glory

 

Church was glorious this morning. Not slick—we don’t do slick—but real, and, glorious.

At Communion, in this Eastertide, we are using Eucharistic Prayer G, which includes the following words:

‘How wonderful the works of your hands,

O Lord.

As a mother tenderly gathers her children,

you embraced a people as your own.

When they turned away and rebelled

your love remained steadfast.’

It was precisely as I was saying these words that the youngest member of the congregation today, held in her mother’s arms, decided that she had a lot to say, and say with conviction. Glorious. I almost lost it in giggles at the perfect timing of this illustration, of what it means to say these words about God. Of who we are:

children in arms, sometimes wrestling against the love and security we need;

needing—and free—to express ourselves;

loved.

Glorious.

This is Church. The life of faith, from birth to death, embodied, enacted, given voice.

After that service we had a time of baptism preparation with two families, for a girl born in lockdown and the little sister of a big brother who had been born in lockdown. We role-played our way through baptism, its significance, and the connections between the symbols of oil, water, and a little candle, and everyday life.

This, too, was glorious.

And now, the sun is shining, and I am on annual leave.

Glorious.

 

The Responder, baptismal and otherwise

 

Two things I am known for: helping people prepare for baptism and watching tv dramas.

The Responder follows a police officer over several days, as his life falls apart. It is a fine performance from actor Martin Freeman, including the most convincing Scouse accent by a non-Scouser I have heard on tv. Indeed, this gritty, harrowing tale is full of fine performances from an excellent cast. And every single character, no matter what part they play in the story, is just about at breaking point.

It is easy to dismiss drama as exaggerating for dramatic effect. Or to rail against portrayals of corruption as unhelpful. If you work within an institution—the police force, for example, or the Church—it is easy to become defensive about portrayals of corruption (in fiction, or the news) as misrepresenting an overwhelming majority of good people. But, as The Responder sees with wide-eyed clarity, good people—or people who try to do good, or to do ‘the right thing’—make bad decisions when they feel forced into a corner. When they or their families are threatened with violence, or even loss of face. This is even more likely when we are under a more general stress pressure. And, like the full range of people from diverse backgrounds in The Responder, so many of the real people I know in real life are living with unbearable loads right now.

(This crisis response is as old as human nature: in the Old Testament reading set for Morning Prayer today, we see Sarah trying to cover herself when her eavesdropping is uncovered; and in the Gospel reading we see Pilate make successive and increasingly desperate attempts to save Jesus from a lynch mob, ultimately putting his own skin and that of his family ahead of the life of an innocent stranger.)

At the heart of Baptism are four questions and responses, made for ourselves or, in the case of an infant, by parents and godparents on their behalf. In their most simple form, these are:

Do you turn away from sin?

I do.

Do you reject evil?

I do.

Do you turn to Christ as Saviour?

I do.

Do you trust in him as Lord?

I do.

These questions and answers acknowledge the reality that The Responder depicts.

That there is a distance that grows between us—‘sin’—even between us and those we love the most, that must be turned away from if we are to close that gap, if we are not to vanish from our own lives.

That the refusal to love our neighbour—for that is the definition of ‘evil,’ an indifference towards others—must also be strongly, and communally, rejected. You cannot mitigate against indifference by indifference: this is not a vaccine scenario where a small dose of indifference immunises society against potentially fatal indifference.

But also that we find ourselves, from time to time, in a hole where to keep on digging would only make it deeper. We need saving, from those who would harm us, including our own actions. In Christ, God is with us and for us, not necessarily rescuing us from consequences, but rescuing us from the disaster we catastrophise by bringing life out of death.

For, in all things, he is at work to reconcile all things—relationships, conflict, pain, the good we fear losing but cannot hold on to however hard we try—to bring about not a neat resolution and a Happily Ever After fairy-tale ending, but fresh beginnings and a true peace even in the most complex and challenging of circumstances.

I would recommend The Responder to your viewing. But I would recommend baptism preparation—or, for those who have been baptised, a revisiting of the baptismal promises; and, for those christened as a child who have never made the rite your own through Confirmation—even more so.

 

Dying and rising with Christ

This afternoon we started the latest of our regular (three times a year) 8-week English-Farsi baptism classes. Today was our introduction, looking at what baptism is.

