Fifth Sunday in Easter: Baptism of Zachary Wheat
Service Date:
10 May, 2009
Psalm 27:1-6
I should like to make it clear that this reading has been chosen by Elisabeth and Jon, not by me. Not that I'm disagreeing with it, or disowning their choice. But it sets out more starkly the way the world is than you might immediately call to mind at a baptism. Look at Zachary, happy to be here, so far as we can tell -long may that peaceful happiness continue. When you see him, do you immediately think about enemies surrounding him with evil intent, waiting for him to trip up? If that was your first thought on meeting Zachary, I'd respectfully suggest you might like to consider talking to someone about it. And yet, all over the world, babies Zachary's age and younger are facing the worst of modern warfare. All over the world, babies Zachary's age and younger are battling against the effects of famine and disease. And Zachary himself did not enter this world completely trouble-free. So Jon and Elisabeth have it right: the world can be a dangerous place, and there's no point our closing our eyes to that fact, even in the joyful setting of a baptism service.
But the reading they have chosen doesn't stop there. It asks for God's help when bad things happen, for protection from evil. And I suppose that is every parent's wish: that their child be protected from all that would damage or harm, and every parent's determination that they will do everything possible to help their child while he cannot help himself. You'll have noticed that the psalm is written from someone's own experience - when bad things happen to me, the writer says, this is what I think, what I hope for and what I do. For now, Zachary relies on others for everything - though I understand that with some relief to his mother he's currently embarking on the adventure of solid food. For now, too, as they bring him to baptism, his parents and godparents must make promises for him in words that he cannot yet say or understand. And they do this in the hope that in years to come when Zachary can speak up for himself, he will be able to tell us from his own experience: God is my light and salvation; God guides me in dark times; God rescues and heals me when I'm in trouble.
How can Zachary begin to find out for himself what we are telling him here of God's goodness, God's reliability? Well, he could do worse than make this church, this body of people, part of his friends and well-wishers.
For if his baptism is going to mean anything to him as he begins to grow up, just like the writer of our psalm, Zachary will wants to see glimpses of God's beauty - and to ask hard questions about God, too. And in this church, as in every church, that's what we're about: looking for the beauty of God's love in our lives, and wrestling together with the hard questions of sorrow and suffering.
But that's all in the future for Zachary. For now, like the psalmist and like every budding musician, he's got the chance to start learning to sing with us God's joyful song of love.
I should like to make it clear that this reading has been chosen by Elisabeth and Jon, not by me. Not that I'm disagreeing with it, or disowning their choice. But it sets out more starkly the way the world is than you might immediately call to mind at a baptism. Look at Zachary, happy to be here, so far as we can tell -long may that peaceful happiness continue. When you see him, do you immediately think about enemies surrounding him with evil intent, waiting for him to trip up? If that was your first thought on meeting Zachary, I'd respectfully suggest you might like to consider talking to someone about it. And yet, all over the world, babies Zachary's age and younger are facing the worst of modern warfare. All over the world, babies Zachary's age and younger are battling against the effects of famine and disease. And Zachary himself did not enter this world completely trouble-free. So Jon and Elisabeth have it right: the world can be a dangerous place, and there's no point our closing our eyes to that fact, even in the joyful setting of a baptism service.
But the reading they have chosen doesn't stop there. It asks for God's help when bad things happen, for protection from evil. And I suppose that is every parent's wish: that their child be protected from all that would damage or harm, and every parent's determination that they will do everything possible to help their child while he cannot help himself. You'll have noticed that the psalm is written from someone's own experience - when bad things happen to me, the writer says, this is what I think, what I hope for and what I do. For now, Zachary relies on others for everything - though I understand that with some relief to his mother he's currently embarking on the adventure of solid food. For now, too, as they bring him to baptism, his parents and godparents must make promises for him in words that he cannot yet say or understand. And they do this in the hope that in years to come when Zachary can speak up for himself, he will be able to tell us from his own experience: God is my light and salvation; God guides me in dark times; God rescues and heals me when I'm in trouble.
How can Zachary begin to find out for himself what we are telling him here of God's goodness, God's reliability? Well, he could do worse than make this church, this body of people, part of his friends and well-wishers.
