Baptized

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, A.D. 2016 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“I baptize you with water for repentance!” John the Baptist cries. “But one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy even to carry His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire!”

What is Baptism? What is it for? And is it necessary for salvation? These are questions that were brought to me this week in something of an interdenominational debate. Some folks were keen to insist that baptism is a symbol, an outward gesture reflecting an inner conviction. Salvation arises from the work of the Holy Spirit within us, not from formalized rituals or customs. Because of this, they argued, baptism should be limited to adults, who are mature enough to choose a relationship with God for themselves.

That seems very pragmatic, doesn’t it? Very reasonable. They certainly have common sense on their side. Alas, we have the Bible on ours.

Ah, the scandal of an Incarnate God! How dare He make His promises into physical things: Word and water, Body and Blood? It’s so crude, so inflexible. Every red-blooded American knows that human beings are really free and sovereign wills floating about in arbitrary, malleable bodies. Doesn't God understand that life (especially eternal life) is about my choices, my feelings, my promises? I'll offer Him my baptism when I'm good and ready, thank you very much; He needn't offer me His.

A nebulous, symbolic God is so much more sensible—and less threatening—than one who tangibly drowns and raises, who gathers us into a visible body, who commands us to eat of His Body and drink of His Blood if we wish to have life within us. Alas, Christmas and Easter forever obliterate such a diaphanous deity. The God made Man in Jesus Christ, the God of the crèche and the cross, thrusts upon us promises that are every bit as real and solid and tangible as He is, manifest amongst us, scars and all. Baptism is not a choice we make based upon feelings. It is a reality that breaks in upon us, overturning our world, killing us and raising us up to new life!

This is what I tell families when they bring their loved one to the Font for Holy Baptism. I tell them that that Baptism is not magic; it is not a force field or fire insurance. It is something far simpler and infinitely more powerful. Baptism is the promise of God. And because that promise relies on His faithfulness, and not our own, that promise is assured. Of course, a promise does us no good if we do not know what it is that we are promised. And so parents have the obligation to raise their baptized child in the faith, to know the story of God’s people of whom they have been made a part.

Herein we must be careful not to fall back on one of Protestantism’s primal sins, namely, our tendency to seek out the lowest common denominator. What is the bare minimum? What’s the least I can do to squeak by in the Kingdom of God? As though salvation were a bar to pass or a box to check! This is a legalistic, mechanistic understanding of salvation, repulsive and unappealing to those either within or without the Church.

Christ has come not to condemn the world but to save it; it is not the will of the Father that even one of His little ones should be lost; but some will be saved as through fire. All three of those are biblical quotations, mind you. God has chosen to save the world through Christ; Christ has chosen to save us through Baptism. Our response, then, should not be, “Do I have to?” or “What about everybody else?” These are the questions my children yell out when I tell them to pick up their toys.

Instead we should say, “What a gift! What a promise! What a wonder! God has promised to meet me, to meet my children, to meet the whole world in this simple water! Truly this is a miracle!” Yes, that is grace! For we are indeed baptized with the Holy Spirit, and with fire.

Brothers and sisters, we live in a world devoid of hope—so devoid that it fails to realize its own hopelessness. Honestly, from where is our hope to come in this society?

Is it to come from the pagan virtue of having “made something” of ourselves, having kept our records clean and gotten a good job so that we can have exactly two kids who will in turn keep their records clean and get good jobs, world without end, amen? And when our children find such stifling mediocrity unbearable, without so much as a glimpse of transcendent good, what then?

Or do we place our hope in freedom, or whatever passes for it these days? A freedom that exists for its own sake, unaware of what freedom is truly for, or even that freedom has a purpose beyond self-indulgence and self-worship? Such an acquisitive, atomistic freedom cannot unite but only divide, for it excludes any concept of the common good beyond, “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.” Not that the thought police can manage even that nowadays. What we call freedom our forebears called slavery, slavery to ego and pride and lust and desire. And we revel in our chains.

Or do we place our hope in the flesh, in staying fit, forever young? In the pleasures of gastronomy and sensuality and mindless entertainments, striving after the Olympian ideals offered up to hungry masses by movie stars and rock gods and ad agencies? And what, then, when the flesh withers and sight dims, when beeping machines and uncomfortable visitors to the nursing home become our companions in old age? Where is our hope when all flesh is as grass?

Here is our hope: that Christ is Risen; that He has bought us with a price, marked us with His Cross, filled us with the Holy Spirit and raised us up to new life in Him; that He came of old as the Son of Mary, comes to us now in the Sacraments, and will come again to judge the living and the dead, when His Kingdom will have no end. Then will He dry every tear, heal every wound, and fulfill every prophecy. Heaven will descend to earth and together they shall be a New Heaven and a New Earth, a Holy City, the New Jerusalem, whose gates shall never be shut.

This is the hope that brings wonder and joy to daily life, that gives purpose and meaning to our freedoms, and that comforts us at the end of our lives, as we prepare to meet the King of Kings in a good and faithful death. All of this has been promised to us in Baptism. All of us have been sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the Cross of Christ forever. And come war or peace, youth or age, heaven or hell, that promise will endure, immortal, immutable, invincible throughout all eternity.

For Baptism is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit to whom credit is due: sections of this homily are drawn, in some cases phrase by artful phrase, from Anthony Esolen’s 2010 Touchstone article, “All Things New”.