One of the great misconceptions that many people have about the Church and the Christian faith is that the sacrament of Holy Baptism is the same thing as a Christening. But, if you’re one of those people, I’m sorry to disappoint you, it isn’t. When people either bring their children to church or come to church themselves to have water poured on their heads and to be anointed with holy oils, they come to receive the sacrament of Holy Baptism, and they are being baptised. A Christening, on the other hand, is simply a naming ceremony. If the person being baptised is an infant, or an older child or adult who’s being baptised decides to take a new, or additional name at their baptism, which is usually the name of a saint or ‘Christian name’, that part of the baptismal service is the christening. The service itself, the rite, is a sacrament of the Church called Baptism.

Perhaps some of you are now thinking, ‘So what?’ ‘What difference does it make what people call it?’ ‘What’s in a name?’ Well, actually, in this case, I think there’s an awful lot in a name.

When people contact me to enquire about having their children baptised, they almost invariably ask for a ‘Christening’ and when I start speaking about baptism, quite a lot of them get confused, because they think I’m talking about something they haven’t asked for. Well, I suppose I am in a way, but that’s because they haven’t asked for what they actually want; they’ve asked for a Christening when what they really mean is a Baptism. In fact, this misunderstanding is so widespread that the Church of England now refers to infant baptism, which as you know is what we usually do in the Church, as ‘Christening’ and ‘Baptism’ as something for adults, as though they were two different things (and if you go on the C of E’s website, you can see that for yourself). I think that is a great mistake because it encourages this misunderstanding people have of what Baptism is, and what it’s all about.

The problem is, that because people think in terms of Christening rather than Baptism, they think that once they’ve ‘been done’, as many of them say, they’re Christians. It’s as though they come to church on a specific day, once in their life, usually as a baby, to have water poured on their heads and ‘Hey Presto’ they’re a Christian for life and that’s all there is to it. So, because they think that, they never have to do anything else about it. They never have to come to church again, at least until they perhaps bring their own children to be Christened. Once they’ve been done, they’re a Christian and always will be. But that is not what being baptised is all about.

Being baptised does not make anyone a Christian. Being baptised makes that person a member of the Church. Being a Christian is something that takes a lifetime of hard work because it involves a lifelong commitment to living as Jesus Christ lived and taught us that we should live. And it’s as a member of the Church where people learn about what that means and how to do that, because it’s in the Church where those things are taught.

So, to be a Christian, rather than someone who’s simply been ‘Christened’, or even just baptised, we need to do what Jesus did and taught us to do, and that obviously means that we have to know what Jesus did and said. And so what we need to do, before we can start becoming Christians, is to listen to Jesus.

In the Gospel this morning, we read about Jesus’ own baptism. Today, we read the story as recorded in St Mark’s Gospel, but it’s a story that we find in the Gospel’s of St Matthew and St Luke too. As we come to expect of them, each of the evangelists that the story in a slightly different way but, if we read them as a whole, and in the context of the Gospels as a whole, these stories of Jesus’ Baptism tell us so much about what the Church is doing when we baptise people today.

We know that John’s baptism was for repentance: it was for the forgiveness of sins and a change of heart and life in the baptised, and today the Church baptises for the forgiveness of sins, and the promises that are made at baptism are all about a change in the way the baptised, or their parents and godparents, will live. John baptised in water, and so does the Church. We believe that, through the waters of baptism, the Holy Spirit is given to the baptised to guide and strengthen them as they begin this new way of life. And in the stories of Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove. And immediately after this, Jesus goes into the wilderness to prepare for the beginning of his earthly ministry. Of course, we don’t have doves flying around in church when we baptise people, but we symbolise the Spirit’s presence in, and with, the newly baptised through anointing with oil which is another sign of God’s favour we read about frequently in the Scriptures. In obedience to Jesus’ command, we baptise in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And all three are all present in the stories of Jesus’ Baptism. Jesus, the Son, is there; the Spirit, in the form of a dove, is there; and the Father, who speaks from heaven, is there.

