Sermon for Sunday, May 24, 2026 || Pentecost A || Numbers 11:24-30

One of the most powerful words in the English language is the first person plural pronoun “We.” That’s what we are going to talk about today on this day when celebrate the birth of the church and baptize a child into this wonderful part of God’s household. We’re going to talk about the power of collaboration and how our community of encouragement, togetherness, and mutual support is a prophetic enterprise in a world of increasing fracture and isolation.

So, to start: you’ve all heard the old saw: “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” Smart alecks will be quick to assert that, if you rearrange the letters, there is a ‘me,’ but we’ll leave that alone. When I was a kid, I loved playing baseball and soccer as part of teams. In soccer, I enjoyed the flow of the game, the ball moving from one player to another in a string of passes. In baseball, I remember the different strengths of the players all coming together to make things happen. I wasn’t a very good hitter, but I was very small and very fast and, crucially, left-handed. So I walked a lot and bunted a lot and got on base a lot. Then the big hitters got up and drove me in. That was the essence of teamwork, along with the encouragement from the dugout, even when – especially when – someone struck out. God, I loved playing baseball as a kid because we were all using our unique gifts and talents towards a common goal.

Which sounds a lot like church. We come together for a common goal too. We come together to love God and one another and to serve the God of love in this broken world. 

If you look in the prayerbook, there are very few places where prayers are formulated in the singular. Nearly every prayer is plural. The confession of sin is plural. The Nicene Creed is plural, which is a change from its original form. Some of you probably grew up saying, “I believe in one God.” The current prayerbook changes this to “We believe in one God.” Even bits of scripture that are turned into prayers are changed from singular to plural. The opening invitation of Morning Prayer says, “Lord, open our lips / And our mouth shall proclaim your praise.” This verse comes from Psalm 51, where it is singular: “Lord, open my lips.” In our worship, we change this to plural.

Strangely, the one place in the Book of Common Prayer that does not follow this plural pattern is the Baptismal Covenant, which we will proclaim together in a few minutes. Each of the questions in the covenant includes a singular answer. After the creed part, I will ask you six questions about living the life of faith as a beloved child of God. And you will respond, “I will, with God’s help.” 

This is such a strange blip in the otherwise steady pattern of plurality found in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s strange because the rest of the service of baptism is so intensely plural. When I ask,” Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” you respond with a resounding, “We will.” Then, in the Thanksgiving Over the Water, everything is plural: “We thank you…for the gift of water […] We thank you…for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.” The very fact that baptisms happen during public worship speaks to the collective, communal nature of the sacrament as we welcome a new beloved child of God into this part of God’s family.

So, even though we say “I” during the Baptismal Covenant, please think of these promises we make as plural ones, ones made together, because we cannot fulfill these promises alone. With God’s help, we must be collaborators, one with another. We are partners in mission, laborers together in God’s vineyard. We participate in God’s mission collaboratively, as each of us discerns, as Frederick Buechner said, where our deep gladness intersects with the world’s deep hunger. Then, with God’s help, we continue our discernment collectively, sharing how our deep gladnesses overlap. Together, we look at the deep hunger of our local community and the wider world, and we propel our collective missional gladness towards those hungers.

This collaborative nature of ministry goes all the way back to Moses, as we heard in the reading from the book of Numbers. Moses needs help administering the mobile nation of Israel, which had become a military enterprise 600,000 soldiers strong, along with women, children, and elders. Moses could not adjudicate every issue across the whole nation. He needed help, so God commands him to gather seventy elders, upon whom God shares some of God’s spirit. Two of the elders, Eldad and Medad, oversleep and miss the meeting. But the spirit still falls upon them in the camp! The people are aghast, Joshua chief among them. But Moses recognizes that God’s Spirit cannot be contained and proclaims a great wish: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”

We believe that God has done just that. God’s Holy Spirit fell upon the apostles on the Day of Pentecost, empowering them in their mission to spread the Gospel. Through our Baptism, we are sealed by that same Holy Spirit and commissioned to live out the promises of our Baptismal Covenant together. In today’s world of fracture and isolation, living in community is a prophetic act. We come together as people of every age, from every background and socioeconomic group, across the spectrum of political ideology. We come together to display the truth of the power of connection, the beauty of mutual care and support. We come together to pray and praise and offer each other peace and to share a meal from the same table. What an incredible example of faithful, authentic living for a world moving further and further away from these lifegiving practices.

I am so thankful to be a part of this community of faith. I am so thankful that today we get to welcome a new soul into this community. As we support her and each other in following the Way of Jesus Christ, we respond collaboratively – together – to God’s call on our lives. We respond, “We will, with God’s help.”

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Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.