It is the sixth Sunday of the Easter season, the great fifty days after the feast of the Resurrection. This is the sweet springtime of hope that stretches from Easter Day to the Day of Pentecost that we celebrate in two weeks on May 27.
The readings of Easter season all explore the contours of hope released by the Resurrection in the Christian spiritual landscape. All the readings are from the New Testament, leaving out for this season readings from the Old Testament — as though to say that there is so much good news breaking out that there is no time to think about what went before.
Among the meanings of the Resurrection explored in these readings is that the ancient boundaries of ethnic and national exclusion no longer hold. The first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, is part of a chronicle of expanding inclusiveness of the early church — during the years when Paul and his colleagues took the original Jewish reform movement led by Jesus in Palestine to the gentiles in Macedonia and beyond. Christianity’s expansion is compressed in the story about Lydia, a religious leader in Thyatira. Paul was inspired to travel to her city in Macedonia. While there, he and his colleagues found Lydia with the community she gathered for prayer outside the city gates down by the river. There, by the water Paul made his case about Jesus, and there Lydia received it as good news. She and all her household were baptized in their holy river, and afterwards Lydia welcomed the travelers into her home. Abandoning the old rules, Paul and his fellow Jews accepted the table hospitality of gentiles. In converting the gentiles, they were themselves converted to a more radical enactment of God’s hospitality that includes all people, indeed, every living being.
Do you remember that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River at the beginning of his ministry? John the Baptizer, that compelling desert preacher, had been calling on the people to return to their covenant with God. Hearing him, Jesus waded out into the river, leaned on the arms of the fiery John, who put him under the water, breathless, a symbol of dying to the old life and rising to new life.
By their baptisms, Lydia and her house church entered the mystery of redemption in Christ. Christ is present in and through the community of faith. When we gather together to pray, to celebrate Holy Communion, to study our faith, to reach out to others, Christ’s holy spirit is embodied in the church. When we gather as the community of faith for good times, good food, the consolation and delight of friendship, Christ is present, and stays present even as we struggle to live in justice and accord with each other — for that is part of being human together, in light of covenantal faith.
Today we bring Benjamin, age seven and a half months, into the heart of the community of Christ in this place. We will gather around him, encircling him with the commitment that we ourselves have made in our own baptisms — by water, or by fire, or by desire — and our own conversions to deeper faith and hope and love over our lifetimes. It is right that Benjamin should be baptized in the midst of our Sunday service, with everyone here, for the gathered community is the sacrament of the presence of Christ in the world.
Some of us here grew up in other faith communities — Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Jewish — some grew up without any faith community. So it may be helpful to reflect for a moment on a bit more of the history of the practice of baptism.
By the late middle ages, before the Reformation in the 16th century, Roman Catholic Christians had come to believe — through the theological teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century, among others — that baptism was necessary to ‘wash away the stain of original sin’, a deep, almost physical wound to human nature that was inherited from Adam through the very process of sexual generation. So strong was this belief that God acted solely through the church’s sacramental system, they taught that, should a person, even an infant, die unbaptized, he or she could not go to see God face to face, could not go to heaven, but must dwell for eternity in Limbo, a place of peace that was still incomplete because God was not there. Limbo balanced in their minds God’s justice and God’s mercy, which they believed was bound up exclusively with the sacramental power of the church.
The radical Reformers aimed their theological fire against the overreaching hubris of that sacramental system. Yes, they agreed, human nature is most evidently flawed, on the evidence: prone to violence, and deception, and infidelity. But, said the reformers, the sacraments have no more power than we invest in them; we can only be saved through personal conversion. That is why the most radical reformers recognized only adult baptism — believers’ baptism, as they called it.
We in the Episcopal tradition proceed along the ‘via media’ — the middle path.
With Catholics we share the catholic belief that babies should be baptized, but not because we believe they would otherwise be cast out of God’s presence. Rather, we baptize babies to include them from the beginning in the blessings of community. And although we recognize that human beings are morally frail, we are less likely to frame it according to Augustine’s pessimistic view of original sin as transmitted by birth. If we were to speak of ‘original sin’ we would be more likely to understand it as the ‘sin of the world’ into which we are born — for example, family dysfunction, racism, ecological destruction, the harm of war. Even though these ‘sins of the world’ didn’t start with us, we are soon implicated in them and, in time, we become responsible for them. This is our common struggle and our common vocation.
With the Protestant Reformers, we stand in awe before God’s freedom from all human-made systems, even the church with its sacramental system. The spirit blows where it will. God’s generosity and God’s power to save cannot be commandeered by any human system.
By the sacrament of baptism that Benjamin will receive this morning, through his family’s nurturance as he grows, he will enter into this community of faith. He will be recognized as a living member of the body of Christ that continues on pilgrimage through time. From now on, wherever he goes, whatever he does, he has a home among us in the church. He wholly belongs, always and forever is welcome at the table. Now he is a young pilgrim with the whole communion of saints in all times and all places, on the journey most worth traveling, into the world of grace.
All of us here provide the matrix of community for Benjamin and his family. In a few moments, as those who have been Baptized renew our own covenant in support of Benjamin and all the children who will inherit the legacy of this faith, let us strengthen our own commitment, for each of us and all of us together participate in the beloved community whose vocation is to worship, to heal, to teach and to serve this suffering and beautiful world.