It’s a great delight to be baptising Isla this morning, not
least because I am going to be one of her godparents. But it’s always a delight
to baptise a child.
When
we do so, we are doing lots of things. We are praying for her, of course, and
for those who care for her. We are making her part of the gigantic family of
the church, through all time and space, declaring that she belongs to us all,
and that we are all there for her. We are reminding ourselves, so that we can
remind her, that there’s nothing we can do, nothing that can happen to us which
can separate us from God. I may just pour a trickle of water on her head in a
few minutes, but the water of baptism is a symbol of the love of God which is
ever-flowing, which can never dry up. No matter how badly things may go wrong
for her, as they can do for all of us, it all comes out in the wash of God’s
love, so to speak.
But
one of the most important things that baptism tells us is that the child we
baptise, before all else, above all else, is a child of God, his gift to us. We
don’t give Isla to God in baptism, he gives her to us. She, like every child,
like every person, is a reminder of the generosity of God, of the giftedness of
all things. She is born as a gift, unique and precious, into a world which is all
gift.
Do not be afraid, little
flock, says
Jesus to his anxious disciples, for it is
your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
When
Jesus talks about the kingdom, he doesn’t just, or even mainly, mean life after
death. It is far broader and better than that. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus
talks about it as “life in all its
fullness”, life in the here and now that is rich and deep, life that is
beyond our expectations, beyond anything we could kid ourselves we had earned
or deserved. It may not always be easy – neither Jesus’ life nor the lives of
his first followers were easy – but it will be full of meaning, full of
treasure, because it will be lived in the company of God. And this kingdom,
this new place to live, is given to us, by God’s good pleasure. All we need to do is to learn open our eyes to
see it.
Jesus
tells a parable about slaves waiting for their master to return from a wedding
banquet. Of course, they would need to be awake to look after him when he
arrived – they would expect to get into
trouble if they weren’t. But Jesus turns that expectation on its head
here. He goes on to say , “He – that is the master - will
fasten his belt and have them – that is the slaves - sit down to eat , and he will come and serve
them.” The slaves don’t need to be
awake so they can work; thgey need to be awake so that they can share in the
joy of that wedding he had been to, hear the stories, feel the excitement. They
are going to be part of the celebration. Who, in their right minds, would want
to miss it? Everyone hearing this parable would have known what the life of a
slave was normally like, a life of drudgery, hardship and often fear. But in
the kingdom of God, the ordinary things of life, even its darkest,
middle-of-the-night moments, can be transformed into places of delight, when we
learn to see God at work in them, God who wants nothing more than our
company.
It’s
not always easy to trust that and to learn to look for that, of course. In our
Old Testament Reading Abram longs for a child. God has promised that he will be
the father of a multitude, but right now he’s not even father of one, and
according to the Bible he’s almost a hundred years old, and married to a woman
who is well beyond child-bearing age herself. He’s set out into the wilderness,
enticed by God’s promise, to a new land that God has said his descendants will
fill, but there are no descendants, and Abram is starting to despair, quite
understandably. It looks as if all he has will eventually go to a distant
relative Eliezer, and what of God’s promise then? Abram is no hero. Trust doesn’t come easily
to him. He tries all sorts of tricks of his own to achieve his aim in life.
Twice he gives his wife away to others, to save his own skin. He fathers a
child with Sarah’s slave girl, Hagar, at Sarah’s suggestion – perhaps that’s
the way to create descendants they think – but that ends in disaster. Poor
Hagar and her son, who have done nothing to deserve it, are cast out in the
wilderness, where they have to be rescued by God. Abram is no hero. It’s a huge
struggle for him to trust in the generosity and faithfulness of God, to see
life as a gift, rather than as something he must negotiate through by his own
anxious striving, just as it is for most of us.
But
God sticks with him, reassuring again and again when he struggles. Look towards the heavens says God on
this occasion, taking him outside his tent. Count
the stars if you can! Of course he
can’t – it would be hard enough in our light–polluted skies, but impossible in
the star-filled darkness of the desert. So
shall your descendants be! And so it turns out to be. Eventually his son Isaac
is born, and he goes on to have children of his own and soon it is as God has
promised. Abraham is the father of a
multitude, despite this inauspicious beginning.
What
we see, as we follow his story, is someone who is slowly, painfully, through many
ups and downs, learning to trust God’s generous heart, rather than his own
abilities and strengths. His story is an encouragement to us to keep going when
times are tough, to keep daring to trust that we are in God’s hands, even if we
have no idea what he is up to or where he is leading us.
Do not be afraid, little
flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
To
be honest, if we know that, we know everything we need to know. This is one of
the most comforting and encouraging verses in scripture, and one which we
should all have graven on our hearts, so we can find it easily in dark or
desperate moments. It’s not just that God grudgingly thinks he ought to
look after us, now we are here. There’s nothing conditional about it, no
qualifications; we don’t have to know anything, do anything, figure anything
out. He doesn’t say that he’ll give us the kingdom if we are good, or say the
right prayers or live the right way. Giving us the kingdom, life in all its
fullness, is something which is in his nature to do, his good pleasure, his
delight.
I pray many things for Isla today, and for the rest
of the family, but most of all I pray that she’ll grow up knowing the
generosity of God, that she’ll grow up knowing what we all struggle sometimes
to believe about ourselves, that we are gifts of God – each one of us -
that life is a gift of God, that everything around us is a gift of God.
I pray that every day she’ll hear God’s call to her to sit down and eat with
him, just because he wants her company.
I pray this for her because if she knows that, she’ll have that purse
that never wears out, she’ll have found the treasure that never fails, and she’ll
never need to be afraid.
Amen
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