January 12, 2014

John Bluck

Epiphany 1     Matthew 3:13-17

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Something is going to happen in a ceremony for  a little girl here at St Matthews this morning that will change her life for ever. The record of what happens will follow her as surely as a marriage, a graduation, a redundancy, a funeral. Future historians will refer to this record as a defining event, utterly reliable as a marker in her life.

Sadly most of this community won’t meet her, and won’t be present at the event, even though you are all invited and entitled to be there. Because a baptism is first of all an incorporation into a community of faith.  At midday, Layla will become part of this St Matthews community in a profound and indissoluble way, just as my own daughter did here, 40 years ago. Some of you were present. Like Layla, she has a place to stand here like no other place in her life.

Most Anglican churches, in fact every Anglican church I’ve been a part of for the last 40 years, make a big deal of this community joining. The baptism is part of the main service or immediately after. Some churches even insist the parents and godparents get involved beforehand, attend classes, sign promises.

 St Matthews doesn’t operate like that.  The policy is to baptise anyone who asks, whenever, privately if necessary. That policy is highly contentious and your next vicar  might want to review it with you, but it’s motivated I believe by a desire to make the Christian story as readily accessible as possible to as many people as possible. And in that sense, you could well argue that St Matthews is taking baptism more seriously than those churches who set up a doctrinal  obstacle course to run through.

If baptism really is such a jewel to be treasured, it needs to be available to everyone who expresses interest, however hesitant and uncertain. St Matthews is after all, the home of the hesitant inquirer. Our patron saint is the believer who says yes, well maybe.

Why then is this sacrament so important, so universally accepted and sought after?

Well this morning’s gospel gives the obvious answer. Jesus couldn’t begin his ministry without it, thereby setting a simple precedence for all Christians ever since. This is the way to begin a journey of faith, even if you are too young to understand intellectually what it’s all about, let alone make promises about. Baptism, quite physically, becomes a marker point, a milestone on the journey, and if it doesn’t happen, there is a certain incompleteness that remains and waits to be filled. Recently I baptized a 75 year old woman who had been attending church and receiving communion for much of her life, married in church, burying a husband from a church, but because of all sorts of early family entanglements and arguments she had never been baptized. And when she was, a gentle transformation began, which included the making of a remarkable gift.

There is no formula for how and where a baptism happens, other than to link it into the tradition where it belongs, and in whose name we are baptised. In an emergency you don’t even need a priest.  The only essentials are water and the name of the Trinitarian God.

John the Baptist wasn’t the only or the obvious choice for Jesus. There’s a bit of argy bargy that goes on in the story. John says he’s not the right man, and Jesus replies you’ll do for the meantime, implying that God can make good use of all sorts of flawed characters. Behind that exchange is the competition between the disciples of John and the disciples of Jesus. This is a sorting out episode before the main event.

And the location doesn’t matter much either. Unlike the architectural elegance of our baptistry, the place of Jesus’s baptism is a muddy creek. This part of the Jordan is the most barren and unprepossessing place, despite the tourist stopover alongside the narrow river.

All of the preliminaries in this story are just that. Preliminaries. Like the banter that happens on the aerial platform before a bungy jump. The event itself is everything and nothing for the jumper is the same again.

In our story the heavens open and the voice of God is heard and the Spirit of God descends like a dove.

Where else are we told about such heaven opening moments? 

In the nativity story where the shepherds are overwhelmed by the sounds and visions falling from the night sky. At the Transfiguration, and the Ascension, but even more immediate, following the baptism of Jesus, the temptation in the desert when the devil finally departs and the angels appear.

Baptism is up there with all of those. Let’s not make the mistake of underestimating this sacrament and its transformative power. The immense and secret power that lies in the heart of creation, hidden in all material things to explode open and speak of God. It’s the reason that in the very secular corridors of science, there are fewer atheists in the realms of astrophysics and astronomy.

What happens in baptism is that we take ordinary water and bless it and dare to believe that it can speak of transformation and rebirth and new life.

Quite how that happens we’re not sure, we know it can happen in a myriad of different ways. 

In Lautoka in Fiji a while ago, we attended the baptisms of a large group of converts from the local Indian community. They were paying a high price for their baptism, some threatened with loss of jobs and alienation from friends. The baptisms took place on the beach, the sand was oil soaked from discharge leaking from the sugar refinery port nearby. The candidates were immersed in the waves by the Anglican bishop and emerged smiling, surrounded by family. It was their very own Big Day Out and the singing was wonderful. It was an occasion of infectious and costly celebration. 

In Waiapu, we introduced the practice of giving every baptismal candidate a river stone, inscribed with the Jerusalem pilgrimage cross and their baptismal name. The stone came from the Ngahuroro River, where the first missionary in the region, William Colenso once walked up the riverbed en route to his historic crossing of the Ruahine ranges, one failed attempt after another until he finally succeeded after suffered great hardship.

In baptism, the candidates we trained made Colenso’s story their own, because in baptism we are welded into the stories of all the saints of God, all those who have gone before us in the faith, all those who surround us on every side and sustain us and urge us on.

This spiritual welding happened through a piece of stone and a splash  of water, not even a river full or a sea full, a bowl full will do.

Another sort of spiritual welding is described in this passage by Alistair Hulbert, the head of the Student Christian Movement worldwide, who worked in a French engineering workshop in the 1960’s as a worker priest and trained as a welder. “Gradually I began to get a feeling for metal and the satisfaction of guiding a ball of molten steel, leaving behind tiny waves – white, red, purple, all the colours of the liturgical year, this ball that follows the arc as the sea obeys the moon. And there was born in me, all frail, a relationship with matter”  - a spiritual link with the physical stuff of creation.

When physical things  speak of spiritual realities and heavenly truths, we call  them  sacraments. These physical things speak of God. They cannot be silenced by any force no matter how oppressive. On Palm Sunday Jesus is warned by the authorities to keep the crowd quiet.  He replies, even if I did, the very stones beneath my feet would shout aloud.

It’s a pity that Kiwi Christians are so slow to see the holiness of physical things and so deaf to the voice of the natural world around us. The stones beneath our feet are shouting about the poisons in our water and  our soil. Even Fonterra now admits we’ve been living in a state of denial. Our duty of care is way past its use by date.

And in the same way, if we don’t take care of the sacraments we inherit, then someone else will. The world of consumerism knows all about the power of physical things to change lives. We’ve just witnessed the biggest shopping orgy for a generation in this country. People spending up large on things that they have been told will change their lives, and make them happier, prettier, more successful. Good luck but don’t hold your breath.

The sacrament of baptism has a longer and better track record.

If you haven’t enjoyed this sacrament, think about reconsidering what it offers.

And if you have already received this sacrament, this is a day for recalling your own baptism, recalling the promises you made or others did on your behalf, and perhaps considering renewing them again. As you make your communion this morning, think about saying to God thank you for the privilege of belonging to this community, for the gift of faith, and give me the eyes and ears to see and hear your presence everywhere, in the people  around me, and in the things of your creation, the summer sky and sea, the green landscape  and the water and rocks of this beautiful land. Baptise me again and again, and let the heavens keep opening for me and the people around me, and especially for Layla later this morning.