Both Jesus and Paul (one of his early followers) describe baptism as dying and rising with Jesus, in which we are made one with him and with all the baptised. This dying and rising is not a metaphor. It is a mystical reality. It is also an anthropological and sociological reality.

For my Iranian friends, their decision to turn towards God in the Way of Jesus has meant that their families, their friends, their community, their nation considers them to be dead. This is, of course, a two-way loss. My Iranian friends grieve having been put to death by the state, as Jesus was; they grieve being counted as dead by those they love; they grieve their family’s pain; and I bear witness to their mourning, the outward expression of grief. And we can be sure that their family, their friends, most likely their community, and perhaps even their nation, mourns for them as for the death of any daughter or son.

For some, this would be grounds to rail against religion, whether in the form of Islamic (and other) fundamentalism, or religion in general. But as I said, this is an anthropological and sociological reality. One might as well rail against humanity and society. The hope of baptism is dying to what has already been marred here, and of rising and living into a new humanity and society.

Baptismal vows

I am regularly approached by parents wishing to have their children baptised. Alongside this, I’ve been marking papers written by ordinands (trainee vicars) on the pastoral (i.e. responding to human need) and missiological (i.e. pertaining to the mandate, message and mission of the church) challenges and opportunities presented by those who are seeking to engage with the Church for baptisms, with reference to the spiritual, social and psychological dimensions involved. And so, among other things, I’ve been thinking about the baptismal vows and what it might mean to live them out.

At baptism we make certain vows, either for ourselves or on behalf of our children. These vows concern a turning away, and a turning towards. In other words, a change of orientation, or perspective, a metanoia or change of mind. Though there is some variation in wording, the vows may be as follows:

Do you turn away from sin? I do.

Do you reject evil? I do.

Do you turn to Christ as Saviour? I do.

Do you trust in him as Lord? I do.

Sin is largely self-centredness, and we all know what it is like to wrestle with that. In the context of being a parent—the context in which many people approach me regarding baptism—I love my children and genuinely want to be a good father to them…but when they want my attention when it is fixed on something ‘more important’ or ‘more pressing’ (such as the tv drama I am trying to watch, or the facebook feed I am scrolling down, or work, or…) they may get brushed aside, until the day comes when I want them to talk to me but they have learnt that whatever they are doing is more important. Or, again, I know that our love of fossil fuels and plastics is destroying the planet…but I love the convenience of electricity and do not really want to reduce my habits of consumption. While we can recognise sin in our own lives, vowing to turn away from sin, embracing this as habitual behaviour, is far harder.

Evil is largely the absence of love. Human beings traffick other human beings, or enslave them to drug addiction, or kill strangers, because of an absence of loving our neighbour as we love ourselves. And it is easy to paint certain people as evil, somehow different from the rest of us. And yet, we all know the impact of unresisted evil in creating division, as certain groups of people are dehumanised and the call goes up to strip them of rights, and responsibilities. But to reject evil is an active stance: to resist and resist and resist, in how we think and what we say and what we do. And again, it is far easier to recognise evil than it is to commit ourselves to embracing the rejection of evil.

To turn to Christ as Saviour is, firstly, to recognise that we need saving and cannot save ourselves. And in the immediate context of these vows, that we need saving from sin and from our complicity in evil. I reckon most people I know recognise that they need saving from something that, at root, comes back to sin and evil, and that they cannot save themselves. It may be loneliness, the consequence of the breakdown of relationships into isolated individualism (and, hence, we recognise that individualism is not the answer, and so go looking for salvation in a friendship group). It may be cancer, a complex consequence of our collective modern lives including what we put into our food and our air. From a Christian perspective, I would suggest that running is a poor saviour (I need only get injured to be cast back out into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; or, I may become addicted to running, and use it as an excuse to avoid relationships that need attending to) but that it is a great means by which Christ is at work to save me. Or, again, medical science is a poor saviour (people still die; and even if we eradicate all cancers, we’ll only die of something else) but also a great means by which Christ may work to bring salvation to some. But the baptismal vow grounds salvation in Christ, as the only dependable source and completion of my salvation.

