There is a scene in The Sound of Music when Maria teaches the major musical scale to the Von Trapp children who are learning to sing.
Being Outside, after Jack’s baptism, able to gather again, it’s the right time for us to consider our faith.
If we start at the very beginning of faith: it is about Incarnation, Baptism & Grace…
As our Book of Common Prayer puts it…
The Incarnation is the understanding that the divine Son became human (God became one of us), so that in him human beings might be adopted as children of God and be made heirs of God's kingdom.
Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ's Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.
Grace is God's favor toward us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.
As the song from the Sound of Music concludes,
"When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything."
If we remember and believe: that God became one of us, and through our Baptism, we follow in the faith, then by God’s grace we can do anything…
Covid, Racism, Hate, Despair, Job Loss, you name it, God is with us in it all and we are with each other as the body of Christ in the world to sustain the weary and heal the sick, to free the oppressed, to bring love and hope and light to all.
In their book The Tales from the Night Rainbow, Pali Jae Lee and Koko Willis recount this parable from Hawaiian folklore:
“Each child, it is believed, is born with a bowl of perfect light. If the child tends the light, it will grow in strength and the girl or boy can swim with the sharks, fly with the birds, and know and understand all things. But if the child, along the path of his or her life, becomes envious, jealous, fearful, or angry, each of these emotions becomes like a stone that the child places in their bowl of light.
As a result, some of the light goes out because the stone and the light cannot hold the same space. If the child continues on this path, the child becomes heavy like a stone; a stone cannot move, and a stone cannot grow. But if at any time the child tires of being a stone, all she or he needs to do is turn their bowl upside down: the stones will fall away and the child’s light will shine once more.”
In every life there are moments when we are overwhelmed by “stones” of grief, disappointment, despair, hopelessness. Or we let anger, envy, and hate be the stones we collect. But Jesus promises in today’s Gospel that the light of God is always in our “bowl” if we are wise and humble enough to turn our bowl upside and let the stones fall away and the light returns.
That is God’s grace.
Turning over a life full of stones is not easy and often requires the help of others and sometimes we are called to offer our understanding, patience and generosity to help other souls cast their stones aside.
If we start at our beginning: Incarnation, Baptism & Grace – living out of that understanding – we can do anything for ourselves and our world.
Jesus calls us to embrace a vision of hope that is the opposite of fear: hope that matches our uncertainty of the unknown with the certainty of the love of God; hope that can only be found and embraced when we reach beyond our own fears to confront the fears and heal the hurts of others; hope that lives in the Incarnation & Baptism and is transformed by grace.
Amen.
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