11/3/02 - All Saints

Our Savior’s Lutheran Church

Hartland, WI.

Pastor Christa von Zychlin

Text:  I John 3:1-3

DO YOU NEED A BATH?

All Saints Sunday is about God washing us clean by water and the Spirit.

I purposefully refuse to remember exactly which of Our Savior’s college student moms told me this story, but I think it’s a true one:

Her son, & his roommate got into a little contest…

Who could go the longest without washing their bed sheets.

“It seems like it ended up being a tie”, said this Mom

“We just put those sheets in the dumpster when it was time to move him home at the end of the year.” 

“But You know what?”  she said  “My son is right about one thing, it really is humanly possible to go an entire year without washing your sheets.” 

How are your sheets on your bed at home right now?  Are they in need of washing?

May I also ask, how’s the state of your soul?  Is it marked by sweat, tears, and the dreck of everyday living?  Does your soul need a wash, do you need a bath?

XXX

Hey how about your mattresses & pillows, for that matter?  How many of you have heard of dust mites?  Dust mites are little microscopic monsters that live in every one of our homes.  I learned an interesting fact this week:  you know the dust that you floating see in the air when the sun shines in your window just right?  80% of it is dead skin.  And dust mites thrive  by  feeding on  yummy microscopic entrees like dead skin and other side dishes which make up ordinary household dust.  Depending on how old your mattress is that you use right now, it contains between 100,000 and 10 million dust mites.  Even grosser is the little known fact that 10% of a two year old pillow is made up of dead mites and their droppings.  How many of you have washed your pillows lately?  Did you even know that you should? 

And back to the state of your soul.  How much of the weight of your soul is made up of old grudges, and crabby misunderstandings?  How many millions of microscopic monsters of  nasty comments, stingy giving, deadened hope, and general self-centered joylessness make up the weight of your life, like dead dust mites in a 2 year old pillow?

When I was a little girl, my bother & sister and I in the winter time anyway, we just took one bath a week.  Now we did take sponge baths the other days, you know, you take a washcloth at the sink & wash off strategic areas of your body, but as far as a full bath, growing up in a working class neighborhood, the cost of heat & hot water & soap for all I know, It was only on Saturday night, the night before church, that we three got a full hot bath.  I loved those baths.  The only catch was that we of course would not waste water by putting in fresh water for each bath, heavens no, so we would share baths, the three of us altogether in the bathtub when we were really little, then one by one in turns using the same water as we got older.  Sometimes, due to dawdling or just finishing one last chapter of the Nancy Drew mystery I’d be reading,  I would be the last of the three, and the water would be luke warm and rat gray when I stepped into the bath, but usually, as the youngest,   and needing to be first in bed, I also got to be first in the bath, and then I’d  get to watch the water turn from bubbly clear to murky gray as a week’s worth of dust, dirt, and grime was lifted from my little body.  I considered this normal. 

xxx

How about you, did you take a bath or a shower last night or this morning? 

And how about the state of your soul, brothers and sisters in Jesus, would you consider it normal to bathe in Christ’s great washing river of salvation once in your lifetime?  Or once every couple of years? Or even just once a week, on a (Saturday night or a Sunday morning) at church?

No, no.  Old man John, Jesus’ beloved disciple, who was writing his letter found in our Bible when he was maybe the last living of the men & women who had surrounded Jesus in his earthly living,

Old apostle John says see!  How very much our heavenly father loves us, for he allows us to be called children of God!  And that’s what we really are!

When you and I were baptized by water and the spirit… some of you like Kaelyn, Riley, Alaina, Mitchel, Tiernan, Andrew, Heather, Harley, Katie, Riley ,Colton, Alan, Colin Jack , Jack, Calvin, Dylan and Sydnee, just this past year

And some of us like Sandy & Jude & Will & me

Decades ago,

When were baptized,

God received us just the way we were.  At our baptism, God said, “I love you, I sent my son to die for you and to allow you to be reborn as my beloved child.”

But as one old saint said, “God loves us exactly the way we are AND he loves us too much to let us stay like that.”

In the Lutheran church we have this terrible heresy.  It’s so stupid when you think of it.

On the one hand,   we have this beautiful Biblical tradition of baptizing infants, children, and young people.  It’s biblical because in the early church there were continually whole households being baptized into God’s saving grace… and we at our Savior’s are such a household of faith…

But then, like a poor family afraid to pay for heat and water,

Like an adolescent away from home for the first time,

We sometimes act as if there’s some bet with a college roommate going on… “I don’t need to bring my child to church anymore, she’s baptized. 

I don’t need to wash my sheets, they don’t smell that bad.

I don’t need to go to church and hear the Gospel, I already went at Christmas,

I don’t need to wash my pillow, I’ve only had it for 2 years.  

I don’t need to belong to a church community, I was confirmed when I was fifteen.”

Oh but we do need to be washed in Jesus’ Grace again and again and again.

Not by another water baptism, you only need one of those in your lifetime,

But you and I need to be washed in God’s word, daily lifting the impurities from our thoughts and our actions, weekly feeding on the bread & wine of the sacrament of the altar.

At our church in Iowa Mike & Paula were a childless couple in their late 30’s who went through Lutheran Social Services to begin foster parenting with the hopes of eventually adopting.  On Christmas Eve, little Joseph came into their lives, three years old, taken away from his alcoholic mother and a schizophrenic father at birth, then left with a set of foster parents who left him for hours locked up in a closet when he “misbehaved”,  Mike & Paula received this child into their lives, adopted him as quickly as they could, and then began the process of bathing him with their love.

“He wouldn’t let us touch him at first,” Paula told me once, he would just crouch & rock, like he was still trying to comfort himself in that locked up closet.  And he would scream when we gave him a bath, because his first foster parents would use very hot or very cold bath water to punish him.” When he was 1 and 2 and 3 years old.

Paula & Mike are the most lovingly consistent parents I’ve ever seen, And still, now that Joseph is 12 years old, they get regular calls from the school and the principal. “ Joseph is acting out today.  Joseph got into a fight today.  Joseph used the really bad words in the classroom today.

Paula explained to me, you don’t get rid of a child’s pain overnight, or even in a couple of years.  It takes a life time of regular, consistent love, firmness, bi-weekly counseling, and in Joseph’s case, daily physical contact.

But just this week Paula  sent me an e-mail to say that Joseph came over to her as she was sitting on the couch and  started rubbing her back!  “That may not sound that amazing to you,” she says, “but he’s never ever initiated positive physical contact before.  I’m just so happy because I just love him and I want him to be ok.  I want him to be ok so badly.”

“See what love the Father has given us,” says old man John, “that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

Thank God for his consistency in loving you, and his desire to bathe you clean and hold you close, and make you ok, not just once, but every day every WEEK – NEW;  in your life here on earth, and perfectly with all his saints in the world to come.   AMEN.     

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