And on that basis, we come to the final vow, to trust him as Lord. That is to say that he is over all things, at work despite sin and even in the face of evil—that he opposes and will ultimately overcome—to bring about salvation not only for me and for my children but for self-destructive humanity and the tragically scarred natural environment. Such a belief is not passive, but, like turning away and rejecting and turning to, trusting calls us to step into the vow we have made. To respond to his voice, that drives out fear and calls forth courage from deep within us, courage we never knew was there. To trust the good purposes of one who is greater than our own self-centredness, the endemic lack of love of neighbour, and our spiritual, social and psychological need for salvation is a daily act of resistance, of refusal to go with the flow.

It should come as no surprise that this is what parents want for their children. At the same time, these vows become so much harder to live out when we attempt to do so on our own. God knows, the church is an imperfect community, but we live out our vows imperfectly together.

Baptism and APEST

I’ve been thinking about baptism and the preparation of candidates for baptism, and also about APEST (apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers) recently, and find myself making the following connections between them.

In our liturgy of baptism, there are three symbols: oil, water, and a candle.

The oil comes first, as we mark the candidates with the sign of the cross, in oil, on their foreheads. This is an anointing. As such, we are recognising that the candidate has been chosen by God to fulfil a special role. It is a deeply Christocentric anointing – they are marked with the sign of the cross, the sign of Christ, along with the words ‘Christ claims you for his own’ – but it is the candidate who is anointed. That is to say, they are anointed into a share in Jesus’ calling.

Note that this comes before we get to the act of baptism. At this point, they are not yet identified with Christ as members of his Church, but rather are being identified with Christ in his humanity, as members of the human family. What we are recognising – what we are anointing – is a unique share in Jesus’ fully-human nature, his incarnation; and this anointing is for the purpose of taking a stand against all that rebels against the God-given commission that we should steward this earth.

According to Ephesians 4, there are five human impulses that Jesus perfectly expresses, and that we share in. These are:

the apostolic impulse to innovation and pioneering, to taking ourselves beyond the known;

the prophetic impulse to pursue justice and to protect beauty – and often, to use beauty to resist and overcome injustice;

the evangelistic impulse to share good news, wherever it may be found;

the shepherding, or pastoral, impulse to care for others, paying special attention to the most vulnerable;

and the teaching impulse to learn and pass on learning.

Each of us carries all five impulses to varying degrees, but we tend to have one or two that are primary. It is this Jesus-defined humanity we are recognising here. Where baptism candidates are infants, we have yet to (help them to) discover the role for which we are anointing them: we do so in faith.

Next comes the water of baptism. Here, we are identifying the baptism candidate with the saving work of God, who always comes to rescue us from chaos. The water of baptism, poured out three times recalls God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – drawing out dry land from the waters; saving Noah and his family during the Great Flood; bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt through the Sea of Reeds, and, after many years in the wilderness, across the River Jordan into the Promised Land.

In baptism, we are symbolising the reality that God has ransomed the candidate. This finds its expression in Ephesians 4 in verses 8-10, which draw on Psalm 68 and the imagery of God descending on Mount Sinai and ascending Mount Zion, liberating captives and receiving tribute. We move from Jesus claiming us, as members of the human family; to God saving us, into the family of the Church…and then to Jesus giving us to one another and for the world.

The third symbol is the giving of a candle, lit from the Paschal Candle which represents Jesus the Light of the World. Here, we are commissioned to shine as lights in the world. Again, this is to have a share in Christ – lights, dependent on the Light. The baptism candidate has been anointed, passed through the waters, and is now sent out into the world, to make a difference. The person they are by Jesus’ involvement in their coming into being (Creation Order) is redeemed (Salvation Order), liberated to fulfil their calling, shining in the world according to an apostolic or prophetic or evangelistic or shepherding or teaching impulse.

The role of the Christian community – with parents and godparents often having special responsibility – is to support the baptised to grow in their understanding of what they have been anointed and liberated for, and where and how we are called to shine as a light. This is as true with adults who come to baptism as it is with infants who are brought for baptism. It is a lifelong journey made by faith, in community. It is a journey made in response to the call of Christ, from which we get the word vocation as a way of coming to our right selves.

I am convinced that the pattern of Ephesians 4 is key to our practices of disciple-making, and is therefore rightly there in the very liturgy of baptism – and all that brings us to that point, and flows out from it.