9 January 2011                                                                                       Epiphany 1

There is nothing quite like the birth of a child.  No matter how many billions of times it has already occurred, a baby is always a miraculous creature.  That a new person should have arrived into the world is amazing and we take great delight in the beauty and delicacy and vulnerability of the newborn.  Of course, part of the excitement and the importance of the situation is that, with this new life is given a huge responsibility: to nurture it so that it can develop according to its potential and according to God’s will for it.  The birth is wonderful, but the prospect of a developing character is awesome. 

Baptism is analogous to physical birth in many respects.  Of course, when the one who is baptized is already an adult, there are a few differences, but since, today, we are baptizing an infant on the feast of the Baptism of our Lord, let us look at the similarities between baptism and physical birth.  There is something of the new and miraculous in baptism.  A relationship that had not existed before does now exist: someone who was previously a human being, a son or daughter of Eve, is now also a son or daughter of the heavenly Father, brother or sister of his only Son Jesus, beloved object of the attention of the sisterly Holy Spirit.  To be incorporated into Christ by the power of the Spirit is a miraculous event, no less so for having been done all these hundreds of years.  There is newness and freshness in the baptismal event—a Christian has been born.  But, as with normal birth, the object is not to remain a newborn Christian—it is to develop the maturity of Christian character which is the promise of baptism.  Birth is a starting point, not an ending point, as we well know. 

And along this line, all of the baptismal promises—which we have an opportunity to renew on this day—are oriented toward a process of growth and development.  I never noticed before how forceful are the verbs that anchor the promises of the Baptismal Covenant: continue, persevere, proclaim, seek, serve, and strive.  None of these are timid or tentative words.  They indicate a job to be done, a life to pursue, a goal to aim at.  Let’s look at these briefly.

First, “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?”  Baptism brings us into the apostolic teaching and fellowship, in the midst of the Eucharist and surrounded by prayer.  The promise is that we shall continue what we have begun.  None of these things have been invented by us—they are given.  We promise not to let them go but to continue—a life-long process of learning and loving and sacramental sharing and praying.  We don’t promise always to get this right, we don’t promise never to get bored, but we promise not to quit, even if we don’t see what use it is at any given moment.  One of the old desert fathers, when asked for a definition of prayer, said: “warfare to the last breath.”  That is the spirit of the promise to continue the life in which we have been immersed.

The next promise is: “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”  Resisting evil is not likely to be a one-time experience.  Temptations to sin—to all of those ways of not being like Jesus, this sinless One—these are constant.  Evil is a word that we usually reserve for what we consider to be quite terrible and awful wickedness—but it actually exists on a continuum between little acts of malice—like saying something gossipy about someone we don’t like—to full-fledged and merciless destructiveness at the other extreme.  The baptismal life pledges us to a life-long perseverance in resisting evil in all its forms and cultivating the habit of repentance for when we fall short, which we shall. If we fail at the last, It is not our sins that shall have defeated us, but our failure to persevere in resisting evil and repenting when we don’t.

Then: “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?”  Proclamation is not something only priests and other preachers do.  Proclamation is a word for letting others in on what we know—the Good News in Christ as experienced by us.  It is going to take a while to master this vow.  We have to learn to express what we know of Christ and then how to put it into practice in such a way that our testimony is not contradicted by our life.  This is a tall order.  We shall not perfect it except by long practice.

Again: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”  Seeking and serving Christ: it is not always easy to understand how to do this.  How do we find Christ in our neighbor?  Is Jesus really there?  Yes He is—everyone we meet is loved by our Lord just as we are.  We are meant to share His love for all our neighbors and to express that love in action.  When we do this, we serve Christ in others.  This promises to consume a lot of energy and effort—the need to discern what love requires and then the strength to do it.  We are constantly in the company of people—friends, neighbors, co-workers, family, strangers on the street.  Each one offers us an opportunity to seek and serve Christ, especially those who are in need of something that we can provide. 

Finally, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”  To strive for something indicates a significant commitment of energy and desire.  This is the vow which reminds us of the Kingdom of God and Jesus’ teaching that we must seek the Kingdom and its justice first.  We are to strive for a social order in which everyone is treated as a son or daughter of God.  This striving is likely to wear us out unless we are convinced that Jesus is fully capable of establishing his Kingdom and that our efforts are simply some of the ways that he is working in the world.  Sometimes these ways are quite mysterious to us and all our best efforts come to nothing.  But still, we know he is at work and all our striving is but a way to live into the justice and peace of the Kingdom.

Continuing, persevering, proclaiming, seeking, serving and striving—these things could consume a whole life-time.  That is the idea, of course.  The Baptismal Life is actually a life—a life in relation with Jesus and his Church—which has as its goal the development in each baptized person of the mature Christian character which sometimes has been called sanctity.  Each baptized person, in other words, is called to become a saint.  You may think you have quite a ways to go yet before reaching that goal—it is true: so do I.  Yet what is a saint but a person who has taken his or her baptismal vows seriously in a life of faithfulness—not giving up, not quitting, not losing heart, but continuing, persevering, seeking and striving?  Of course, we also call the heroes and heroines of our faith the saints—and it is true that sometimes people arise who do incredible deeds in fidelity to their baptismal calling.  But I would settle for “ordinary sanctity”—that is, ordinary people continuing, persevering, seeking, proclaiming, striving—in the confidence that God is acting through them to do his mighty works even if they cannot often see them.