Lorax and How Bad Can I be

This was NOT a sermon, just a reflection.  I did a little bit of it for the kid's service, but just felt like I needed to send it out there.  Click on the purple links to listen to the song or read the scripture from this week.  Please feel free to leave comments.
Missy

Luke 3:15-22

"How bad can I be"

We were watching the Lorax tonight...again... with the kids and the song "How bad can I be" came on.  Besides being incredibly catchy it has a lot to say to Christians let alone a five year old 

I am drawn to this song in particular because we are celebrating Jesus baptism this week.  I keep thinking about what we can end up like if we just continue to do what "comes naturally" as the song says.  We are a selfish people who seem to try and fill ourselves up with everything else in the world, but what is drawing us - God .  We don't always look at the long term consequences, nor do we know them.  We can't usually see around our selves and our own ideas and wants to see that there may be something better, not only for ourselves in the long run, but for everyone, for the collective community that we share this planet with.

How bad can it be when we do what comes naturally?  Well in many places you can't drink the water. In our own dear Hudson River you don't want to eat the fish, and please do not fall off your kayak into it.  Our planet wastes 1/3 to 1/2 of the food it produces and we have millions starving to death.  We have places where our search for precious metals to create faster cell phones and computers have caused the land, the air and the water to be not only unusable but to be poisonous   We cut down our trees without replacing them, dump poisons into the environment and produce so much carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that our global temperature keeps rising.  And then we have the audacity to complain when the weather is all messed up or we are hit by floods and storms we have never seen the likes of. I think sometimes the question should be "How bad does it have to get?"  How bad are we willing to let things get before we take a stand, before we shake ourselves out of our sugar induced stupors to respond?  I am not sure.

We could also look at it like this as well - how bad can it be when we do what comes naturally in our own lives? More people are dying of strokes, heart attacks and stress related issues than ever before.  We no longer take a Sabbath and no one has time to spend with family or friends.  The computer has replaced conversations and although we are connected to at least two or three devices for extended periods of time constantly communicating with one another more people are depressed then ever before. We are fixated by machines, novelty and new things and that seems to trap many people into constantly upgrading and playing and becoming ever more isolated.   How bad can it be to do what comes naturally?

I do know however that God is letting us have our free will.  We have the free will to destroy ourselves if we so choose.  Yet God is calling us, pulling us towards God.  We have a God sized hole in the middle of our souls and God pulls us toward him.  Do we fight it or do we accept it?  That truly is the question.  As a Christian who accepts that pull we accept it by becoming baptized.  We publicly give God free reign over our beings.  This is not a private act in most cases.  It is not supposed to be a private act.  Jesus didn't get baptized by himself so no one could see.  There were witnesses.  People heard God.  It was big! God claimed him publicly - just as he does for each of us who gets baptized. It is not a private act because we are a communal people.  We are agreeing to let the Holy Spirit in to our lives and our hearts.

This is also not just a safe little routine.  Have you ever experienced a severe rain storm?  Have you felt wind that could blow off a roof?  Have you watched flames consume anything?  These are the elements used in a baptism. It isn't a small thing, it is a big thing.  These are all things that mean the difference between life and death for us and we can not control them.

We need water.  This is our main symbol in baptism.  We use it daily.  We wash in water, we drink it, we clean with it, we spray it on our gardens, we watch it fall from the sky.  Yet this life sustaining water is dangerous.  Just as easily we can drown in it, it can destroy entire towns, it can create slippery roads on a winters evening.   This tension in the gift of water is supposed to be there.  God is bigger than we know.  God can control these elements when we can not.  God can harness a flood, and yet provide water in the desert for his people to drink.  This tension is important because when ever we see water we are supposed to remember our baptism and God.

We are to remember that God is bigger than we know and more powerful than we can imagine.  When we are submerged or sprinkled with water we are told that in baptism we share in Christ's life and death and resurrection   With this act we die to our selves, to our own selfish ways and are given freedom from doing "what comes naturally".  We can choose life, we can choose to do something else, and if we don't we know it, we feel it, the pull is there.  When we are baptized we are born anew in Christ.  We are not trying to fight the pull of sin or separation from God on our own any longer, we are teaming up with a God who is bigger and more powerful than any sin can be who loves us and accepts us as we are.  God who walks with us even when we make poor choices, gives us strength and courage and continually pulls us towards him and his path.  This is baptism.  This is freedom.  This is a whole new life.  This is our journey.