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Today we reach down to the deep Baptist roots of this place. For those of you who don't
know, Judson is a Baptist Church. The United Church of Christ is a much later co-affiliation,
and though it plays a really big role here, the fundamental DNA of Judson is Baptist.
Now maybe that sounds strange to some of you, because there's this idea that Judson is some
kind of far out there progressive place, and that all Baptists are lock-step message control
conservatives. For many people, the Southern Baptists have taken over name brand recognition.
But underneath the brand, there is a profound tradition that gets handed down to us in this
place. It isn't really one denomination so much as it is a spiritual movement that stretches
back all the way to the 1600's in the Netherlands and England. And though the core identifying
mark of this movement is the rejection of infant Baptism (the Baptists said it only
worked for adults), in context, this gesture symbolized a rejection of all top-down church/state
hierarchies that would dictate to us from birth how we must behave in order to earn
God's approval.
Instead, Baptists affirmed the life and soul competency of each and every person. They
recognized that faith in God is a personal experience that people can only come to for
themselves, and that no bureaucratic authority can ever dictate what that looks like. Because
of this, the first-hand experience of each and every person was important for Baptists.
They knew that every story is unique and to be respected. Personal Testimony became the
lifeblood of the local circle, and so today, in that tradition, I've asked some of you
to share your Testimony. Because ours is a priesthood of all Believers, a free-church
movement that affirms the rights of local gatherings like this one to decide for themselves,
from the bottom up, what our own life of faith looks like, and how our loving service in
the world operates.
Now historically, this freedom led to an amazing diversity of perspectives and experiences,
especially as those first Baptist communities spread out across North America. Some of them
I would say were really great, and some of them I would say were not so great at all.
You can read all about it in the history books I suppose, but as someone who was raised Baptist
(my grandfather was a Baptist preacher, and there was scarcely a day growing up that we
weren't at the church) I'd say the best record is all the Baptist hymns they left behind
- some of which we're singing today. The music itself is the key to their history, because
while sometimes the lyrics are dated and we can cringe at some of their blind spots and
biases, the music itself leaves a trace of their hearts behind. And today I want us to
listen for them. Find out if we can hear a little bit of ourselves in them, underneath
all our own blind spots and biases, but maybe with some of the same hope, and maybe some
of the same heart. Will you please rise as you are able for our opening so.
Part 2 375 years after the first Baptist Church was
set up in North America, the descendants of these groups are no longer radical experiments
living against a wide open frontier of limitless resources and possibilities. The ground has
shifted, and today the Baptist Church represents huge concentrations of people, wealth, and
power in this country. The phrase "Baptist Church" is now largely synonymous with the
"Southern Baptist Church," and the same kind of top-down hierarchy that the original Baptist
Movement stood against. And this played out on both the right and the left. Even here
at Judson, which is affiliated with the more progressive American Baptists, we have at
times had to justify the spiritual life of our community to the denomination by reminding
them what the "free-church" movement is supposed to be all about.
But I say all this to once remind us of one of the core spiritual legacies of this place.
And it sounds so obvious, but somehow - in the social politics of 2014 - the notion of
"soul competency" is still a revolutionary idea, just like it was in the year 1608, or
even in the year 33. It's the idea that all our religious traditions are always and forever
incomplete. There is no holy book, idea, song, or institution that can ever deliver us on
its own, because these things all lack one fundamental ingredient that activates them
into life. And that ingredient is you. Your life, and your immediate experience of God,
or Spirit, in the world.
In Baptism, this is symbolized as living water, flowing water, and it reminds us that the
life of faith isn't a noun, it's a verb. The life of faith isn't a set of specific ideas
you must believe in, or political positions you must hold. Faith is a living thing, that
must be rediscovered anew by each generation and each individual in motion. Faith is something
that circulates, you can't see it at rest, but only in the specific, person to person
demonstrations of love and compassion that sometimes we are fortunate enough to receive,
and then decide whether or not we're going to pass along to others. Because it's not
enough to read about Jesus' baptism, we must discover the life of the spirit for ourselves.
This may be the greatest legacy of Edward Judson's Baptist Church. The theological reminder
that your voice must be heard, that your story must be told, that each soul is competent
to determine for itself how the fountain of love that wells up within us must flow out
into the world. Because this is God entering the world through us, and it doesn't happen
second hand. It's up to you to decide how to pray, or whether to pray. It's up to you
to decide how to serve others, just like it's up to you to decide what you do with your
body, who you're going to sleep with, who you're going to fall in love with. Ultimately
only you can know the circumstance of what God is doing in your life. By definition it's
necessarily a personal relationship. And then we, as a community, decide how we're all going
to live together, how - as a group - we live out our interior call to love and serve and
build a beloved community together. We can't dictate this for everybody, it never works
from the top down, but we can do it together in groups like this, with the people we are
in direct personal relationship with, from the bottom up.
This was the way of life Jesus demonstrated, and it is perhaps as radical now as it was
2,000 years ago. Now it's happened once or twice recently that I've been talking in this
way with someone new that I've met who doesn't know I'm a Minister, and they've asked me
"are you an anarchist?" And I can't tell you what infinite glee it gave me in those situations
to say "no, I'm a Baptist." Now will you join me in singing one of my very favorite Baptist
hymns - I use to listen to the Loretta Lynn version of it and cry, "How Great thou art,"
please rise as you are able.