Posts Tagged New Year
State of the Church Address: Remember Your Baptism
Posted by Elizabeth Hagan in church life, sermons on January 8, 2012
State of Church Address 2012: Mark 1:4-11
It’s hard to believe that a little over three years ago, I stood in your midst in this very spot on the first day as your new pastor. When I look back at where I was then and where you were then, I stand amazed at what God has done in me, growing me up to be the pastor that I believe you need and amazed at who you have become as we’ve collectively followed Jesus.
For starters, I’d ask you to stand this morning if you were a regular attendee or member of Washington Plaza Baptist Church in January of 2009. (You may sit down). Now, I would invite those of you who began attending or have joined the church since January 2009.
The visualization just before our eyes is one of the many gestures that reminds of the great time of change the last three years we’ve experienced in this very room. Some beloved friends are no longer with us because of job transfers or moves, deaths, or because they’ve decided that we are not the community that is best for them. But, along the months, equally more have joined us too– eager to see what this “first church in 
Reston” or “that community in the middle of the Lake Anne” or “that church in the strip mall” (as I heard someone call us this week) are all about. We have much to celebrate as a community including the fact that we unique to our core. This is not the church, nor never will be the church, if you want to come and pretend.
Though the faces may change in worship, the spirit of Washington Plaza has stayed the same throughout. “There’s something in the air here,” a recent visitor told me, “I just knew I felt welcomed and loved just as I was from the moment I first walked in the doors.”
I am proud to be the pastor of a church that welcomes people. Washington Plaza is never a place to come where your doubts or questions will be trivialized– which never ceases to amaze me, even after all this time. Though seemingly a small thing, it’s not.
Even as your pastor, I feel spoiled when I visit other churches because I often don’t get the same feeling of knowing I’m accepted and valued with 
unconditional love. And, I’m proud that we’ve done a better job at welcoming our neighbors this year. Times like the Black History month program we hosted last February in this room alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. Christian Church, when our choir brought the house down with “I Love the Lord” and we sang “We Shall Overcome” together. Or, when we hosted neighborhood kids from around the Plaza in our Fabulous Fridays ministry this summer. These were stand-out welcoming moments for us!
In the same way, I am proud of our growth in intentional Interfaith partnerships. 2011 was a great year of learning more about Israel and Palestine from an Interfaith perspective and getting out in the community and talking to our neighbors of other faiths through discussion groups, special programs or shared mission projects. It’s exciting to see where our friendships with our Jewish, Muslim and other Christian friends might take us in the months ahead.
I am also proud to be the pastor of a church that hosts a booth at Gay Pride each year (even if our booth is stuck down in an ally so that not as many people see us as we like)– for our presence at events like this says a lot about the loving people we all. We proclaim loudly by simply being at such events that all Baptists are not like the hateful ones you see on tv.
I am proud to be the pastor of a church that is willing to try start and embrace new traditions. We’ve done a lot of work in the past year as a Church Council and in particular the worship ministry to make the high holy times of the Christian calendar to be special spiritually focused events for all of us.
Easter in 2011, was a fun day of welcoming neighbors in worship during our outdoor service (dogs were included too), hosting children for an Easter Egg hunt on the Plaza and celebrating triumphantly in song led by our choir and other guest artists in our 11 am worship gathering. I look forward to how we can make Easter just as meaningful and spiritually uplifting this year as we did last.
In the same way, we’ve built up the traditions of Advent in our community life– setting aside four Sundays at the end of every calendar year for reflective thinking about how we can usher in more peace, hope, love and joy into our lives. I love the eager anticipation that many of you are growing to feel about Advent in “getting” that Christmas is not really Christmas if we don’t prepare spiritually for it first.
We’ve got a lot of good momentum we’re heading into 2012 with as a community.
But, with all of this true, our race is not complete! There is more work to be done.
How appropriate then for this Sunday, the day we always set aside in our church for some thinking and dreaming about what we’ve accomplished and what we want to accomplish in the coming year to read the story of Jesus’ baptism. It’s the one huge moment of “beginnings” for Jesus– the time when he put aside the past and looked to the future with great purpose and focus.
As Jesus’ cousin John becomes a preacher in his own right, gathering the crowds along the Jordan River and baptizing them in the waters of repentance, Jesus makes his move. He too, comes to John and asks for baptism. Though this was much to John’s surprise, feeling unworthy to even untie his sandals, Jesus insists. “You must baptize me!” Jesus says.
