Baptism and the Mystery of Growth

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 14, 2009

Episcopal Church of the Holy Family, Jasper, Georgia

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Rector

On the Occasion of the Baptism of Jameson Campbell Bragg

I love summer time around Holy Family.  The grounds are teeming with life. A couple of days ago I walked along our lake, so grateful for the way the shoreline is returning to its post-drought dimensions.  


 There were schools of little fish in the grassy shallows, and in the sunshine their tails were a beautiful translucent blue-green.  There were the biggest dragonflies I’d ever seen, and all the small bright blue darting ones we used to call “darning needles” when I was small.  There are lilies 
 
and cosmos blooming, and St. John’s Wort; and rhododendron 
 
and Black-eyed Susans 
 
and Queen Anne’s Lace, 
 
all growing wild.   

There are jungle-size tomato plants in the parish garden plus a whole forest of fresh, peppery mixed greens and lettuce.  The beautiful little garden planted by our boys and girls last weekend is thriving under the midweek care of Pete Cook and Andy Edwards and Ralph Kiphuth.    
 
This is the time of year when we are aware that God created our earth to be fruitful and multiply.  This beautiful world that God made is, above all, life-affirming.

 Jesus said in today’s Gospel reading that the Kingdom of God can be likened to this kind of phenomenal, inevitable, powerful, beautiful tendency of living things to grow.  “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”  This kind of growth is mysterious and wonderful.  Scientists can describe the biochemical and genetic processes that govern the growth of plants and animals, but most agree that there is still a sense of awe and wonder that attaches to life, and leaves the curious mind wanting to learn still more. 

Paul Hawken, in his recent commencement speech to the students of the University of Portland,  listed many of the enormous challenges that young people face:  environmental degradation, profound poverty in the Third World, wars and terrorism, economic unrest… Yet he claims audaciously that the only realistic stance to take is one of hope.  Hawken said:

       There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.  The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school.  It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating.  Take the hint.  And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required.  Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible.  Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.”

YOU ARE BRILLIANT, Hawken says to this next generation of young adults, with their newly minted degrees, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING.

All our Bible readings today are about growth, and about youth, about new creation, and about God challenging people’s concept of what is possible.  Taken together, I would like you to imagine that the readings are God’s way of sending you and me an invisible message like the one Paul Hawken saw on the diplomas of the students graduating from the University of Portland.  God’s message to us this morning is this: YOU ARE BELOVED AND GOD IS HIRING. 

Today, on this Sunday that is just a week away from mid-summer, we are baptizing the newest member of the Church, a boy who will always be able to remember that he celebrates the sacrament of New Birth on the same day as his birthday.  We are proclaiming to Jameson Campbell Bragg—but the whole congregation is along on this journey and eavesdropping—that Jameson is beloved.  Jameson is invited to live a new life, founded on hope.  Jameson is invited to remember that, in Christ, he is a new creation.

 This language about a new life, a new creation, implies that there is an old life to be left behind.  But Jameson is only two years old.  The language about renouncing sin and evil that is central to our baptism rite seems a little bit odd or forced when applied to a child, kind of like the precocious preschooler who clutched the microphone at the revival meeting and belted out “Years I spent in vanity and pride!” 

Jameson is at that age when a child begins to work on developing a robust sense of self, a mind of his own.  He will stand there and shout, “No!” when his parents tell him it’s time to stop playing with his Legos and put them away before bedtime.  He will refuse to let his Dad help him get his shoes on, and will insist, “No!  Self do it!”  That kind of contrariness is actually a part of growing up.  It is not intrinsically evil, not some root of sinfulness that needs to be beaten out of a strong-willed child.  The category of sin insinuates itself much more subtly into a child’s life. 

In my experience, what usually happens is that we adults, responsible for a child’s wellbeing, generally introduce sin and its consequences into our children’s lives.  We are self-centered or distracted and short-tempered, and the children feel and respond  to our tensions. 

Jameson is young and full of energy and potential now.  But you, and he, will one day recognize that there are ways of being that we have to turn away from if we are to be the people God created us to be.  There will be times when he discovers, to his shame and disappointment, that he has hurt somebody he loves—on purpose, and it felt good for a minute.   Sin will be well rooted in Jameson, just as it is in the rest of the human race.

But, by the grace of God,  sin will not have the final word in Jameson’s life.  Here is what I pray will have happened by then.  Jameson will have grown up with the loving involvement of his parents and grandparents, who also are followers of Jesus.  They will remind him of the day when, on his behalf, they renounced Satan and the forces of evil, when, on his behalf, they turned to Jesus as Savior and Lord.  (They can do this now, because this Sacrament of Baptism is an outward, public sign of God’s grace and goodness at work in the life of the one being baptized.  The Grace of God is at work in our lives before we ask, before we are even aware of it!) 

Someone will take Jameson, when he has done something mean or selfish, and get down on his level, and talk to him as a fellow human being who also has struggled, and they will remind Jameson that at his baptism, as the water ran down his head, the beginning of a dying to his old life started.  They will remind him that a priest put the sign of the Cross on his forehead and it was a sign that he was marked as Christ’s own—forever!  I hope and pray that someone will then remind Jameson that at his baptism he received an invitation: YOU ARE BELOVED, AND GOD IS HIRING!  Jameson, God has a job for you to do.  He wants you to help to make the world a better place.  He wants you to live in hope.  He wants you to be a light that shines in the darkness so that when other people see it they will say, “Yes!  There is a God; and God is good!”

That is what we want to have happen in Jameson’s life in a few years.  That is what we trust that God’s grace will be doing in Jameson’s life from now until the day he dies. 

This may sound like a very heavy thing to put upon a boy who is just two years old, who should be making truck sound effects and learning to like macaroni and cheese.   But it is, indeed, exactly what we are doing.  We wouldn’t be responsible human beings if we did not welcome him into God’s family, and offer him our love and support.  Because we all know that sometimes life is almost unbearably hard.   And we also all know that Jesus will not lead Jameson—or you or me—anywhere that he has not gone.  Jesus was once a two year old.  He grew up to be a twelve year old who got caught up in his Father’s business and stayed behind in Jerusalem when his parents headed back home.  He lived another twenty years or so, and, his teaching and preaching and healing so threatened the Powers of this World that they killed him.   But in the greatest paradox of the universe, the death of Jesus defeated Death.  God raised him to life again on the third day.  And so we who follow Jesus into his death know and hope that we are—and Jameson is—marked as Christ’s own forever.   And we live a life that is a response to that amazing invitation:  YOU ARE BELOVED—AND GOD HAS A JOB FOR YOU!