To Be a Child of God

“You asked about Baptism and I am in the midst of death and dying.”  So a friend of mine quoted back to me from a letter I had written him.  He did it as he was letting me know about a class he was offering on Baptism and the Passion Narratives of Jesus.  “In the midst of life, we are in death,” he quoted from the Burial office. Yes, Baptism is about dying, and that is the part that is so hard for me to hear.

Fourteen years ago on Christmas Eve, I had spent the night with a family in the hospital keeping vigil round the bedside of a 2 year old girl named Janay who had been struck by a car the day before.  We watched the machine that measured the fluid pressure in her head.  These numbers told the story of life and death in that moment.  The numbers got too high.  She was declared brain dead in the afternoon and it was probably the saddest moment I  have ever witnessed.  We baptized her, the medical staff disconnected life support, and then we did the last rites.  Her mother stayed in the hospital, at the end of a pregnancy and already in labor.  I went back to the church to preside at a stunned celebration of the Feast of the Nativity.

The next day, Christmas Day, Janay’s mother gave birth to a baby boy and named him Jordan.  A week later, we buried Janay from our church.  Three weeks later, at the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, the little brother Janay had never met, Jordan was baptized in our church.  At the time, I wondered at this beautiful act of faith.

A month after that, my sister was struck by a car while carrying her 2 month old son in a snuggly.  The baby, Mason, was thrown through the air and landed on the pavement.  He was not breathing when the ambulance arrived.  Somehow they revived him but the injuries to the skull and brain were so profound and extensive that they were sure he would not live.  A nurse baptized him that night.  He spent the next two months in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where I and the rest of my family spent a lot of time, and Rachel, at four months of age, had her first experience of camping out in a hospital waiting room.  Once again, sitting watching the numbers on the screen that monitored the fluid levels in his head.  Once again, counting the ups and downs, hoping against hope.  Mason is still alive, but paralyzed in most of his body and he does not see or speak.  My sister Sarah though, knows a deep connection with him, and it is because of her intense commitment to his care and his own strong body and life instinct, that he has not succumbed to any of the many illnesses that threaten his survival.

Sarah decided to have another child and that baby boy, Wyeth, was born 10 years to the day after his brother Mason.

Life has some interesting poetry to it, some real mystery to it.  All these dates – sister dies on Christmas Eve, brother born on Christmas, baptized at the Baptism of Jesus and named after the river Jordan, and two brothers with the same birthday ten years apart.  It is strange, isn’t it?  Why and how did these events occur on these particular dates – but I sense some meaning in it all, some intimation of higher truths and an eternal realm beyond this daily round of circumstances.  And in the acknowledgement of the mystery behind these events is faith – the faith of a mother and father who have just lost one child and are now seeing a newborn baptized.

And that is what Baptism is communicating – it is about Eternity.  Baptism is readying us for Eternity by calling us to die to the old and be born to the new.  Baptism is about our transformation from simply temporal, physical beings into spiritual and Eternal beings, who are in the world but not of it, as Jesus said.  And this is a transformation that requires dying to the old habits and ways – it asks us to take seriously what Lent is about, the turning away from the old ways in order to seek the new life in Christ.

We all face our physical deaths, but Baptism asks us to face death before we die physically.  “Die before you die,” said the mystical poet Rumi. That is what Baptism is about – dying before we die.  Facing death now and living from a place that is far deeper than the body or the ego which die, living from the deeper reaches of the soul, from a place that does not die.

In order to do that we must die to the old habits that keep us believing that this temporal life is all there is, die and let go, so that we might be born into the new life in the Spirit, the new life in Christ.

I had a dream last week.  After church on a Sunday I got into my car and headed to Jasper.  On the way, the road ran alongside the river for a long stretch, and there were people lined up to be baptized, and there were Orthodox priests in long beards and robes who were baptizing them.  When I got to Jasper the town square was in the midst of an Easter festival.  I was stunned – how did I end up in a time and place where Baptism and Easter were being celebrated by the whole town, and even by nature itself, it seemed?

I walked into a shop, and that was my mistake.  I found myself then in a confusing maze of shops and stores and restaurants with people on cell phones and talking about all sorts of stuff and ... back into the confusion of daily life.  I was in the world and of it – I couldn’t find my way back to the beauty of baptism and Easter.

I saw in this dream a picture of my own baptismal life.  I glimpse the hope and the promise of all of creation eagerly awaiting the birth of the sons and daughters of God (one of Paul’s beautiful descriptions of what Baptism portends), and I am so easily consumed by the confusion of daily life.  Turning away from that maze of shops and returning to the river and the festival of Resurrection, that is the dying to the old and turning towards the new that I have to do everyday, and several times every day.  The temptation to be lost in the maze of daily life is so strong, but the calling is to new life in the Spirit.  Turning away from this temptation is the practice that prepares us to begin to live into the new life in Baptism.  It is a lifelong journey, and what else is there really worth doing?  To be in the world and not of the world.  To be a child of God.  What else is there really worth being?

Amen.

The Rev. Edie Bird

Second Sunday in Lent
March 4, 2007

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