And in receiving the waters of baptism, Jesus proclaims with this simple, yet profound act what his life’s mission was going to be all about: obedience to the God’s plans for him. Furthermore, Jesus’ baptism would be the event setting his eyes on the cross where he would give even his life in service of all people.
However, I think when you and I picture baptisms, as we’ve witnessed them as services for others, often associate them with the word “nice.”
If we’ve watched infant baptisms, we might remember oohing and wooing over the beautiful dresses on the soft faced babies standing beside admiring parents. If we’ve watched baptisms of older children or teens, we have memories full of the same sentiment. “Isn’t it great that they are giving their lives to God?” we might say. Or even when we see adults being immersed in the baptismal pool, which is usually what we see here at Washington Plaza– we also might feel moved through the sincerity of commitment in fully accepting their Christian faith.
But, is this what Jesus’ baptism was all about? Is this what our baptisms are about? A nice symbol?
If we stick closely to Mark’s reading, then we realize Jesus’ baptism was much more dramatic than a pretty religious ceremony for mothers to cry at and snapshots to be taken of cute religious devotees. This symbolic act was all about conversion to a whole new way of life.
In verse 10, just as Jesus was coming out of the water, notice what happens to the heavens in response. They were “torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on [Jesus].”
Interestingly, the verb choice of “torn apart” is exactly the same at the end of Mark’s gospel when the temple curtain is “torn apart” when Jesus dies. A “violent” and striking verb here in both places flags us to see EVERYTHING was about to change for Jesus and EVERYTHING would change for us too if we let our baptismal vows of Christ as Lord wash over us and over us again well past the day our head first touched the holy waters.
In Marcus Borg recent book: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, describes the conversion experience of baptism in this way: it’s “more than changing religions or joining a new church. It can also mean [and should mean] ‘a process, whether sudden or gradual, whereby religious impulses and energies become central to one’s life.”[i]
Baptism, thus is not something that we do, or is done to us, or gets us into membership at the church (as many might think), but the first step in our process of formed in a completely new way of thinking and being in the world than is natural to us.
Baptism is a covenant– which just is a fancy way of talking about a relationship with God. Baptism is a covenant which bids us to come and let loose of the past and allow God to raise us up in our death to new life. And, most of all, in this covenant, we are bound not only in relationship with God, but in relationship with our family who agrees through their baptism to be in relationship with us as well.
What are the two questions I ask any at their baptism? (Who is Jesus to you? And, will you commit to be a part of church community like this one to see your journey through?) It is not coincidence that such questions are asked of any baptism candidate here.
A colleague of mine from seminary, Enuma Okoro who recently published a spiritual memoir about her search for spiritual community in which she writes about her own infant baptism saying, “If I had really known what I was getting myself baptized into, the life and death of Christ, I’m not sure I would have signed on the dotted line.”[ii] And, maybe, if you and I really knew what our baptism would ask of us, we wouldn’t have gone into the waters either. But, the last time I checked, this room is full of lots of baptized persons. So, what does this mean for us as we look toward strengthening the state of our church in 2012?
It would be easy for me at this point to talk numbers– to say that we need to start more Sunday School classes for children or offer more community welcoming Bible studies or give more money for our building fund or that we need to be together more often than Sunday mornings if we are going to grow in fellowship with one another.
And, even if all of this is true (and it is), such specific topics and goal oriented numbers would really cut short the blessings of what it means to be a baptized body of believers called the church at Washington Plaza if we don’t start we don’t start with first things first.
So, this is my charge to you as a church. The following is what you need to do in 2012 if you want your church to growth, thrive and prosper in the New Year. Are you ready? Live into your baptism. Simply live into it.
For some of you this means actually being baptized for the first time. You’ve been attending church here for a while now and you feel God’s presence and you are eager to grow, but that huge tank of water in front of people thing scares you. (I assure you I’ve never dropped anyone yet). In the waters, my friends, it is the only way to begin– to submit yourselves to the washing away of the past and rising again, in the footsteps of Jesus. For all of you who haven’t yet been baptized, the waters are waiting just for you!
For some of you, living into your baptism means moving from a “spiritual” person to a “faith-filled” person. Being spiritually minded in your daily life is wonderful (which I know many of you are)– recognizing moments divine intervention, seeing God’s presence in the small signs, and praying for those in distress, and I applaud you if this is how you describe your life.
