“But now being made free
from sin and become servants to God,
you have your fruit unto
holiness, and the end everlasting life”
The baptisms of
Dennis and Dominic are a special occasion not only for them but through them
for all of us. A father and his infant son are baptised in the Church where
a wife and mother was herself baptised. Such things may seem to be merely
personal, even private, anecdotal and circumstantial or to fit the rage of
the age, purely biographical. And yet it belongs to the significance of the
mystery of baptism that such things become the occasion of reminding us that
our lives have their identity, purpose and vocation in the greater biography
of God which the Scriptures have opened out to us.
“Come unto
me”, Jesus says. “Suffer” - in other words, let, allow, even
compel – “the little children to come unto me and forbid them not”,
he says. “Ask and ye shall have; Seek, and ye shall find; Knock and it
shall be opened unto you” and behold, such wonders of infinite delight
are poured out upon us through the waters of regeneration poured out upon
them. And perhaps, we come late in the day, in the darkness of the night,
in our doubts and perplexities, like Nicodemus, but if we come like him
asking “how shall this be? Can a man be born again?” we shall
discover as he did, we trust, the mystery of being born again, of being born
anew, of being born from above, and of being born into the covenant of
everlasting life.
To signal the
wonder of such mysteries we have this lesson from Paul in his Epistle
to the Romans. The epistle for this Sunday, it complements the
gospel story of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness. Baptism and
Communion are signified in the conjunction of these lessons. Both themes
are captured magnificently for us in the Collect.
There is the
“graft[ing] into our hearts the love of thy Name” - the Name by which
and into which we are baptised, the Name of the Trinity. There is the hope
and expectation of the “increase of true religion” in us. There is
our constant nourishment by the all-goodness of God without which we cannot
be kept in the great mercy of God. In a way, the baptisms of Dennis and
Dominic serve to make visible to us these invisible mysteries.
What Paul
signals for us is that great mercy of God in the meaning of baptism. It is
radical new life communicated to us individually, one by one. It means
death and life, a life that is a new beginning, a new beginning with God in
whom we have our end - our perfection - in that end that shall not end, the
end that is life everlasting. It means a dying to sin and a living to God,
for only so can we love one another.
By baptism, we
are “made free from sin” because of him who was “made sin for us”
that he might make us right with God. We are become servants to God to live
holy lives, lives which are not so self-involved, selfish and turned in upon
ourselves.
Baptism in the
strongest possible way reminds us that our lives are not and cannot be
solitary affairs as if each of us were the centre of the universe. Our
attempts to be the centre of reality can only result in our frustration and
our folly. Such is no life. Such is sin, the wages of which is death. We
only live when we life for one another and we can only live for one another
when we live for God and when God’s life lives in us. Such is the mystery
of baptism. It is the mystery of our incorporation into the body of
Christ.
Baptism is
about being grafted into the life of God, about being made the precious
child of God, about being named in the greater intimacy of God’s own naming
of himself, the intimacy of the communion of the Trinity, the communion of
the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Baptism would
have us die to the death of sin so that we can live to the life of God.
That we should want this for ourselves and for our children is one thing,
that it should be provided is yet another. Our wanting and our desiring
cannot accomplish this and yet such things are themselves the motions of
God’s love at work in us bringing us to want what he wants for us and which
he provides
He provides for
us in Word and Sacrament, in Baptism and Eucharist, in lives reborn and
consecrated to him who is perfect love, at once selfless and perfecting. It
remains for Dennis and Dominic and for all of us to will what God in the
mercy of Christ’s sacrifice has willed to give us.
Our identity
and our vocation are signalled in Paul’s words.
“But now being made free from sin and become servants to
God,
you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting
life”
