Baptism In Christ: What It Takes To Be The Beloved

We’ve just spent two weeks celebrating again the birth of Jesus of  Nazareth, the feast of his Holy Name, and his manifestation to all humankind, the Epiphany.  It’s a bit dangerous, however, to focus entirely on Jesus, the baby.  The remembrance of His birth should cause us to seriously reflect on the life and death of the person whom the baby grew to be.  Otherwise, it’s too easy too get caught up, emotionally, in the music, the art, the joy of the wonderful Christ Child and his mother.  What should be the beginning of a journey becomes the whole trip.  If our joy centers only on a remembrance, it’s likely that we’ve missed the Incarnation’s call and challenge.

Today’s Gospel passage (Mark 1:4-11) is the first event in Jesus’ life which Mark records. Some folks find this story troubling.  If the only purpose of John’s baptism was a cleansing from sin, how do we reconcile that with the belief that Jesus was without sin? In Matthew’s interpretation of the event, even John the Baptizer is troubled by Jesus’ request for baptism.  “I need to be baptized by you,” he says, “and do you come to me?”  Jesus reassures John, saying: “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Both Mark and Matthew subtly allude to a passage found in Chapter 42 of Isaiah: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him...”  Jesus would have been quite familiar with that text.  He accepts his calling to be God’s servant, to do justice, to set things right, something that can be accomplished only by his accepting and affirming his relationship with people who are aware that they need to be made right with God.

By being conceived and born of a human mother, Jesus became our brother. In his baptism he now affirms that he’s truly one with us as we are, not as we think we should be.  A lyric in the familiar Christmas carol, “O come, all ye faithful”, says “Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb.”  The more amazing truth is that Jesus abhors not the water of baptism and all that it implies of our need to be cleansed and healed and made right with God.

A Jesus who would have entered the human experience only when it was good and right couldn’t have touched us as we really are.  A Jesus who enters our lives without changing us is only “slumming”.  What we need and what God has given us in God’s Son, the Beloved, is One who constantly enters our lives at our worst, and yet renews and restores us.

In Jesus, God is revealed as one who is determined to get involved in the messy human enterprise.  It leads Jesus at once into temptation and into a ministry of teaching, with some people rejecting his message, and of healing, a ministry with people not always so appreciative of his effort.  Eventually it led Jesus to imprisonment and the Cross.  Jesus responds to the call of the God whom Isaiah knew.  Like the prophet himself, Jesus knows that God involves Godself with real human beings, and that he himself can respond in no other way.

What about us?? Think for a moment about what happens when a child is adopted into a family.  If the child is asked: “When were you adopted?” he/she can give a specific day and year.  But that isn’t really when adoption happens. Adoption happens when the child takes his or her place in the day-to-day living and relating among the other people in a family: at the point when the child says “I choose these particular people, in this particular context, regardless of their shortcomings and failings, to be my family: my father, mother, brothers and sisters.”  Becoming part of a family, in more than just name, is a long, slow, creative process.

Baptism is much like adoption.  It happens at a specific time and place on a specific day. Mine was on March 14, 1937, at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dayton, OH.  My son, Andrew, just celebrated his 36th baptismal anniversary on Friday, the feast of the Epiphany.  One of my classmates from seminary did the honors of baptizing him in Alameda in 1975. But somehow, baptism doesn’t, from our viewpoint, “take” until the person baptized deliberately chooses the risk living it. That’s really what the sacrament of Confirmation is all about.  In Jesus, God calls each of us as God’s son or daughter.  Dare we deliberately risk responding to that call? And to what, exactly, does God call us?

In particular, God calls you and me to live and interact with others. As adopted children of God, we thereby become sisters and brothers of one another.  Sometimes that’s a source of immense joy. But if you’ve lived in a family with siblings, you probably know that it isn’t all sharing a plate of fresh cookies on the back porch in the sunshine! A little boy prayed fervently in Sunday school: “Dear God, please bless everybody except Tommy.”  The teacher assured the boy that God understood that his little brother was often difficult to live with, but that God loves Tommy very much.  “Then he’s a mighty funny kind of God,” said the little boy.

Isaiah, Paul, John the Baptizer, and Jesus all found that God who calls us in Baptism, invites us into relationships involving risk and cost, often with people we’d probably never choose as friends, much less as sisters and brothers! But, then, our God is a funny kind of God, funny enough to love and call each and all of us. 

The struggle which you and I experience in living out our baptism isn’t so much in the choosing between good and evil as in choosing between patterns which lead to greater love, acceptance, unity, goodness, and freedom; and patterns which lead us elsewhere.  Stealing, for example, is evil. Hardening one’s heart against the poor is evil. Murder is evil; letting people starve to death, wherever they are in the world, is evil.  And so is denying anyone the chance to grow; or playing to the worst in others.  

Most people can honestly say that they’ve never actually killed a human being. On a scale of virtue, that would be worth a 10.  But what about the times we “sink the knife” into someone with a cutting remark or a glare? What of the times we lock people into the prison of our own expectations; or the times we write people off, simply on the basis of some insignificant or selfish standard which we’ve devised?  “Dear God, please bless everyone except this person or that person.”  Each of us has a “Tommy”.

