,but not directly. Whatd about God's justice? What about theparade of family
 trouble?

5) We replace the words for sin with softer ones. What does this do for repenting?

6)NIB, p.1294 maeks the good point that Nathan and David both represent the church, so we should not see only admonishing the sinner as the point of the story.

7) David's response then becomes I am a son of death, a chilling line.

8) v.6 pity=saving pity, or life saving compassion, used for Pahroah's daughter.

9) Nathan sees David as betraying god's many gracious deeds. David has done evil, even as he told Joab not to see the Uriah incident as evil in your eyes.

10) David recognizes his sin is not only humna, but against the Lord.

1) This is one of the great stories how sin has a tendency to multiply and deepen. It shows how the cover-up is often more problematic than the crime.

2) I don't know if Batsheba (daughter of an oath, or of the south) could be somewhat complicit. My sense is that her bath was private within a wall. She did not think that eyes from above could spy her. Nonetheless, even if David enjoyed the view, his actions go far beyond leering.

3) I read David as always having mixed motves. Others read this as a sudden fall from grace.

4) At any rate, David is now enjoying the indolence of royalty.

5) He enjoys the prerogatives of power. He treats her like a  letter, sending and receiving,returned.

6) Now she returns the favor, and she sends a brief message:pregnant.

7) David cannot imagine that Uriah, a foreigner wth a Jewish name, would not see the light, and be with hs wife, even afte drinking. uriah maintains the purity of the battle, something David has long forgotten.

8)Unable to pin the pregnancy on Uriah, David has another do his dirty work.

Sometimes, it seems as if things fall apart. Facing the changes of industry, Marx said that "everything solid melts in the air."  As we move through life, we work to have it hold together, to cohere. Memory is our great aid in this, and we react when our memory is disrupted. That's why people react when they looked at all of the changes in the Greensburg square during the 150th celebration and why high school reunions are disquieting. Many of us over, say 40, had a shock to our memories with the passing of Walter Cronkite. We talk easily about songs being the soundtrack to our lives, but he was the narrator we heard for events from the fifties into the Reagan era.

 

The writer of Ephesians is dealing with people who have felt the social ground shift under their feet. In the new church, they are associating with all sorts of different people, including people they were told to exclude in their lives. In an attempt to create group cohesion, we make in-groups and out-groups. Sometimes, minorities become more exclusive to keep from being pushed out, and to try to protect a sense of cultural force themselves.As Ephesians says, we put up dividing walls of hostility between each other; walls that separate us. I heard that a huge chunk of the Berlin Wall is being moved to an Ohio museum. I never thought that the symbol of the cold War would fall without a shot being fired. When that dividing wall of hostility fell, it opened the way to reconciliation of people long separated.  In the church, where a wall once stood, there stands Jesus Christ.

 

It is not an easy balance between honoring particular groups and trying to hold together. Our writer uses political language, of citizenship, of a common polity, a common wealth, to get across that we occupy a new position. It seems as if we are often trying to make distinctive points important and to downplay shared values and concerns. I am saddened that the Southport church is considering leaving our church family. In large part, church schism occurs when we over-emphasize distinct points of view instead of tending to what holds us together in the faith: Jesus Christ. Sometimes, when we insist that we are holier than thou, that we somehow have a lock on truth, we can even make God the dividing wall between us. I'm not saying all religion is the same, but I do contend that Christians mistake the small for the essential. We have gotten into a bad habit of making exit an early option, whether it's a marriage, a club, or even church. After all, it's only possible to cast stones when you are on the outside.

 

I like the image of building the church together, where we are all connected one to another, each block fitting in where it needs to. It doesn't give the sense that we are finished; after all, we have been in this building project for almost 2,000 years. Repeatedly, the passage speaks of peace. I don't think it is inner peace, but the actual reconciliation of groups of people, even former enemies, that is peace. We are better at dividing than reconciling. We can think up a myriad of causes for hostility, but few for peace. My prayer is that we imagine Jesus as the glue that holds us together. We have been turned into a household, a family, a family of God. Brothers and sisters in baptism, we can leave our own family dysfunctions at the door, and learn to model a healthy, vital way of living together. Jesus Christ helps us bridge the gaps in attitudes and styles. We can seek out what is positive in our differences instead of using differences as a cudgel to beat each other up.Life is too short to allow petty differences to drive us apart. let alone for us to learn to be together.

