BAPTISM
First in a Series of 3 Sermons
In the early church, Baptism was a really big deal. This is where the work of Christ in ushering in the new creation, met the inner work of the individual as the new man and the new woman. Baptism is about the transformation of one’s very being and welcoming the spiritually reborn individual into the very Kingdom of God. Someone who aspired to the high calling of Christ to be made new and live by the laws of God’s kingdom of love did not take this commitment lightly. He knew it meant a complete change of life, because that change started the moment she asked to be made a part of the body of Christ.
Aspirants to a new life in Christ were taught by example how to bring their wills into alignment and offer this will to God in love and service. The godparents worked and walked beside them for three years of training in how to live and work as a child of God, a co-heir with Christ, in this new community of love. In addition, the elders of the community also instructed them, not with books, computers or even blackboards, but face to face, voice to ear, the music of the words beings every bit as important as their abstract meaning on a page. They were taught in the intimate way that Jesus taught his disciples, not sent into a modern educational institution with compartmentalized subjects of ordinary intellectual study, but steadily brought to a new level of being, of consciousness, so that what knowledge they acquired could become integrated into their daily living as realized truth and serve to increase their capacity for loving.
When the time came for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, the aspirants for Baptism who were ready that year, would be brought into the ceremony in the middle of the night (the Easter Vigil), into a place lit by the new fire. They stripped off their old garments and went naked into the water. Coming up, oil was poured over them and the elders in the faith wrapped them in clean cloth like newborn babies. They were fed milk mixed with honey, and then brought into the full celebration of the sacred mysteries of Holy Communion. There was no ceremony any more important or beautiful than this one. And the process of preparation was rigorous in a meaningful way. It integrated people into the life of the soul and the Christian community more fully. It gathered them in, it did not scatter them.
All of this early practice testifies to the central place of Baptism in the transformation of the old man or woman to the new man, the new woman. Baptism is where we are reborn as people who live no longer for ourselves, but for the purpose of being transformed into God’s new creation, redeemed from our mistaken identification with our own thoughts, opinions, ideas, accomplishments, images of ourselves and restored to the true purpose of human life – to live in the love of Christ, to give our lives for the sake of the world. As St. Paul said back in the 1st century, the creation waits with eager longing for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed, and it is still true today. Creation still waits for us to begin to really live the promises of Baptism.
There is a clear and simple reason why Baptism in the early church required so much preparation. The writer of Hebrews states it simply: It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The Christian life requires that we take persecution without lashing out against others – most of us can’t even handle a slightly stressful interaction without lashing out, most of us can’t even take a drive without cursing another driver. How would we ever expect to take being unjustly accused, being gossiped about, criticized all the time, told that all our work is wrong, how would we be able to take all that, without reacting, unless we had done some real homework – real heartwork, mind and body and soul work. That is the practice of being a Christian – Jesus wasn’t kidding when he asked us to turn the other cheek. But living this way requires real preparation on our part. There is work to be done, by each and every one of us, in order to open ourselves to the higher wisdom of God.
I’ll take a simple, very worldly example. What if you heard all of your life that there is a great library somewhere with all the wisdom of the world contained in books? What if you heard this, and you were so busy with eating, drinking, watching TV, arguing about your opinions and ideas, earning money, all the stuff we do and worry over, that you never took the time to learn to read. Not only that, you never even bothered to find our what a book is, or a library. You just dreamed in your mind what it must be – it must be like a great big palace of pleasure, you think. One day, you come into this huge building filled with these boxes of bound paper. Hmmm. You’re cold. You light a fire with some of them. Others you use as toilet paper when you go to the bathroom. What else can you do? You know no other use for paper. Books mean nothing to you if you’ve never seen one, never known anyone who could read, never learned to read yourself. We are all like that when faced with the Kingdom of God – we have not got a clue what sort of higher wisdom is there for us, and without serious preparation, we will approach the Kingdom without being able to appreciate what it is and how to let its grace inform us. Like the books that we can’t read – that is how God’s wisdom will be unless we prepare, unless we do some inner work here and now. Some say that we should not worry about it, God will just come upon us, no matter what state we are in, and shower us with grace. Well, yes, God does shower us with grace, but what does it matter if we can’t begin to appreciate it. Is that a merciful thing? Is that a good thing? Or is it a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God – especially with no preparation.
Eternal life in the Kingdom of God is something we can approach and begin to live into right here and now, but it does take preparation on our part. We have to learn how to read the signs of the Spirit and interpret their call to us. This take real work on our part – real homework – not the memorizing of facts, but the taming of our natural, selfish drives and the refining of our hearts and minds into instruments that can play the unusual music of God’s love in the midst of a world deaf to this beauty. We do not want to be deaf to God’s music, blind to God’s beauty, walking through a world of grace and using the wisdom for our own crude purposes. We want to be baptized into this new creation, reborn into the transformed life of the new man, the new woman. We want to be ready to receive the gifts of the Kingdom with appropriate awe, wonder, humility and love.
Amen.
The Rev. Edie Bird
November 19, 2006
Return to St. James' Home Page 12.06