But, to all you spiritually minded folks, I say there’s more. Your baptism asks for more than to be spiritual. Rather than being a compliant participant in the unseen things of this world, I challenge you to be a facilitator of faith. Move from responding to God questions to asking God questions of others, move from showing up when you are asked at church to volunteering to serve at church, and move this day from praying in crisis mode to praying with an eye on the future mode.
And, for still some of you who are already faith-filled in your life steps, living into your baptism might mean today even more death so that there can be even more life. Just because you died once or twice in your life to self, doesn’t mean in the kingdom of God that you will never be asked to do it again!
And so, living into your baptism will be doing something as crazy as applying for a new job where you feel called to serve but the pay is less, moving to a new space where you can be more deeply connected in community, reconciling with a family member you’d said you’d never speak to again or as we talked about in the deacon’s meeting yesterday, making room in your heart for hope to be born again. Only the Spirit can clue you into the specifics– but what I can tell you is this, your baptism might just lead you in directions for your life that you absolutely in a million years never planned (and this is a good thing, I promise!).
So, are you in? Are you ready to remember your baptism? It’s our high calling a people set a part to usher in through our lives more and more of God’s presence on earth.
So, today, church, just as we are about to prepare our hearts to come to the Lord’s table, we’re going to remember our baptisms too. We are going to remember our deaths so that all God’s new beginnings in this New Year can bring us new life too. So, no maybe this isn’t the journey for you, but maybe it is and maybe today is your opportunity to say again to our Lord: “I want you in my life.” I can’t think of a better way to begin 2012.
AMEN
2011: A Year in Review
Posted by Elizabeth Hagan in Being Baptist, church life, making it all work on January 1, 2012
As I consider the fact that today is the last calendar day of 2011, I feel much gratitude for all the many people and places and opportunities that have made this year so memorable for this Preacher on the Plaza. Tomorrow I will begin my 4th year as Washington Plaza’s pastor (though I’m still on Christmas vacation and won’t be at church).
January 2011 started with a bang. Not only did the dawning of the New Year come with such high hopes for me personally and professionally for wonderful things ahead, but a life-changing trip to Israel was on the horizon. Traveling with an Imam, a Rabbi and another local Reston area pastor over MLK weekend, Kevin and I entered into the world of Interfaith dialogue like no other experience could have given us. And, so did Washington Plaza. We hosted a series of conversations about Israel in our joint adult Sunday morning Bible Study hour each week in January. And, we gathered together as Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike in Reston for a community forum in June. All of this is what we hope is just the beginning of a long relationship of partnering together.
In February, I celebrated my 31st birthday in the quietness of few dear friends and got these fabulous gifts. And, our pastoral intern– a first in a long time at WPBC– John Luft got settled into work with our growing children’s ministry. And, I learned how old I felt when John regularly wanted to call me “ma’am” or “Rev. Hagan” though I kept telling him that we were colleagues and just “Elizabeth” was fine with me.
As Lent rolled around (late this year), a new worship series was a big hit. We spent the six Sundays leading up to Easter exploring “Characters Welcome” and had wonderful extra worship participation from members of the worship ministry offering testimonies, song and even especially designed art for the altar. This was one of my favorite sermons from the series that took a different look at the woman at the well– maybe she wasn’t so evil after all?
Easter, was one of the best yet at WPBC. We hosted an outdoor “sunrise” service (if you consider 8 am early) followed by a big pancake breakfast thanks to Holly, Bobby, Brad and the rest of the cooking crew and a wonderfully joyful Easter celebration service that Ken and the choir arranged for us. I remember feeling spiritually moved this year, more than previous years– a sign of the Spirit among us. Easter was not show as it had seemed in other churches where I belonged previously: at WPBC this year, Easter was powerful worship of a living God.
May was a month of personal and professional travel for me. I spent the week after Easter rediscovering at the spa with a dear preacher friend in Sedona (with two years worth of funeral and wedding money saved). I did a lot of thinking about life there, especially as the scenery outside my window each morning was just too beautiful not to put me in a happy place. At the end of the month, I traveled to the mountains of North Carolina for the annual girl preaching retreat (with other Baptist females who were also senior or co-pastors). Being with kindred and kind spirits was a source of great inspiration for the long days of summer ahead. I wrote about the experience of gaining collective wisdom from this group in this post.