 

1) In bible Study, this could be a good place to introduce some of the maximal/minimum argument about historicity and ancient sites.

2) Notice how this starts compared to next week's reading.

3) When do you need rest from your enemies?

4) Nathan's switch would be a good time to talk about discernment.

5) What does God's response tell us about god's character here/

6) Does god like being outside because god enjoys creation? does God fear that enclosed in a space would have the tendency of pushing us to manipulate god, to put god in a box, to say who is in and who is out?

7) Whjat od you think of the word play with house here?

8) Is David motivated purely out of good, or is another mixed motive a consolidation of a religious and a political center in the city of david?

9)What are some stumbling blocks in a putely messianic interpretation of the last section? Does it explain why jesus was hoped to be a poitical messiah?

10) On sonship, see Ps. 2 The ANE often had entrhonement rituals for a child of the gods linked ot monarchy.

11) Given history, did god keep this promise?

 

1) In bible Study, this could be a good place to introduce some of the maximal/minimum argument about historicity and ancient sites.

2) Notice how this starts compared to next week's reading.

3) When do you need rest from your enemies?

4) Nathan's switch would be a good time to talk about discernment.

5) What does God's response tell us about god's character here/

6) Does god like being outside because god enjoys creation? does God fear that enclosed in a space would have the tendency of pushing us to manipulate god, to put god in a box, to say who is in and who is out?

7) Whjat od you think of the word play with house here?

8) Is David motivated purely out of good, or is another mixed motive a consolidation of a religious and a political center in the city of david?

9)What are some stumbling blocks in a putely messianic interpretation of the last section? Does it explain why jesus was hoped to be a poitical messiah?

10) On sonship, see Ps. 2 The ANE often had entrhonement rituals for a child of the gods linked ot monarchy.

11) Given history, did god keep this promise?

 

I think we have lost a sense of the holy, the transcendent mystery that surrounds us. In our effort to be casual, we've flattened our existence to the more mundane. You could tell what we thought was important when you looked at how banks and churches were built.m We don't make a great vault in contemporary churches; that is now left for malls and sports arenas.

 

Uzzah encounters the holy in the nature of touching the ark. It is a reminder of the biblical scene that Raiders of the Lost Ark touches where people are consuming merely for peering inside the ark. We tend to think that Uzzah is being punished for something. No, in the Bible the encounter with the wholly other, holy God is more than mere mortals can bear. It is the same sense as the fear that one could not encounter the face of God and live.  I have a feeling that the trouble lies in forgetting that the ark was to be carried in a special way, with special poles, not with the efficiency of a cart. The Holy One is not to be handled as merchandise, but with special care.

 

The same actions can be holy or unholy. David danced before the ark in a mode of ecstatic, uninhibited prayer. Michal was understandably bitter toward David. He was gone from her for years, and she was married to a man who loved her. Out of spite or power politics, David ordered that she be returned to him. I don't know the content of Salome's dance, but her mother knew that it would entice the king to a rash promise. Perhaps it was an unholy dance for a most unholy purpose of execution of John the Baptist. John the Baptist certainly wasn't holy in a sense of being well-scrubbed and mannerly. We've domesticated the holy with a sense of being prim and proper.  He had the fire of God in his soul; he was holy in the sense of being wild for God beyond any conventions or signs we would make.

 

It seems that one place where the holy is encountered is by nature writers such as Annie Dillard. they look carefully at nature, and in so doing, lose its romantic sense of being a pretty spectacle.. They see it in its dangers in poison, tooth, and claw. In that spectacle they find an awed awareness of the hand of the Creator. Nature is less an object to be analyzed, not a 3-D painting for us, but a living trace of the living God. Dillard writes "If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe it existed."

 

When I've been present at the birth of a child and at its polar opposite, death's door, I realized I am in the presence of the holy. When we face a moment of deep meaning, beyond our capacity to fully grasp, we are in the presence of the holy. God's holiness can be glimpsed, in part, in its extravagant diversity, astounding beauty, sheer abundant generosity of life. Our response to this truth is the religious act of praise, of adoration, in the face of the holy.