So what we do in the Church in the sacrament of Holy Baptism is very much in accord with what we read about Jesus’ own baptism by John in the River Jordan. But, as we think about what Baptism signifies and the kind of life it calls us to, perhaps the most important thing we learn from the story of Jesus’ Baptism is found in thinking about the Father’s words. Perhaps not directly, but certainly in the context of the Gospels as a whole because the words of the Father at Jesus’ Baptism remind us very much of the Father’s words in another story about Jesus we read later in the Gospels.

As well as the story of Jesus’ Baptism, another story that the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark and Luke share, is the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration.  In both stories, Jesus is revealed as the Son of God by a sign and by a voice from heaven, and in both stories the Father’s words are very similar. At Jesus’ Baptism, the Father says to Jesus,

“You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

And at Jesus’ Transfiguration, the Father says to Jesus’ disciples,

“This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

So in these Gospel stories, God the Father, proclaims Jesus as his ‘beloved Son’, with whom he is ‘well pleased’, and he tells his disciples to ‘listen to him’. And the message for us is unmistakable. Jesus is the beloved Son of God. The Father approves of what Jesus says and does. And if we’re going to be disciples of Jesus, if we’re going to be Christians, we’re called to listen to Jesus. And, if we think about it, isn’t that what the baptismal promises are all about? Aren’t promises to turn to Christ as Saviour, to submit to Christ as Lord and to come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life, all promises to listen to Jesus and do as he says? And aren’t promises to reject the devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce the deceit and corruption of evil and to repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour, all promises to do what Jesus taught us to do and live as he lived? And when we think about it in that way, isn’t it obvious that being baptised and being a Christian is about far more than simply coming to church on one day, usually very early in life, to be ‘done’?

An awful lot of people do think that they come to church on the day of their baptism to be Christened, to be somehow miraculously transformed into Christians. An awful lot of people speak about being Christened as being done, and the very word itself suggests that people think once they’re Christened, they’re then finished in some way; that being Christened is some kind of completion. In fact, the day of a person’s baptism is simply the beginning of a lifelong journey towards becoming a Christian and if people ever do want to complete that journey, they’ll have to spend a lifetime thinking about the promises they made, or that were made on their behalf; thinking about how to fulfil those promises and listening to Jesus to find the answers.

So, if you’re thinking of bringing a child to church to have water poured on their heads or know someone who’s thinking of bringing a child to church, or coming themselves, for that reason, please remember, and explain to others, that you, or they, are not coming to church to be Christened or to be done, but to receive the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Please understand and explain to others what that means and involves. And for those of us who aren’t in either of those situations but who are already on the journey towards becoming Christians, let’s remember that it’s up to us, all of us, to encourage the newly baptised, and their parents and godparents to take Baptism seriously by coming to church where they can listen to Jesus and learn what he has to teach us about how to be his disciples. And let’s make sure that, if they do come to listen and learn, we do teach them, not only in words, but by our own example.

Amen.  

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You will find the Propers for The Baptism of the Lord here.

Well, here we are once again at the start of another new year. Traditionally, this is a time for making new year’s resolutions, so it’s a time for looking forward. But the turn of the year is also a time when we tend to look back too. A time when we look back over the old year, to think about what’s happened during the year that we’ve just left behind, to take stock of the year, perhaps to think about what we could have done differently or better, so that we can make that new year’s resolution and resolve to do or be better in the coming year.

But, as we look back over 2020, regardless of how the year has been for us personally, I think all of us will see it as a year unlike any we’ve ever known before. The coronavirus pandemic meant our lives were very different during 2020 than they have been in any other year we’ve known. Our freedom was restricted because of lockdowns and tiers, and all these things caused tears of a different kind too as people were separated from their families and friends and the pain and suffering that caused, not to mention the pain and suffering caused by the illness and death that the virus brought into the lives of so many people. So I don’t think 2020 will be a year that many, if any, of us will be sorry to see the back of. But even as we head into the new year of 2021, we know that we can’t really put the past year behind us properly, just yet, because coronavirus is still with us, our lives are still restricted, and so many people are still suffering and dying because of the virus.

