Sermon for the Installation of Rev. Rony Reyes, Sunday, March 30, 2008

GOD’S HOLY MOUNTAIN

Rev. Dr. David Andersen

Pastor Emeritus, First Baptist Church of Greater Toledo

Galatians 3:23-29, Isaiah 25:6-10 (Other references: Isaiah 56:1-8, 2:2-3, 9:9)

The first time I visited Chicago as a college student looking at seminaries to attend, I fell in love with it. Never has that love for this city faded. I chose Northern Seminary, partly because of its proximity to Chicago; I worked at Marshall Field’s part time as a student; and I met my wife in Chicago.

The first church I served after graduating from seminary was in Joliet, Illinois, which enabled continued forays into the city. I then served churches in West Virginia, Michigan and Ohio, but because my wife’s family lived in Chicago, we continued our visits to the city, and always when updating my personnel profile, sent by the denomination to search committees of churches looking for a pastor, I included Chicago as a geographic preference.

Nothing ever happened, but here I am today in Chicago, preaching at the installation service for Rony Reyes, my young former associate at the last church I pastured before retiring. Rony is living my dream. How did this happen? It is like the son fulfilling the dreams of the father, and I am overjoyed, but it is not just because Rony is living my dream, it is because I believe there is no better fit in heaven than what has the potential for being in this new relationship between a pastor and a church. It is as though God has played matchmaker in bringing you together and I am delighted this morning to serve as one of the groomsmen, a witness to the formalizing of this unique bond between pastor and people.

Rony needs the challenge this church will give him, and this church needs the love and sensitivity Rony will bring to you as your pastor. And I am blessed to know that somehow that dream I dreamed as a young man was perhaps not all whimsical fantasy but helped in the end to connect me to a bigger dream, God’s dream that we on earth give form to His kingdom in heaven. You as a church and Rony as a minister have in each of your lives separately incarnated this dream of God and now, together, you can expand upon it and grow it.

And what is this dream? Isaiah, almost more than any other Biblical writer, is able to visualize this dream of God’s. He dreamed God’s dream. He saw what God intended and willed to be for all creation, and Isaiah knew that nothing could separate us from this dream, dreamed by God for His creation, the dream that we might be one even as God the Father and God the Son are one.

Some have called the Book of Isaiah the fifth gospel and it has been as such for me. Next to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it has had the greatest influence upon my life as a Christian and understanding what it is to be a member of Christ’s Kingdom. If you were to ask me what is it Christ enables to be through is life, death and resurrection, I would answer it is the fulfillment of the dreams and vision Isaiah records over and over in his book, visions revealed to him by God, waiting to be fulfilled in the last time but even now breaking in upon us because of the generosity of Jesus Christ who when we accept Him makes all things new and shows us a new creation.

And what are the particulars of this dream that can’t wait and is even now coming to be and we are privileged to see, concretely, in the life and work of this congregation right here at North Shore Baptist Church? Let me repeat in for you in the words of Isaiah.

It is a dream of a Holy Mountain. It is a dream where people of all nations gather together. It is a dream where the shroud that has blinded people from truly seeing one another has been lifted and we see each other as we really are, children of God. It is a dream where all the tears caused by injustice, war, hunger, disease, and prejudice are whipped away. It is a dream where we no longer hurt one another. It is a dream where the Lord Himself will be our host and He will prepare for all of us a feast of rich food and well-aged wine.

This is the dream and Isaiah, repeats it over and over throughout his book, reaching for one image and then another to help us understand its fullness. In one version of it he writes about the foreigner who comes to settle with the people of God but fears, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people,” but the Lord says, “No, I will bring you to my holy mountain and make you joyful in my house of prayer.” No one is to be left out.

But the eunuch, the one excluded from the Temple worship because of how his sexuality was perceived says, “I am just a dry tree.” But the Lord says, “No, I will give you in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give you an everlasting name.”

On this Holy Mountain nations are brought together, differences that use to divide now become diversity that is celebrated, and all those who once felt themselves left out are now given an everlasting name more precious than any other name. They are to be called sons and daughters of God.

