All Saints’ Day – PF (White or Gold)
Stewardship 2022, part 3; Lincoln’s Baptism
DANIEL 7:1-3, 15-18; PSALM 149; EPHESIANS 1:11-23; LUKE 6:20-31
And so we come to the last of our Stewardship Sundays—and how lovely it is to come to our final Stewardship Sunday on All Saints, and a day when we will baptize Lincoln.
There’s a few things that I hope you’ve heard as James and I have preached over the past weeks: that God has made us to love him, and that God draws us ever into this life of love; that God has made us to love others, and that God is ever drawing us into a life of service for others.
And then that God in Christ is graceful, that grace is superabundant, that grace is persistent and relentless, that God pursues us by this grace, a grace that purifies our loves and our motives as we love and serve others, a grace that is already given in Christ—in his crucifixion and resurrection—long before we even make a venture of love or take the risk of service.
God’s grace doesn’t only come after we love and serve, as if we could earn that grace, God’s grace comes before anything we do, in that Christ is already crucified; but God’s grace does also come after, in that in Christ’s resurrection we see the promise of our own resurrected life; and God’s grace comes now, too, as we worship and pray here together, and as we carry on with our lives as the body of Christ, his church, in the power of the Spirit.
Today, we celebrate, and even enjoy, the grace of baptism in particular. We celebrate that in the waters of baptismal rebirth we are together renewed by the Holy Spirit, adding today Lincoln to that number.
And while we could never say “and here’s the Holy Spirit, and there the Holy Spirit isn’t,” in that the God the Holy Spirit lives a life of her own and far beyond any boundaries we would create—we know that the Holy Spirit is active in the world, and in the church among the yet-to-be baptized, and that the Spirit respects no denominational differences, either. The Spirit blows where she will.
We do feel quite sure though that the Holy Spirit does descend upon us in baptism, in the waters of rebirth, as it did for our Lord when he was baptized in the Jordan: the Father expressing his pleasure in his Son as the Holy Spirit descended upon him.
And so it is for us in our baptisms, and so it will be for Lincoln in his baptism, baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, becoming a member of Christ’s body, the Father in heaven expressing his pleasure in Lincoln’s having been made new in Christ, and now the Holy Spirit descending upon Lincoln.
Last week I spoke about that lovely short story and film, Babette’s Feast—don’t worry if you weren’t here! I’ll mention again the important bits for today. In brief, it’s a story of a village of neighbours who had fallen into resentment and hostility towards one another; the villagers not really liking one another anymore, and living a largely joyless life.
But they are invited by Babette, a french chef and refugee, to a feast unlike one they’d ever experienced. And though the villagers make a plan: that they will come to the dinner, but they will not enjoy it, in the end grace finds a way, and the dour and reserved and unloving people in that story came to be joyful.
And I don’t think it was by mistake that in the film, upon unintentionally receiving the grace offered in Babette’s feast, that a gang of elderly once-enemies now hold hands and dance around a well to joyfully sing the songs of their youth. That they gathered around their unending source of water
to express their joy. This was, surely, a gesture toward the waters of baptism, a baptism that brings joy, and a font around which we would sing and dance in thanks for God’s grace in our baptisms. (Ok, we’re Anglicans, we can figuratively sing and dance around the font.) We would sing and dance because baptism, this entry into new life in Christ that is made possible by the Holy Spirit being poured into our hearts, what else could it bring, but joy?
And this is, by grace, ever our posture as we imagine our lives newly being remade by the Holy Spirit, and our lives now no longer being our own, but Christ’s own life—a life lived in the gentle hope of a joy we would know now.
Sure in the knowledge that whatever hardship we would endure, in whatever way we give in to love and offer of ourselves in service, to our families and communities and to our church, sure in the knowledge that hardship, and even our deaths, will yield to joy—because we live not our lives, but the life of Christ; and the life of Christ that emerges from his sacrifice, his death, his self-giving, is the new life of his resurrection.
And so we will gather around this font in a moment. And we will refresh our own Baptismal Covenant renewing our own commitments to the baptismal life of love and service. Some of us have already made our renewed commitment in very concrete ways, through a financial pledge, or offering of ourselves to others through the shared life and work of the church. Others of us will take the opportunity to make that offering today, and in the weeks to come.
Do keep in mind as you make these ventures of love and take these risks of service, that you do as the baptized, as a people already dead and then alive in Christ, as a people ready to dance and sing around the font in the sure knowledge that any hardship will in God’s time yield to joy—the joy of life in the Spirit that we are inviting Lincoln into today.