If we were to look at the past year as a journey, certainly since the first lockdown in March, we’d probably see it as a journey with lots of twists and turns. It’s been a journey that we seemed on a few occasions to be coming towards the end of, only to find that we weren’t and that we still had a long way to go to the end of the journey. That’s been true generally, and it’s certainly been true of our journey through the year as members of the Church. When we were told we had to suspend services in March, I’m sure we were all hoping it wouldn’t be too long before we could be back in church to worship the Lord, together, again. But, when we were allowed back, it was to services that were very different to the services we had before the lockdown. Then, a few months later, we were right back to the start of the journey because we had to suspend services again.

We’ve had to cancel baptisms and weddings. We couldn’t have funerals in church. And even though we can do all those things again now, we’re very much restricted in how many people can be in church for them, and in how we actually do the services. And it’s the same story for our worship. We only need to look around to see how different things are. It’s almost 9 months since we’ve been able to sing during our worship. And all this seems set to carry on well into this new year. When all this started, I don’t think anyone thought we’d have to celebrate Christmas in Covid-19 secure churches and in services without singing, but now, I think we’re all just hoping that we can at least celebrate Easter in church this year, however we have to do that, because we couldn’t do that at all last year. So it’s been a long journey with lots of twists and turns, and it’s a journey that isn’t over yet, we still have some way to go before we reach our destination which is a return to something like normal life both in church and in our daily lives.

And in this, I think we’re very much like the Magi, the Wise Men, who followed a star to bring gifts to the Christ-child. We don’t really know too much about the Magi, but we can tease a few things out of the little that we read in the Gospel. The name Magi suggests that they were from Persia, modern day Iran. They followed a star that they’d seen rising so we think they were astronomers or astrologers, and unlike today, there was probably no difference in those two terms at the time of the Magi. That suggests they were from Babylon which is in modern day Iraq. The gifts they brought, especially frankincense and myrrh, suggest they came from Arabia. So they were probably Parthians because the Parthian Empire covered all of those areas, and many others, at the time. So they made quite a long journey to find the new-born king of the Jews. We also know that they didn’t know exactly where the new king would be born. So their journey was broken as they made enquiries and tried to find out where to go, and what their final destination was. We know from the Gospel that, from the time they first saw the star rise, it took the Magi two years to reach Herod in Jerusalem before they finally found their way to Bethlehem where they could present their gifts to the Christ-child. So just like us, as we journey through the coronavirus pandemic, the Magi made a long journey, full of twists and turns, a journey they must have thought they were coming to the end of, but weren’t, before they finally got to where they wanted to be. 

When we think of the Magi, we perhaps think most easily about the gifts they brought to Christ. We see these gifts as gifts fit for a king, and we see their spiritual significance. Gold as the gift for a king, frankincense as an offering to God, and myrrh as an ointment for embalming the dead, symbolising Christ’s destiny to die on the Cross. And we often think about the way we can offer similar gifts to Christ in our own lives. The gold of our time and talents, not to mention our financial support of his Church. The frankincense of our worship and our prayers. And the myrrh that symbolises our faith in him as our Saviour, the one who died and rose again from the dead for us, and the healing his life and resurrection brings to us and to the world, and that we’re called to bring to the world in his name. But today, as we journey on through the coronavirus pandemic, whilst not forgetting those gifts, I think we should really think about something else that the Magi offered to Christ.

In one of the seasonal blessings we end our services with during the Christmas season, we pray for a number of things associated with the story of Christ’s birth. We pray for the joy of the angels, the faith of the shepherds, the obedience of Mary and Joseph and the peace of the Christ-child. But when it come to the Magi, we pray for their perseverance, and their perseverance is something that I think we really do need at this time.

I don’t think these past months have been the best time of anyone’s lives, but some people have found them very difficult indeed, and difficult from a point of view of their faith. Speaking to people, I know that some don’t want to come back to church until things have returned to normal, but we don’t know when that will be. Some have decided, for various reasons, that they won’t return to church even when things return to normal. Some people have struggled, and are struggling, to keep their faith. Some have struggled, and are struggling, to pray. Now, I’m not denying that things have not been easy on this journey, and they’re still far from easy as we continue on the journey, but it’s now that we need to show the perseverance of the Magi so that we can keep going and make it to the end of the journey.

