A Sermon from Falmouth Congregational Church…

A Sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship service of the Falmouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Falmouth, Maine on the First Sunday after Epiphany, January 10, 2010. The scripture reading was Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.

“Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright”

A fable can be told about an orphaned tiger who was adopted by a herd of goats and was raised by them to speak their language, emulate their ways, eat their food, and, in general, to believe that he was a goat himself.

One day an adult tiger, a real tiger, came out of the forest; all the real goats scattered into the bushes. The young, tiger-goat or goat-tiger was left to fend for himself. He was afraid and yet somehow not afraid.

The adult tiger asked him what he meant by his masquerade, but all the young one could do was bleat, like a goat, and nibble the grasses, like a goat. The adult tiger was not impressed at all. He grabbed the young one by the scruff of the neck, shook him, and carried him to a forest pool. He forced him to look at their two reflections, side-by-side, to draw his own conclusions. When this failed, the adult tiger offered him his first taste of raw meat. The young tiger recoiled from the unfamiliar look and taste, but then as he chewed a little more and swallowed, he began to feel it warming his insides.

The truth dawned on him but only gradually. Lashing his little tail about and digging his claws into the ground, the young beast raised his head, and the jungle trembled at the sound of his first roar. The adult tiger left him, fading back into the forest.

The young one was not a goat at all. He was a tiger, except he did not know that he was one. In every sense but one, he had been a goat.

To use our faith language, we are created in the image of God Almighty, but sometime and somewhere, after creation, perhaps in the Garden, something happened. Like a mirror with a crack in it, we began giving out an image that was seriously distorted.

To return to the fable, if the tiger who thinks he is a goat could really be a goat, then he would not have a problem; although he might quickly have become lunch for the true tiger. Fortunately, there is still enough of the “tiger” or image of God in us to make us discontented with our goat hood. We eat grass but it never really fills us. We bleat well enough but deep down inside there is the suspicion that we were really made for roaring.

No scripture better illustrates this idea than the words spoken at Jesus’ baptism. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (3:17). That has to be one of the most important theological sentences in the Gospels. Attached to it is an obvious question: what are you going to do about it?

It will never do to just hear the voice from Heaven making a statement that Jesus is the Child of God. It always has a rider or addendum attached to it: what are you going to do about Jesus who is “the Beloved” of God. The message comes as both declaration and question, and demands an answer.

Step back into the parable. Standing by the forest pool, we have seen the image of the tiger. It is a wonderful image because it cuts through so much contemporary thinking and rubbish. We look at him who is the Christ; we look ourselves who are the Disciples of our time and place. We suddenly see what a real tiger looks like, and if we thought our goat hood was a problem before, we now reach the point, where the comparison and contrast are undeniable and become so painful that one or the other of us simply has to go back into the forest.

Step back into history. Either we gang up on the Christ and crucify him, to escape his gaze and person, or we risk the crucifixion of our goathood, which must go if it to be replaced by tiger hood. We have a problem and an opportunity and neither will go away of its own accord. What is one to do?

“This is my Son….” In an older English translation, the voice of God thunders, “Thou art mine.” “You are mine,” says God. “What are you going to do about it?” The words should remind us of where our life and all life come from. The Bible tells us that the Lord God (Yahweh) created us, and gave us the mysterious gift of person-hood.

More than just creating us, God has been forming us, bit by bit, through the years, bending here, molding there, through countless experiences of joy and sorrow, prosperity and its absence, achievement and failure. Even when we have chosen to ignore, even when we have been unable to feel God’s creative presence in the pain and the tears, God has been exerting a quiet, lifting and steadying influence on us.

Baptism is the proclamation and the experience of just that fact that we are who we are because God created us, loved us, called us, washed us, forgave us, and will one day bring us into the Kingdom or realm of God.

It is disarming to be told that my person, my name, my purpose and my very being were given to by my Lord and my God. It has been said that the sweetest sound any of us will ever hear is our own name spoken by someone we love deeply and who deeply loves us.

What does the Christian faith mean by taking this man who really was a man, and calling him the Son or the Child of God? Just this, I believe, and it is much: that in this man there is power to turn goats into tigers, to give life to the half-alive and even to the dead; that what he asks is what he also has the power to give; and this is the power of God that, and that is why men and women and little kids, too, have long called him the Christ, the Anointed of God.

What he gives us in our selves. What he tells us is our names and who we really are: God’s beloved children, brothers and sisters all. The real marvel is not the water and the descending dove, but the moment of recognition recorded there in: “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”

If you were walking in your backyard one day and heard a thundering voice calling your name saying, “I love you, you are mine. Go and do as I say!” what would you do? Would you recognize that voice?

Like the English mystic and poet William Blake, we can be left with a poetic question: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry….Did He smile his work to see? Did He whom made the lamb make thee?” What is your answer?