For if his baptism is going to mean anything to him as he begins to grow up, just like the writer of our psalm, Zachary will wants to see glimpses of God's beauty - and to ask hard questions about God, too. And in this church, as in every church, that's what we're about: looking for the beauty of God's love in our lives, and wrestling together with the hard questions of sorrow and suffering.
But that's all in the future for Zachary. For now, like the psalmist and like every budding musician, he's got the chance to start learning to sing with us God's joyful song of love.
Hymns:
R&S 45: Morning has brokenR&S 420: Aaronic blessing
R&S 489: Be thou my vision
R&S 558: Will you come and follow me
R&S 579: Lord, thy church on earth is seeking
Sermon:
Psalm 27:1-6; Acts 8:26-40; John 15:1-8I'm not a gardener myself, but I have friends who garden. And I've learned that saying round this time of year, How's the garden getting on? is not at all the right thing to do. They look harassed; they look embarrassed; they try to answer me honestly without having to admit in so many words, It's all completely on top of me and I don't know when or whether I'll ever sort it out - and it's just not worth the hassle of asking.
But I want to tell all you gardeners out there: I admire you. Not just for the effort you put in, but for the knowledge that seems to ooze from your fingertips. (Just to put this in perspective, I feel quite proud of having kept alive two spider plants since I arrived in Sheffield four years ago.) And one of the things I'm most impressed by in gardening is pruning. How do gardeners know how to prune? The mistakes are dead obvious. But pruning successes are less evident: well-rounded rosebushes, for example, bushy but not leggy, with plenty of buds sprouting, look just the way they do in the catalogues - but after how much deliberation about what to cut and what to leave, heaven only knows.
And heaven only knows the effort God has gone through to keep the sap of life flowing through us. If vine branches were to decide, the way Jesus' word picture talks about us, that they don't need that boring old stem to stay alive, but can branch out on their own much more fruitfully - well, you don't need to be a gardener to see why that won't work. And for Christians it's obvious why, too: we believe Jesus shows us as much of God as can fit into a human being, so we'd be daft to ignore him and go off on our own.
But being pruned doesn't sound too good if you're a vine branch - or if you're a person, come to that. If you're faced with redundancy because your employer has to balance the books; if your significant other decides to dump you; if you go through bereavement, or through any loss, it is no fun at all. And plenty of us are struggling with being pruned right now; not just because of the credit crunch, but because loss is part of life for us all, even for Zachary.
But hold on. Christians say we have good news or Gospel to pass on: yet how can the pain of loss be ‘good' in any meaningful sense?
It may have been this sort of question the eunuch in our second reading today was wrestling with. Anyone in the ancient world with that description had suffered an obvious and painful loss at some time in his life, though he seems to have risen high in his career, as a high-ranking treasury official in the Ethiopian civil service. But now all his education, all his achievements could not help him work out what this ancient Jewish prophecy was on about. And we can sympathise, for it's still mysterious today: As a sheep led to slaughter, and quiet as a lamb being sheared, he was silent, saying nothing. He was mocked and put down, never got a fair trial. But who now can count his kin, since he's been taken from the earth? And it's a fair question the eunuch asks: what is all this about? Is the prophet talking about himself here, or someone else?
The first Christians didn't have the benefit of what we call the New Testament - they were living it. So they often looked back to the Hebrew Bible, what we sometimes call the Old Testament, to try to understand just who Jesus was and why he, God's chosen leader, had died a criminal's death. And this very passage was one of the ones they found shed light on the question. Jesus had been arrested on false charges of being a political rebel, but had refused to speak up and defend himself. Witnesses had lied about him; the occupying authorities were manipulated into giving him a terrorist's death, with no children to mourn his passing. Not so different from the stories Amnesty tells us today. But the difference was that, as we believe, God's life within Jesus was so strong that even death could not end it - that's what we've just celebrated at Easter.
Christians believe God's life lives now not only in Jesus but in everyone who follows him, too. It's not like magic armour to stop us from getting hurt or protect us from the pruning process - it didn't stop Jesus dying. But God promises that if we follow Jesus, no loss, however terrible, can ever take God's life from us, that life which even death cannot destroy.
And the fruit we're to produce, as vine branches living through Jesus our stem? Sometimes it's sharing in words what God means to us, as Philip did. But actions speak louder than words, and I don't just mean the action of baptism. Our next hymn gives an idea of some of the other things Zachary and the rest of us may end up doing if we answer Jesus' call: Will you come and follow me?