We might not be able to do what we usually do in church or for the Church at this time, but we need to persevere in doing all the things we have done, and would do again, in better times. We need to persevere in giving our time and talents the Lord, and our financial support to his Church, in whatever way we can, and to whatever extent we can through these hard times. We might not be able to worship the Lord in the way we want to at this time, but we need to persevere in worshipping him, however we can, at this time. We might find hard to pray as we, and the world goes through this difficult time, but we need to persevere in prayer, nevertheless. And it doesn’t matter if we can’t find the words to pray at this time: don’t the Scriptures tell us that at times like this, the Spirit who knows the thoughts of our hearts, will intercede for us with sighs too deep for words? We might find it hard to see the end of this journey, but it will end. And amidst the pain and suffering that the world has gone through in the past year, and is still going through now, we might find it hard to understand where God is in all this. But we have to persevere in faith that he is with us, that Christ, who endured the pain and suffering that human life can bring, and died for us, will never abandon us; that he is true to his promise to be with us always, not only along this hard road and to the end of this hard road, but to the end of the world itself.

One of the signs that we’re on a difficult journey at the moment, is that we’re keeping this feast of the Epiphany of the Lord on 3^rd of January rather than on the twelfth night of Christmas, the 6^th of January, which is when we usually celebrate it. What that has done is moved the celebration a little closer to the turn of the year, to that time of looking backwards and looking forwards. So, as we look back on a difficult journey through 2020, and forward to an uncertain journey into 2021, perhaps today is a good day to make a new year’s resolution. And perhaps a good resolution to make would be a resolution to persevere in faith regardless of what lies behind us on the road or may lie ahead of us on the road.

A resolution to travel on, with God, towards the end of this hard journey and onward into the better times ahead that will come.

Amen. 

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You will find The Propers for the Epiphany of the Lord here.

 

Among the most well-known opening lines of any novel, certainly in the English language, is the opening sentence of L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between. I don’t know if anyone here has read that book, I haven’t myself but I’m certainly familiar with how it begins, and I think many other people might be in that same position. Perhaps many people know the opening lines but don’t know where they come from. And for those who don’t know the lines or aren’t sure, the novel begins,

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

Notwithstanding that sentence comes from a novel, a work of fiction, I don’t think there have ever been any truer words written. Things were different in the past, they weren’t the same as they are now, and so things were done differently in the past than they are now. And that’s something we always have to be aware of when we’re studying the past, including the Scriptures.

One very great mistake that people make when they study, or even simply read history, is to view it and judge it from the perspective of their own time. And so they view and judge the people in historical times as though they’d acted in modern times. But we simply can’t do that. Actions are linked to thoughts, and thoughts are always conditioned by the world and society we live in. And so, because the world of the past was different to the world we live in now, people in the past thought differently than we do now, and so they acted differently than we do now, or would do now. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

It’s not too many years ago that the idea of driving an electrically powered vehicle was a joke. The only people who did that were people who delivered milk and drove milk floats. But, in those not-too-distant days, hardly anyone gave a thought to the environment, global warming had never been mentioned and the only people who cared about climate change were scientists who studied the Ice Ages of tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, or mass extinctions tens and hundreds of millions of years ago.

