SUNDAY 19 JUNE 2005
Genesis 21: 8-21; Roman 6: 1b-11
In one of my previous parishes I had a woman who had been born in Russia in the 1930s. She had survived the German invasion of the western part of the Soviet Union where she had grown up. She had survived a couple of German concentration camps, and after the war ended, found herself in the part of Germany that was occupied by the West. She ended up in a camp for displaced persons in Italy, met a Greek man there and married him, and eventually they were resettled in New Zealand. It was not surprising that she lived with profoundly deep emotional scars. Occasionally she would tell me some of what it had been like for her. One of her stories came from her life as a girl in a village in Western Russia, not far from Poland.
Her family was, of course, Russian Orthodox. But this was Stalinist Russia, an officially atheist state. The headmaster of the village school lived in the school-house across the road from the church. Young people were forbidden to attend church ?± it was primarily old women who kept the faith alive. She told of occasionally being dressed in black with a black scarf over her head like an old Russian mamushka, a grandmother, and taken to church while the schoolmaster stood in front of his house looking to spot any of his pupils. On another occasion she told me about being woken up in the middle of the night, and taken stealthily to a house in another part of the village to witness something that, if the authorities found out, could result in those taking part being sent to a Siberian prison camp. The crime that was being committed was the old village priest baptising a newborn baby.
"I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." In the Russian Orthodox tradition, the child is usually only a few days or weeks old, is stripped naked, and is totally immersed, three times in a large bowl of water. When you think how uncooperative some of our babies can be with a much more genteel Presbyterian pouring of a small amount of water on their head, you can??t help wondering if the baby??s cries brought out the schoolmaster, the police, and everybody else in the village! The Orthodox immerse their babies; I pour water using a cockle shell, a symbol of pilgrimage and journey. Other traditions do it in other ways, with greater or lesser amounts of water. But we all use the same words ?± "?ñin the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
What we do easily and openly, in other places and at other times others have had to do secretly and in fear. What for many of us is part of the whole package of how we choose to bring up our children, is for others an act of courageous defiance in the face of religious or political persecution. What for us provides an excuse for a little bit of a social occasion, for others requires them to nail their colours to the mast as they commit themselves to keeping the Christian faith alive in another generation.
And always those words. In the warmth and security of this community??s church, in a five hundred year old Russian church with its icons stained with the smoke of incense and candles, in a river or in the sea, from a stone font in Yorkshire that has been used since before the Norman conquest, from a cracked china bowl in the highlands of New Guinea because it was all that was available at the time, sedately in a royal chapel, furtively in a prison camp, in a bamboo church in the north of Thailand while hilltribe people look on with impassive faces, in a mud brick church in Nigeria while the muezzin calls the majority Muslim faithful to prayer from the nearby mosque, in Gaelic on a wind-swept Scottish island, in Swahili in a jungle clearing in Tanzania, with haste and anxiety as a new-born infant struggles to hold on to life, with beaming faces and proud grandparents of a healthy child born to healthy parents, in 2005, in 1005, and in 105 ?± always those words: "I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?ñ"
By those words and with water, Jessica and Daniel who we baptised this morning have become part of a story that began some four thousand years ago in the Middle East with the stories of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael. How much these are people of history and how much they are people of legend and myth is now almost impossible to tell. Probably they are more legend and myth, but despite that, the stories about them are at the roots of both our faith and also of today??s international relations. According to the ancient tradition, Abraham??s son Isaac was the father of Jacob who was later given the name Israel, and from him descends the Jewish people. One of those descendants, known in his own day as Joshua, or Yeheshua, is known to us by the Greek version of his name, Jesus.
For we Christians, Jesus, and from him the Christian faith, is the continuation of the story of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. The movement he began during his adult life erupted after his death into a new religion, giving the world a new way of seeing God and of making sense of human life and of living human life. It is because of Jesus, the apostle Paul claimed in our second reading, that baptism gives each generation a new way of living with God and of living with themselves and others so that we become Christians ?± a word originally meaning ?´little Christs??. And when we say ?´christen?? instead of ?´baptism?? to describe what we did this morning, we use a word originally meaning ?´to make like Christ?? ?± ?´Christ-en??.
A promise of hope for the future came to the legendary figures Abraham and Sarah in the same way that a promise of hope came to the parents of Jessica and Daniel ?± through the birth of a child. A birth in and of itself is a promise of hope; it means there is a future; and baptism claims a particular kind of future as it ?´Christ-ens?? a new Christian, a new ?´little Christ??. A birth and a baptism proclaim that there is something to live for and to strive for and to be committed to ?± a new and safe and complete world in which our children and our children??s children can live and flourish and, as the introduction to the baptism service says, grow tall like kauri trees in the forest of life. The blessing begun with the birth of Isaac to an old and hitherto childless couple is continued in the blessing of each new child, each new generation, and is affirmed in baptism.
But there is a shadow that moves through the forest of life; a shadow which, like the promise and the hope, also began with Abraham and Sarah. For Abraham had another son, Ishmael, born of Sarah??s Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar when it had been thought Sarah would not be able to produce a child. After the rejoicing of being fulfilled in childbirth, a shadow of fear and jealousy fell on Sarah when she felt this other boy might some time threaten the inheritance of her own son, Abraham??s heir. And so, the legend tells, she had Ishmael and his mother sent away, into the desert where they might die. The legend which we heard read this morning, said that God had other plans, and so Ishmael and his mother lived. Here ancient legend comes alive daily on our television screens and in our newspapers. For just as the Jewish people trace their ancestry from Isaac through his son Jacob, and Christians trace their faith from Jacob??s descendant Jesus, so Muslims claim that Abraham??s son Ishmael is the ancestor of the Arab peoples.
Centuries of animosity and warfare have come from that legendary shadow, the shadow of fear and jealousy, the shadow of perceived threat and of resulting persecution. Israeli occupations, Palestinian suicide bombers, jihad, 9/11, Iraq, the War on Terror ?± ancient legend becomes current affairs in the world into which our children are born, and baptised, and blessed. An ancient tale of how the first people of God failed to internalise God??s blessing and instead became agents of prejudice and destruction is the background to today??s headlines and the backdrop against which we baptise and promise to nurture our children to walk in the way of Christ "by rejecting evil and by loving God and neighbour".
"I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit?ñ" Those ancient words lay a responsibility on we who do the baptising and welcoming of Jessica and Daniel into the community of ?´little Christs??. It is a responsibility to strive to move beyond the shadow of fear and persecution, to turn our back on the shadow of rejecting others for their difference or the threat we perceive in them. It is a responsibility to work for a new and better world for our children, and for all children, to grow up in safety and plenty.
And the words lay a responsibility on Jessica and Daniel. It seems too much to place upon their tiny shoulders just now, but in time it will be there and it will be theirs. Jessica and Daniel, like each new generation are given the opportunity to turn shadow into light, to turn curse into blessing, to turn fear into hope and enmity into reconciliation, to turn prejudice and persecution into the glorious freedom of all the children of God ?± both Jewish, Christian and Muslim who trace their faith back to Abraham, and also those who trace their faith origins in other ways and from other places or people.
"I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." In places and for people beyond number, in ways that are familiar to us and in ways that may seem strange, water is used and those words are said for a longed-for world where the children of Abraham and Sarah, and the children of Abraham and Hagar, and all other children of all other races may know themselves loved and nurtured, valued and free. So may it be!