The vision of Isaiah is the vision of things coming. It is the vision of God’s intent for all creation. But, and this is important, it is not just a vision of what will be for already we see it coming to pass and it is happening in our midst and we see it here, we see it now, we see it among the people of North Shore Baptist Church.

When I was a student in seminary and so in love with the city of Chicago, the American Baptist church that most connected to my cosmopolitan sense of the city was the North Shore Baptist Church. To me it epitomized the metropolitan church in the city. I was struck by the majesty of your architecture, so stately and strong. I absorbed the sense of your storied history and looked in admiration upon those who were your pastors. It was for me a grand church in a grand city, but through the decades as your own history has evolved, what I began to see was something even grander. What I began to see was not only a church in the city, but a church that mirrored the kingdom of God.

I see in you Isaiah’s vision coming true. I see in your multiple congregations an early incarnation of what awaits us in heaven. I see what awaits us at the end of all time. I see in you a living visualization of God’s Holy Mountain where all people, all nations are given a name above all names that unites us to one another, the name of son or daughter of God.

How did this happen? How did you become this one people encompassing so many people from so many different lands and nations? How did it happen that even before the time when God will be all in all that I see God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven? It has happened because of Jesus. What was a vision for Isaiah has become possible in Jesus Christ. In His word and in His Spirit dwelling in us what was far off is no longer so distant and what once seemed only a like a dream has become a reality as week by week, an Anglo congregation, a Japanese congregation, a Hispanice congregation, a Karen people, a Afro American people gather in one place to worship one and the same Living God.

Jesus makes it possible and from the day the church was born at Pentecost, in ever widening circles, beginning first in Jerusalem and then in Samaria, and then to the Gentiles, including an Ethiopian Eunuch and a Roman centurion named Cornelius, and then to the farthest reaches of the world, in an ever widening fellowship we have come to know what Paul meant when he wrote in Galatians, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” It is enough to make a Baptist shout “Amen.” Amen?

And now, today, to help lead you closer to that Holy Mountain, you are installing Rony Reyes as one of the pastors of North Shore Baptist Church.

Why am I so enthused about this new relationship between a pastor and a people? It is because from the first day I met Rony it seems to me the vision of Isaiah is what has radiated through his life and now he comes to join a people who share the same vision.

The first day I met Rony was in an interview at First Baptist Church of Greater Toledo where I was pastor. He was applying for a position in our church. He sat in the room in a coat and tie and answered questions from the committee. He was from a Pentecostal background. We were an American Baptist congregation. He was from Guatemala. Our heritage was Anglo. Yet, at the end of the day, after interviewing all the candidates, it was Rony we were drawn to.

Over the next two years Rony and I had many long discussions, we worked together, and eventually Hope joined the staff as well, and we prayed together. Early on I remember one discussion in which Rony spoke of the similarities in Pentecostalism to the Orthodox Church and its focus on the Holy Spirit. I was impressed and thought to myself this is not the narrowness I had associated with Pentecostalism and realized I was the one with the narrower view. Rony has an inquiring mind that has led him not only through the corridors of evangelical scholarship, but down pathways carved out by liberationist theologians and into an exploration of his own heritage in the study of Mayan spirituality. I am sure this inquiry mind and questing spirit will flourish in Chicago.

At the center of his self, in his spirit, Rony has a pastoral nature that places healing and caring above judgmentalism and condemnation. He bridges the divide between ethnic groupings, social classes and theological diversity. In short, Rony is in his person what North Shore Baptist seeks to be in its mission, worship and fellowship as a church.

It is to me more than coincidence that has brought you together. It is, I believe, a match made in heaven, and in the relationship I have shared with Rony, the bond between us, transcending barriers of age and ethnicity and theological persuasion, and when I look at this church, incarnating so much of Isaiah’s vision, I realize as well, heaven is not so far away. Rays of light are shining through and that light is in this church.

God is not quiet, but even while we await His final coming, already we see his appearing in this church and daily as we pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” our prayer is being answered, Isaiah’s vision fulfilled, our oneness in Jesus Christ revealed.

I see it in this church, and I see this same spirit in Rony Reyes and I am delighted, overjoyed, God has brought you together.

Thanks be to God who gives us the victory of our oneness in Jesus Christ. Amen.