This sermon was preached on the Occasion of the baptism of twin boys, and speaks more to that momentous occasion than to any specific lections. The Propers for the day were Epiphany 2, Year B.
While I was on my pilgrimage this past fall, the last site we visited was also my favorite. It was the site of Lydia’s baptistry, the place where a wealthy woman asked Paul to baptize her after hearing the Good News of Jesus. She and her entire household, including people of all ages and backgrounds, were baptized there in a little river that still flows through a grove of fig trees. Although the site has been a place of baptisms and pilgrimages for many generations, at some point someone built a chapel there, a platform right in the middle of the river, with the water flowing through its center and around either side. It is impossible to worship there and not think about baptism, about the bravery it must have taken those first converts to walk into the water and allow a near-stranger to submerge them under the surface. I imagine it was as strange to them as it must be to the children who feel the splashes of water on their foreheads in churches all over the world, sometimes startled awake by the cold to see a strange person in weird clothes looking down at them. Those first Christians thought this ritual was important enough to give up everything for, to risk their lives and their livelihoods for. I wonder how we might live differently, if we felt the same. It does not feel so radical now, but I believe it still is.
This morning, our friends at St Mark’s welcomed two new members to the Body of Christ, two twin boys. It is an important moment in their lives, in their family’s life, but it is also an important moment in the life of the entire Christian community, including every one of us. Every time we do this, whether we know the people being baptized or not, whether we are present for the baptism or not, we are all impacted by the leap of faith taken in the font. And it is a leap of faith, to entrust our loved ones to God. It is a leap of faith to say that we will raise our children in the Church, in a world that seems very often to have lost sight of who the Church is really for. It is a leap of faith to promise to repent, to admit that mistakes and missteps and poor choices are inevitable, to acknowledge that the little ones in our lives will make their own mistakes and missteps and to promise we will love them through the pain and joy of growing up. It is a leap of faith to open up our hearts to the possibility that newly baptized members will change us. Their very existence changes us, their presence among the body of the faithful makes us new. Whether the candidates for baptism are minutes old or have lived a century, the rebirth they experience in baptism renews the whole body, including people they will never meet in this life. By baptizing one another into the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we immerse ourselves in an overflowing and never-ending love.
In baptism, the Body is expanded and so is our capacity for love. The Divine Love is ever expansive and ever-deepening, much like the universe that Love created. Our human capacity for love is similarly expansive- the addition of a child to a family often leads not to less love to go around, but more. Of course, we are human and thus limited, so this is not always true within the nuclear family. But the family writ large, the family of blood relatives and chosen parents and adopted aunties and uncles and soul friends, is almost as limitless as the universe. With the defeat of death, our families become truly eternal, never ceasing to grow and never truly losing any member. The family those twin boys joined today is bigger than their household, bigger than their family tree, bigger than any genealogy even the best historian could track. This family includes saints, and martyrs, and queens and kings and monks and nuns and teachers and nurses and scientists and artists and untold thousands of siblings, both in this life and in life everlasting.
Many of you may have had the great privilege of being someone’s godparent. Although it does not hold the same legal and social power that it once did, the relationship between a newly baptized Christian and their godparents is a sacred honor that must never be taken lightly. As a godparent, you make the same vows as if you were parents, guardians entrusted with the upbringing of your godchildren just as their parents are. You become, literally, a member of the family. And in being a part of the family, you have responsibilities to uphold. You are committed to supporting the parents of your godchildren, to helping them in any way that you can to be the kind of parents God is calling them to be. You are committed to your own faith, to paying attention to your own spiritual health and engaging actively with the promises you’ve made. You are committed to treating these children like you belong to them, because you are theirs and they are yours in Christ. It is a tall order, but praise God none of us has to do any of this alone.
By witnessing these leaps of faith and promises of love today, whether in person or in prayer, every one of us is implicated. We are now responsible too, for the upbringing of all children in the faith and for the support and care of the people raising them. We are accountable to them, to being Christ to them, to remembering them in our prayers and loving them with our actions. In being baptized into Christ’s Church, these new little Christians get us too.
There is no limit to the people who will love them, or us, because Christ broke down every barrier to love. This is why we are commanded to love, why that love is specifically for one another as Jesus has loved us. The way Jesus loves us brings us closer together, grows us infinitely, refuses to be stopped by our arbitrary separations. The way Jesus loves us is expansive, and this is how we are called to love one another- expansively, exorbitantly, limitlessly. This is the way we are called to love these two new Christians. Before they pass through the waters, they are David and Jenny’s children, Mack and Melissa’s grandchildren. After they pass through the waters, they become our children, our grandchildren, our brothers, our responsibility and our joy. The things that separate us from them are washed away, and because of that we have no choice but to love more, love bigger, love impossibly.
Mother A Writes 