But all that’s changed now. In today’s world, people do know about global warming and climate change, and most people do care about the environment. And so, electrically powered vehicles aren’t a joke anymore, in fact, it won’t be too much longer before vehicles powered by petrol or diesel fuel will be the joke, and a very bad joke at that. And how long will it be, I wonder before we start to see people like Nicolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, Karl Benz  and Rudolf Diesel, people who are credited with inventing the various forms of the internal combustion engine being demonised and start to hear calls for statues and monuments to them to be torn down and for their names to be obliterated from streets and buildings, for their names to be expunged from history for the crimes against the world that these evil men committed?  I’m sure that will happen, perhaps in our time, just as I’m sure that, in their own time, these men really believed they were acting in the interests of humanity.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. That’s something we always have to remember, and if we can remember that we’ll understand the past and things that were written in the past so much better. And that’s very important for us, and to us, as Christians because the Scriptures were written in the past and the people we read about in them lived in the past. So, if we’re really going to try to understand them, we need to try and read them on their own terms, rather than through modern eyes and from a 21ts Century perspective. We can adapt them to our own situation after we understand them, we have to do that so that we can apply what they teach us to our own lives. But we have to understand them properly first, before we adapt them.

This is yet one more example that we’re set by the Blessed Virgin Mary. In a number of places in the Scriptures, when unusual or miraculous things happen, we’re told that Mary stored these things up, pondered on them and tried to discern what was going on. We find the same thing in Joseph too, but especially in Mary.

So, as we go through the stories from the archangel Gabriel’s visit to Mary to the time the young Jesus is found by his parents in the Temple in Jerusalem, we read that, when Gabriel spoke to Mary,

“… she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.” 

When he hears that his betrothed is expecting a child, that clearly isn’t his, before he decides what to do, Joseph,

“… being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.  But … he considered these things …”

And, as he considered these things, an angel appeared and told him that his initial response wasn’t the right one.

Then, after Jesus had been born and the shepherds told their story about the angels and what had been said about the child, we read that

“… all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”

And then, 12 years later when, after 3 days of searching for him, a young Jesus is eventually found by his distraught parents in the Jerusalem Temple and he simply dismisses their worries and concerns with a response that, in modern parlance, amounts to,

‘What’s your problem? Where else did you think I’d be?’

Instead of the clip round the ear we might expect Jesus to get from his parents, we read that, even though Mary and Joseph

“… did not understand the saying that he spoke to them. … his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.”

When we read these stories, perhaps especially when we read about Mary storing or treasuring these things in her heart, we might get the impression that Mary was kept these things as nice, warm, happy memories. That’s because we think of the heart as the place of love and emotion. But to ancient people, the heart was a person’s centre of thought and reason. We get an inkling of that in the story of Jesus’ Presentation in the Temple when Simeon says to Mary,

“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”

So what these stories are really telling us is that Mary, and Joseph too, did some really hard, serious thinking about these things before they decided what to do. Today, we think of the brain, or the mind as the place we do our discerning and pondering don’t we? So when we have a decision to make, we might say,

‘The heart says this; the head says that.’

And what we usually mean by that is that, emotionally, we’re drawn to one course of action, what the heart says, but logically, we’re drawn to a different course of action, what the head says. But even so, we still do use this old-fashioned way of speaking at times. When we’ve got a hard decision to make, we sometimes say we’ve had to do some real heart-searching or soul-searching, before we made a decision, don’t we? We don’t mean that literally because we think about it in our heads. But for the people we read about in the Scriptures, it really was all about searching the heart and the soul for an answer.

So when we read the Scriptures, we do have to try and look at them through the eyes and with the mindset of the people we’re reading about. If we can do that, we can get a much better understanding of what the stories are about, and then we can go about trying to apply the lessons the stories teach us to our own lives.

Once we understand that Mary and Joseph put some serious thought into the dilemmas they were faced with before they came to a decision, that, even after he’d come to a decision, Joseph was still open to other ways and different answers, and that Mary, in particular, didn’t simply go with her heart, her emotions, but did some real heart-searching, some very deep thinking, in these situations, we can see another aspect of the example they set us in these stories. As well as examples of faith and obedience, these stories are also examples of our need to put some serious though into what we do, especially in difficult situations. They’re examples to us that going with our initial instincts isn’t always the right way to go, and that we shouldn’t make knee-jerk responses to problems and difficulties but should always think about what the best, and right thing to do is before we make a decision and act. And for us, as Christians, the best and right thing to do always means the most Christ-like thing to do.

Amen.

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You will find the Propers for Holy Family Sunday / Christmas 1 27th December, 2020 here.