In calling us into relationship with the Father, Jesus calls us both to be made right ourselves and to become part of God’s desire to call all people, all of life, into right relationship.  If we pretend that we’re already in such a good and right relationship with God, that we don’t need healing, we’re really refusing God’s love. People who thought of themselves as holy enough refused John’s offer of baptism -- but not Jesus.

Keeping one’s relationship with God as a private matter, just between God and oneself, isn’t an option.  The God of Love can’t and won’t be so confined.  If you invite Jesus to dinner, you need to be prepared for him to show up with some of his other friends.  And you never know whom he’ll bring: perhaps someone you’ve never gotten to know, perhaps someone “interesting” or sophisticated, “our kind of people”.  But then again, he may just bring Tommy!

In baptism you and I are gathered into the Communion of Saints, given to one another, called to live in relationship, because that’s simply the way Jesus extends his love and compassion and grace in the world.  We’re each of us God’s “Beloved”, called to be a “light to the nations, to open eyes that are blind”, to release those bound up in darkness and hopelessness.  May God, as with Jesus, be “well pleased” with you and me.  

The Feast Of Seeking & Finding

"One of the names given to this feast...is 'The Feast of the Three Kings'. Untheological and unhistorical this cherished name for the feast may be, because the Wise Men at the crib neither constitute the subject matter of the feast, nor were they kings, nor were there, for sure, even three of them; yet the name 'Three Kings' points out a significant aspect of the feast's mystery: that the first people on earth searched everywhere for the child who would redeem them, roving like pilgrims, journeying from afar through every kind of danger. So this day is the feast day of all those who seek God through their life's pilgrimage, the journey of those who find God because they seek God...

...We know very well that God is the goal of our pilgrimage. God dwells in the remote distance. The way to God seems to us all too far and all too hard. And what we ourselves mean when we say 'God' is incomprehensible. The free spirit finds only what it looks for. But God has promised in his word that he lets himself be found by those who seek him. In grace he wills to be not merely the one who is always a little farther beyond every place that the creature on pilgrimage has reached, but rather to be that one who really can be found, eye to eye, heart to heart, by those small creatures with an eternal heart that we call human beings."

(Fr. Karl Rahner, The Eternal Year, 1964)

The Holy Name

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name 

of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation.

Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is

the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; 

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,

in glory everlasting.  Amen.

Giving Thanks

As I complete my 14th year as an Oblate of the Order of Julian of Norwich, I rejoice and celebrate with all my OJN sisters and brothers the anniversary of the founding of the Order by Fr. John Julian, OJN, on December 30, 1985. That day The Rt. Rev. W. Bradford T. Hastings, Episcopal Visitor of the Order and Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Connecticut, heard the solemn profession of life vows by Fr. John Julian, formerly John Douglas Swanson, and invested him with the staff and medallion of the Guardian of the Order. 


Fr. John Julian wrote earlier: "On a personal level, it is the blossoming of a flower whose seed was planted almost an immeasurable age ago. But you will understand that even after what seemed sometimes an interminable wait, it is still fraught with awe and dread. One hears the echo of Mother Julian's words: 'The soul may do no more than seek, suffer, and trust, and this is wrought in the soul...by the Holy Ghost; and the clearness of finding is of his special grace when it is his will."


Those last words resonate and echo, especially today, in the hearts of each of us who is a Member, Oblate or Associate of the Order. We've each been drawn into this common enterprise in many different ways: some determined and direct, some after much procrastinating or doubt, some in complete surprise. But here we find ourselves trying each day to "seek, suffer, and trust", by the nudging of the Spirit, to live our vows of holy poverty, chastity, obedience and prayer. Looking back on fourteen years -- and I know many feel the same as I do -- I'm not sure what I'd have done without the Order and the support of devoted and beloved sisters and brothers. Scott Peck opens his book The Road Less Traveled with the words "Life is difficult." He surely wasn't kidding, and anyone who's tried living by the Spirit knows the depth of those words in spades. 


Thanks be to God that Fr. John Julian was attentive to the call, despite many overwhelming odds, and by the Spirit's inspiration provided a means by which so many of us could come to know Mother Julian and drink from the springs of her amazing wisdom. And in the process, we have found ourselves, by God's "courteousness and love", as Julian would put it, growing ever closer to God and to each other, and reaching out with that same courteousness and love to the Church and the world. 

Corruptio Optimi Pessima

One of the Latin phrases which has stuck with me from my seminary days is the one above: "Corruptio optimi pessima" which, roughly translated means, "The corruption of what is best is the worst tragedy". What you see in the photo at the right, brawling Christian Greek and Armenian monks at the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem, during the very octave of the Christmas celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, is for me the epitome of the saying above. How did it start? It seems that it was because one of the monks sweeping with a broom got just a bit over the "boundary" of the territory of the other group of monks! Then all hell broke loose, as, unfortunately, it has done a number of other times in the past. So great is the traditional antipathy between the two groups of monks, I understand, (and I don't think it's limited to just these two groups) that the keys to the shrine are in the keeping of the Muslims!


