Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Imagine with me. It’s late August. You’re 8 or 9 or 10 years old, and all summer at the pool as you’ve bobbed around in the shallow water or swum laps with your friends in the deep water, all the time you’ve been doing these things, you’ve been eyeing the high dive platform.

Sure, you’ve catapulted yourself off the low dive lots of times—diving, doing cannonballs, just running off the end of the board into the water with your arms and legs going everywhere.. But the high dive platform—suspended above everything, exposed: what would it be like to climb up, step off into the empty air, hit the water and go down, down, before coming up again for air?

Imagine that it’s late August; the summer is already telegraphing its end. “It’s time,” you tell yourself.

When you’re 8 or 9 or even 10, an important thing to master is how to do something momentous while appearing to be nonchalant. And so this is what you try to do. You saunter to the foot of the ladder and hesitate just for a moment before beginning your climb, the sound of your own pounding heart in your ears.

As you climb, you’re shocked by the number of rungs it takes you to get to the top. Once there, you look down and cannot believe how high you have climbed.

You take a moment to notice the upturned faces of friends who have realized this is your first time; you take a moment to notice the way the undulating water at one moment reflects the sun off its surface and then the next goes blue and transparent, showing through to the bottom of the pool with; you take a moment.

And then all at once: one, two, three quick steps. Open air. Splash.

Life is like this sometimes, isn’t it? We have a decision to make, that we believe only we can make, that feels for all the world like mounting a high dive platform by ourselves in front of everyone else. And after we get ourselves up there and take a moment to let it sink in, we just do it. We take the plunge, so to speak, a phrase used to describe making a bold move in which we step from a world where we have our bearings into a world in which we don’t have them.

All kinds of things qualify for a “taking-the-plunge” experience—a new job, a new relationship, a move or other situations in which we feel unprepared and exposed, worried about looking incompetent and not up to the challenge.

This morning on the Feast of All Saints little William Bravenec will be taking a plunge of a different sort. After we all reaffirm our own baptismal vows, John and Susan, Will’s parents and Meredith, Will’s godmother, will walk him back to the high dive in our entryway. Once there, they will make the decision for him to jump. This image, the image of three adults letting go of their beloved little one and commending him to the water is in some ways a kind of opposite image from our imaginary high-dive experience in which we, though frightened, choose to take the plunge. And there is theological gold in this opposite image.

For what John and Susan and Meredith will bedoing in making this decision for Will, what we are doing and saying in participating in what is essentially a ritual drowning, is that all the waters of Will’s life—the birth waters of creation, the waters of recreation that fall from the sky in the Northwest, and finally, the real and metaphorical waters of destruction that are and will overwhelm him at time—what we are all saying in this ritual drowning of going down in the water and coming back up—is that God in Christ is the Lord of all these waters, the Lord of the creative, recreating, and, yes, the life-threatening moments in Will’s life. God in Christ is the Lord of all these waters and all these moments, the Holy One who not only does not abandon us, whose presence saves us.

But there is more.  

Unlike our imagined moment on the high dive in which we were alone and exposed before taking our plunge, alone as we stepped off into the empty air, alone as went down into the water, when Will takes his plunge, he will be taking all of us with him.

We, all of us here, will go down with him, down once again into the creative, recreating and life-threatening waters of our lives. And in Christ and with him, we will come up again.  And when we do, here on the Feast of All Saints, we may catch a glimpse of who “we” really are. Yes, we are the living gathered here in this room, but we are also more than those who are physically here or those who are happen to be alive. We are the men and women and children of every generation whom God has met in baptism, whose poverty of spirit and meekness God honors, whose hunger God fills, whose mercy God echoes with an accompanying mercy, the ones whose purity of heart God greets with intimacy, the ones whose peacemaking magnifies God’s own peacemaking on earth.

We and they are all here this morning as God in Christ claims another child as her own.

This last week I was at something called a “clergy wellness” conference. I along with some 30 clergy over the age of 55 gathered with leaders and explored the issues of spiritual, physical, vocational and financial health in our lives. It was a crew that needed strong reminders about health.

One of the retreat leaders was a woman rancher-priest who told the story of what it was like to live through calving season on the ranch. One weekend when her husband was away on a family related trip back East, with the help of others she had to deliver 14 calves. It was difficult work assisting the mother cows as they pushed their babies out of the watery place of their gestation out into the world.

“And what do you think,” she asked us, “is one of the first things that the mother cow does after the calf is born, after she licks him off and the little one struggles to his feet?”

None of us tired clergy in need of re-creation knew the answer.

“The mother bellows,” she said. “The mother cow bellows, and the little calf bellows back.”

Baptism, Will’s and ours, is about God with us as companion and savior in the waters—the waters of gestation, creation, re-creation and what feels for all the world like threats to our very lives.. At each of these times, listen for God’s voice, for she is calling her own, listening for her own.

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