Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The First Sunday in Lent, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
We begin the Sundays in Lent with baptism—with the story of God’s covenant with the world after the flood (an event which prefigures baptism), with the story of the baptism of Jesus, and with the enrollment of adult baptismal candidates. In a sense the entire season of Lent is bracketed by baptism. We focus on it this Sunday, and we will end Lent with the baptisms at the Easter Vigil.
Episcopal Priest Doug Bailey tells the story about going to Atlanta to officiate at the baptism of his grandson. At the parish where the baptism was occurring they had the custom of creating a banner for each child with that child’s name, the date of the baptism and the phrase “Christ’s Own Forever” on it. After the baptismal liturgy was over family and friends went to a party at the parents’ home. As the child’s mother entered the house, she took the baptismal banner and put it on a tack outside the front door of their home.
That same afternoon, some of their friends who lived nearby and who had been out of town for the week drove by and saw the banner bearing the child’s name, the date and the phrase “Christ's Own Forever" on it.
An hour later in the middle of the party; the phone rang. It was the voice of the neighbor who had driven by and seen the banner outside the house. "I’m so sorry to trouble you,” she said. “I feel awful asking you this, but has something terrible happened while we’ve been out of town? (An awkward silence). “Did your son die?”
“Christ’s own forever.” I suppose it does sound a bit like something you might stumble across on a tombstone, “Christ’s own forever,” “Called home by God,” or “Beloved in the Lord.”
But we know differently, don’t we?
We know that these words are not a pious phrase etched on a tombstone, a kind of final spiritual punctuation mark at the end of a life. No, these words, the words said as the sign of the cross is traced on the forehead of the newly baptized, signal a death in the midst of life, a death that ends one way of being and an inaugurates another way of being.
And so in a funny kind of way, the terrified next door neighbor in my story was right—someone had died that day. And someone died the day we were baptized too.
And so I want to talk about what died and what was born on the day of our baptisms and what will die and what will be born for those who will be baptized at our Easter Vigil. I want to explore these deaths and births because Lent is a time to rediscover and renew our baptismal identity and purpose.
So let’s start with the weightiest death that baptism is about. Baptism is about the death of defining ourselves as belonging to ourselves alone, to our families, to our parents, to our friends, to our jobs, to our spouses or partners, to our political parties or to our nation, you might even say to our age, gender, our race or our sexual orientation—baptism is about the death of defining ourselves by these, and the birth of our defining ourselves as belonging to Christ.
Someone who was exploring Christian faith once asked me: “So is belonging to Jesus kind of like having Jesus as an imaginary friend?” He expected me to laugh, but I didn’t. What I said was, “Yes—if you’re lucky it is kind of like that.” It’s like having a sense of a presence with you, even feeling a little haunted by the image of a soulful, centered, fully human being who’s not impressed by status and authority, who’s fiery on the justice issue, who loves the poor and the outcast, who endures all, who forgives all. Yes, if you’re lucky, it’s like having an imaginary friend.
But whether you experience this or not, in baptism, this is the one we belong to—the fully present, the fully engaged, the fully just, the fully compassionate human being. To belong to this one and not to all the others I mentioned means that a new freedom is born in us, a freedom to be in those other relationships or parts of our identity without being suffocated by them, without being imprisoned by them. Baptism transforms them through our belonging to Christ first.
But what does this mean to us in terms of our character and behavior?
This is part of the prayer that we all say after the baptism and before the baptized are marked with the sign of the cross as Christ’s own forever.
“Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”
From this we learn that we are to:
- Die to consumption and deflection and be alive to discernment
- Die to cowardice and be alive to courage
- Die to disappointment and be alive to joy and wonder
First we are to die to consumption and deflection and be alive to discernment. The baptized are not to be people who swallow things whole, who accept anything that comes their way without question. They are also not people who deflect the important questions and issues of their lives or the times in which they live. The baptized are to have inquiring and discerning hearts, meaning that they ask questions of the world, of the church, and of themselves. And then out of this, they discern, they listen for God’s leading in the silence of their hearts, in Scripture and out of what they have heard. The baptized are inquirers and discerners, not just consumers and not folks who avoid or deflect difficult questions or issues.
Second, the baptized are to die to cowardice and be alive to courage. And the particular kind of courage the baptized are to have, as our prayer says, is not bravado but the courage “to will and to persevere.” Joan Chittister talks about this ability to endure, to see something through to the end as a key element of spiritual life in the Benedictine tradition. She says; “Somehow, someday I have to see a thing through to the end or I will never come to recognize the face of God that is hidden there, and I will never come to be all that I could be there.”
Finally, the baptized are people who have died to a life of chronic disappointment and who are alive to life of joy and wonder. The baptized are not people who chronically harbor illusions about life which then leave them disappointed when life doesn’t measure up to their expectations. The baptized learn to joy in what is, finding wonder in the simple gifts of life even in the midst of conditions that need radical change.
Which of these deaths and new births do you need to draw near to during this Lent? To the death of consumption and new life of discernment? To the death of cowardice and the new life of courage? To the death of disappointment and the new life of joy and wonder?
As many of you have noticed, our look is a little different this Lent. Instead of an altar already stripped down, our altar is robed in deep purple, the same deep purple you see on these vestments. Most of you know that purple is the color of penitence, a color about turning away from all that is injurious to others and destructive of our best selves. But purple also has another meaning. It is the color of royalty. The color of coronation robes, if you will.
“Marked as Christ’s own forever,” said while the sign of the cross is made on our foreheads and we are anointed with oil, the same oil used at the coronation of royalty. This finally is what we are about in Lent: drawing near to the process of death and new life that was Jesus’ path to kingship and are our path to what it means to be completely human, supremely human, royally human.
Works Cited or Consulted
Doug Bailey’s sermon entitled “Death by Baptism, but “Christ’s own Forever” can be found on the explorefaith.org website at http://www.explorefaith.org/Homily08.22.99.html
Joan Chittister’s Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today, p. 156