"Disedifying" is a polite word that comes to mind for such goings-on. Bad enough that this took place in that particular sacred place and during this particular week. Even more shameful is that it took place only weeks before the annual Week of Prayer for Christian & Interfaith Unity. What in the world were these monks thinking?! As if Christianity these days doesn't have enough bad press! I hardly think that the great monastic abbas and ammas of the desert would look on such actions with anything but scorn and disappointment.


These thoughts were running through my mind as I read the excerpt from the Second Letter of John at Morning Prayer today: "The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not only I but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever: Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Fathr and from Jesus Christ, the Father's Son, in truth and love...But now, dear lady, I ask you not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but one we have had from the beginning, let us love one another. And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning -- you must walk in it..."


I invite you to join me in praying for these monks, as well as for the whole human family:

Loving God, you created us in your own image 

and redeemed us through Jesus your Son:

Look with compassion on the whole human family;

take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts;

break down the walls that separate us;

unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle

and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; 

that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you

in harmony. Amen.

"This Meddlesome Cleric"

Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, preaches in the Cathedral on Christmas Morning, 1170:


“'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.' The fourteenth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.


Dear children of God, my sermon this morning will be a very short one. I wish only that you should ponder and meditate the deep meaning and mystery of our masses of Christmas Day. For whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on this Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth.  So that at the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It was in this same night that has just passed, that a multitude of the heavenly host appeared before the shepherds at Bethlehem, saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men'; at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross. Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion. For who in the World will both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason? For either joy will be overborne by mourning, or mourning will be cast out by joy; so it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason. 'But think for a while on the meaning of this word 'peace.' Does it seem strange to you that the angels should have announced Peace, when ceaselessly the world has been stricken with War and the fear of War? Does it seem to you that the angelic voices were mistaken, and that the promise was a disappointment and a cheat?


Reflect now, how Our Lord Himself spoke of Peace. He said to His disciples 'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.' Did He mean peace as we think of it: the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace with the King, the householder counting over his peaceful gains, the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children? Those men His disciples knew no such things: they went forth to journey afar, to suffer by land and sea, to know torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom. What then did He mean? If you ask that, remember then that He said also, 'Not as the world gives, give I unto you.' So then, He gave to His disciples peace, but not peace as the world gives.
           
Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once Our Lord's Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen. Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men. 
           
Beloved, we do not think of a martyr simply as a good Christian who has been killed because he is a Christian: for that would be solely to mourn. We do not think of him simply as a good Christian who has been elevated to the company of the Saints: for that would be simply to rejoice: and neither our mourning nor our rejoicing is as the world's is. A Christian martyrdom is no accident. Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of a man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity. Not so in Heaven. A martyr, a saint, is always made by the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. A martyrdom is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, not lost it but found it, for he has found freedom in submission to God. The martyr no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of martyrdom. So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand; so in Heaven the Saints are most high, having made themselves most low, seeing themselves not as we see them, but in the light of the Godhead from which they draw their being.
            
I have spoken to you today, dear children of God, of the martyrs of the past, asking you to remember especially our martyr of Canterbury, the blessed Archbishop Elphege; because it is fitting, on Christ's birth day, to remember what is that Peace which He brought; and because, dear children, I do not think I shall ever preach to you again; and because it is possible that in a short time you may have yet another martyr, and that one perhaps not the last. I would have you keep in your hearts these words that I say, and think of them at another time. In the Name of the Father, and o£ the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

(From Murder in the Cathedral, Interlude, by T.S. Eliot),

Sadness For the Children

Today's feast of the Holy Innocents hasn't much lifted my spirits today. Perhaps it's because of this week's news of two particularly brutal incidents: first, the kidnap, murder, and savage dismemberment of a 9 year old girl, and then the tragic fire in Connecticut which claimed the lives of three young daughters and their grandparents. In either case, I can't begin to imagine the depth of the pain, the desolation, the emptiness which has seized the hearts and lives of the families left behind. How does anyone deal with such tragedy? Not a shred of good, for anyone, seems even possible in the face of the two realities. Or, for that matter, in the face of any similar violence and death dealt to children or young ones, whether accidental or deliberate.


Faith tells me otherwise, but what a stretch I'm feeling to accept that! The graphic words of the prophet Isaiah in the first Lesson of Morning Prayer did bring some comfort, probably because of the graphic imagery which Isaiah uses to bring it to a more personal level. "...the Lord has comforted God's people, and will have compassion on God's suffering ones." When the people object to him that God has forsaken them, forgotten them, Isaiah replies: "...Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands..." 


It's unknown who all was actually involved in the massacre of the Holy Innocents, reported by Matthew (2:16-18), or how many children were slaughtered. Some estimate it may have been as few as six or as many as twenty. The numbers really don't matter, in a way: neglect, abuse, violence, or the death of a single child or young one is far too costly and is cause for unbridled lamentation. It helps, perhaps, to be reassured that the compassionate, loving God never forgets a child or young one, indelibly imaged in the palms of God's creative hand and in God's heart of love. Nevertheless...


And so we fervently pray on this day: "Receive...into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Savior..."