Your Baptism is Your Connection
Saturday, April 19, 2003
By The
Very Rev. James Hubbard
Easter Vigil readings from The Lectionary Page
Proscription
This is the night when you brought our fathers, the children of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the Red Sea on dry land.
This is the night when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the shade of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.
This is the night when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.
I remember well the experience, and it was for me an experience, of taking my first statistics class and learning early on the ins and outs of probability theory. Probability is based on the number 1. All of the findings of science are expressed in terms of probability. As long as something can occur, its frequency of occurrence can be described numerically by a number less than one. One is the perfect number. It represents the whole, the complete range of possibilities. It is no happenstance that the created world is known as a universe, from uni, meaning one and verse meaning to turn or to combine. Placed together the two words, uni and verse, mean to turn or combine into one whole. Likewise the university represents several departments, such as theology, law, medicine and the arts combined in one institution. The word universe, university, universal all represent that notion of combining diverse elements into one. Fortunately or unfortunately, we do not experience these entities as wholes. We go to the university and take a course in Education or Political Science, Medicine or Law and we seldom if ever see how our department relates to the whole of human knowledge, how theology and physics, medicine and architecture, relate. If we see it at all we have to take it on faith. So it is with the universe. We study the planets; we know that the earth is only one of many and that it and eight others revolve around one sun. (Are there still just nine?) We know vaguely about black holes, white dwarfs, meteors, moons and stars. What we have a difficult time realizing is that our earth is apart of the whole. Likewise, we have difficulty understanding that what we do in polluting the atmosphere, what you and I do, affects the air in Tangiers and Beijing, that when we cut a tree all of nature is affected — that the links are so tight that a reverberation, no matter how tiny is experienced throughout the ecosystem of our world. Not only that, the reverberation is experienced throughout the vastness of the entire universe, in solar systems known and unknown to us.
We are here tonight celebrating just such a universal reverberation. God, who is one, created a universe so vast that it can be described by us only mathematically, really. That same God came to earth in human flesh. Creatures, like you and me, refused him access and taking advantage of his humanness killed him. It is my contention that the death of any form of life has universal consequences. If that death is the result of moral injustice, how much greater the reverberation. If that death is the death of the Creator of the universe, can anything ever be the same again?
God died at noon yesterday; God died at noon in 33 B. C. Is there any difference? Have you ever known a moment that was not the present one? But has it made a difference for you? I’m reminded of a story told by Pope John Paul I concerning the powerlessness of the Church. In London, at Hyde Park, a preacher is preaching in the open air, but he is interrupted every now and then by a disheveled, dirty character. "The Church has existed for two thousand years," the character shouts at a certain point, "and the world is still full of thieves, adulterers, assassins!"
"You’re right," the preacher replies. "But for two million centuries there has been water in the world, and look at the condition of your neck!" [Albino Luciani. 1978. Illustrissimi: Letter from Pope John Paul I. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. P. 78]
Has this cosmological event of the aeons, this crucifixion of the God-man made a difference? Paul says yes. In the epistle read in our hearing, the apostle claims that two things occurred since yesterday noon. Jesus died to sin and because of sin. And during this very night he was resurrected, thirty-six hours after his death. That event was a cosmological, universal event which affected our lives. Something was done to us and a response is required of us. Christ died, and because he died, sin has no more power over him. Did you ever know a dead man who could sin or be sinned against? Of course, not. When you are gone you will be just as helpless to sin and to sin against your memory would be an empty gesture. Just so, says Paul, for he who has died is freed from sin.
Jesus was raised from the dead — the only human being to do so, so far. His rising, however, did not mean he was resuscitated and was thereby subject to the same old evil and finally death again. In Him, God did a new thing. He gave him new life, a new participation in the doxa, the glory, the creativeness of God. This change from death to the life which comes from God, was an act which changed the pattern of universal expectation. Nothing could be the same again. And we are able to identify with him in his death and in his resurrection. But how?
Through baptism. Much as the Christ event, his death and resurrection precedes our faith, so baptism has been given as a sign of God’s work before we are able to comprehend it. Baptism, which has taken place in the fabric of the universe, is a projection of the change in our personal existence. Through our baptism we too are as dead to sin, to the necessary dominion and effects of sin, as if we had died. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. "Like his." This word in the Greek has strong associations. It means image, documentary, visible, that is, we are united to Christ in an existence-changing fashion. This death, this resurrection, which is symbolized and actually initiated by God in baptism for us personally works to bring us to grips with this great act of God in our universe.
This is not to say that we have no responsibility whatever. We must grasp the significance of our baptism and verify it in our discipleship. We do have the power to live for God, and we must exercise it.
We cannot talk about baptism as if it were magic, or talk about the Creed as if saying "I believe" were something earth-shattering. Abraham Heschel, an early and life-long hero of mine, wrote in his book, God in Search of Man about the danger of dogma in Judaism. I apply it to Christianity as well.
"Not the confession of belief, but the active acceptance of the kingship of God and its order is the central demand of Judaism. Asserting "I believe in…" will not make a person a Jew, just as asserting, "I believe in the United States of America" will not make a person an American. A citizen is he who accepts the allegiance to the Constitution, its rights and obligations. Thus our relation to God cannot be expressed in a belief but rather in the accepting of an order that determines all of life. [Abraham Heschel. 1976. God in Search of Man. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, p. 331.]
Our baptism is our passage from death to life. It signals our birthright. We must accept it and allow our life to be determined by it.
With Tiesl, who in Robertson Davies novel, The Fifth Business, is saying to Dunstan Ramsey, so I would say to you, if you haven’t allowed your baptism to change and order your life. "You should take a look at the side of your life you have not lived….every man has a devil, a man of unusual quality, like yourself, Ramsay, has an unusual devil. You must even get to know his father, the Old Devil. Oh, this Christianity! Even when people swear they don’t believe in it, the fifteen hundred years of Christianity that has made our world, is in their bones, and they want to show they can be Christians without Christ. Those are the worst; they have the cruelty of doctrine without the poetic grace of myth.
"What I am saying is not for everybody, of course. Only for the twice-born….Here you are, twice born, and nearer your death than your birth, and you have still to make a real life. [Davies, Robertson. 1970. Fifth Business. The Viking Press, p. 259-261]
The psalmist spoke well when she said:
The sea beheld him and fled;
The mountains skipped like rams
Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord.
Here we are between heaven and earth, between Good Friday and Easter, and momentous things have occurred. Search it out and find it; your baptism is your connection.
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How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined, and man is reconciled to God. Amen.