Baptising Will

By Joan Fanshawe

(Based on Luke 1:26-38; Matt 22:35-40)

Today is the fourth Sunday in Advent and also Christmas Eve – it’s not often that happens. Last year these days were a week apart. Such is the way of our calendar year.

However, it is also a very special day this year because we have the great privilege of having Will here with us to be baptised, to be welcomed as a member of Christ’s family.
Baptism isn’t something that is earned, or an award as a result what you have learned. There’s a lifetime of learning ahead for you, Will.
In requesting Baptism yourself, after quite a lot of thought, I know, you have come to a decision, very similar, but not quite as dramatic, as young Mary’s decision in that very much loved gospel passage read from Luke today.

You have said YES to God. YES in response to that call within you to walk on the way, following the way Jesus shows us and reveals God to us. Those that caught the Jesus flame at Pentecost and took up that life, the very earliest Christians, called themselves ‘Followers of the Way’. Many are using that term again these days, wanting to follow the teaching of Jesus – leading them to know God, to experience God more deeply in their lives.

One of Jesus’s teachings, possibly the most important, is contained in that extract from Matthew read this morning: When asked by one the Pharisees – they were great sticklers for the law in Jesus’s time, by the way – “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” – Jesus replied, “You shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Love! One of the most over-used words in our lexicon, it can be as light as a feather and as deep as the deepest pool.
Easy to say, but a lifetime’s work learning to live it; love can be hard, love can often involve personal sacrifice, love means considering others’ needs, others’ feelings, others’ situations ahead of our own.

Does anyone remember that Sunday school song – which is still as true as it is simple?

 J-O-Y,  J-O-Y … This must surely mean,
Jesus first, yourself last, and others in between.

This heart [that I’m holding] was given to me by my daughter-in-law Melissa two years ago as part of a Christmas package sent from Australia. She and I hadn’t always had an easy relationship. There had been hurtful moments. But since then Mel has suffered from an aggressive cancer, which took her life last May.
This little heart has been kept on my sideboard – it says “Joy to the World” in the middle – as a reminder to keep the best of Mel foremost. In her last months we were able to exchange messages and comments in a small Facebook group, often on things we mutually enjoyed.

For me the key to this was a consciousness of loving – and this heart has a ‘key’ in the back, which can be used to prop it up. I feel that God is like that key, always there for us if we share our struggle to love, if we confess that we haven’t always been loving, and especially if we wake up each day and start afresh. With God’s help and support we can live lovingly.

Will, your Grandfather Chris would be so proud of you today – as Grandmother Lyndsay is, and all your family – about your decision to join this journey along the Way. It’s not something you can do alone. You will need the company of other travellers.
I’m sure that Chris would approve of me quoting that much respected theologian N T Wright, who has this to say about baptism:
The story that baptism tells is really God’s own story, from creation and covenant – to new covenant and new creation – with Jesus in the middle of it and the spirit brooding (hovering) over it. In baptism you are brought into that story, Wright says, “to be an actor in the play which God is writing and producing. And once you are on stage, you are part of the action. You can get the lines wrong. You could even do your best to spoil the play. But the story is moving forward and it would be far better to understand where it’s going and how to learn your part and join in the drama … through the water to become part of God’s purpose in the world.”

We in this St Francis Church family welcome you and give you the promise of loving support as you continue ‘on the way’. We also pray that you will find the companionship of good faithful people as you journey.

Friends, we have spent the four weeks of Advent with Hope, Peace, Joy, and now Love, and soon we will be singing out our welcome to the Christ child – Immanuel – that great story of ‘God with us’ – once again and always.