Over the course of this year in many ways, I’ve seen my sense of vocational calling refined. If you now ask me what I do, I would tell you that I am a pastor writer and maybe one day I’ll be a writer pastor (who knows?). Such a revelation has been one that has taken much time to have the courage to say– for writing can be one of the most vulnerable things you can do– but one that I’ve claimed more deeply throughout the year beginning with this post in May, and then applying and being accepted to the summer workshop at Collegeville in Minnesota. Being a writer, has been a calling that has bubbled up much joy in me so you can imagine how much I loved spending a week thinking about and practicing the art of writing alongside 11 other pastors. It was heavenly as you can tell from this post from my time there in August. I am blessed that the leadership of Washington Plaza supports my growing vocation as a pastor writer. They were so happy to celebrate with me when I found out in November that I received a grant to do some more writing through a grant from the Louisville Institute, even though this means I’ll be taking some extra time off in 2012 for research purposes.
In the dog days of summer at church, we took at Sabbatical from our sanctuary and explored a new kind of informal worship around tables in the Plaza Room. The word around the water fountain about this series was “It was like coffee-house church.” Though the jury is still out if we will do it again, it was a nice change for all of us I think from the regular pace of church. We also hosted our first ever “Fabulous Fridays” as a weekly community outreach to children in the month of July. I’m not sure had more fun– the kids or the adults– as you can tell from the pictures. But, it was a great learning lesson for all of us that in relation to children’s ministry “if we built it, they will come.”
I also explored how controversal blogging can be with the mixed responses to these posts about gay rights and how the church needs to get on board, women in ministry, the future of denominations. In the end, I’m glad to have been a catalyst of the conversation and am glad to be writing, even if not everyone agrees (though I’m sorry often times that blogging does not lead to more face-to-face meetings which is the best communication and transformation tool after all).
This fall, I explored some difficult topics in worship in worship especially after being called upon to do a funeral for a 1 month old that broke my heart in ways there are no words for. We went “back to the basics” in September talking about grace, forgiveness, community life and authority. I got a lot of feedback to this sermon on forgiveness. And, as the preacher, I realized again, how much we struggle as human people with giving and receiving the “I forgive you” that happen throughout our lives.
I got a much-needed mental break of a couple of days on the beach in September with Kevin and two of our very dear friends though getting home from this trip turned into a nightmare, but also a great sermon illustration. I really do love my church peeps and am proud to be their pastor– and not just because this is what Lovett Weems taught me to say 
I also participated in two funeral services with connections to my days at First Baptist Gaithersburg for two saints of God in their own regard. Joseph Smith and Tom Hobbs are two amazing men that I miss every time I think of them. It is too sad that the good die young (and I still consider 70 young).
But, in all honesty, as much as I see so much good in 2011, it has not all been roses. I feel a great sense of sadness for the hopes for 2011 that could have been but simply are not. (If you are interested in reading more about this, be watching for a spiritual memoir about grief coming your way. It will be my first book and I’m really excited!). This fall, I was blessed with an invitation to join a preacher writing group that includes wonderful writers like her and her and her (so much fun!) that will continue into the New Year. It’s the peer pressure I need to keep writing and seeking to write well.
I also grieve for how there have been times in our church life together when individual members have chosen a path of separating themselves instead of being bound together in community. There are some folks with whom I began the ministry as pastor of Washington Plaza with who are now no longer in church because of various reasons. I grieve what more we could have done as a church to welcome them in and meet their needs, but also take a dose of realism too believing that the church and I have done the best we could. I can’t make people want Jesus or Christian community or even understand the path we are on as a church. For those who have decided not to journey with us in 2012, I say, it is their loss. For, I still believe about WPBC that the best is yet to be!
Personally, I have dreams to keep going in 2012 because of the amazing faithfulness of this life partner and various communities of colleagues, friends and virtual supporters (such as you who are reading right now) who keep me encouraged to believe in the mystery of hope. There are times when this life and vocational calling seems more than I can handle, but then just the right person or word or moment to breathe deeply shows up and another day comes as the sun rises.
So with all the good and bad: cheers on this last day of the year to the old being gone and the new to come! I am not so secretly excited about what is to come that I know not yet. What about you?
