Baptized Into the Fullness of Life
Katherine Ragsdale
In just a few minutes we’re going to go over to that font and Baptize this child into the life and death of Jesus Christ. We’re going to pledge, on her behalf, to “renounce all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God;*” to “persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever (we) fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord;” to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ;” to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving (our) neighbors as (our)self;” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” We’re going to promise to teach her to model her life on the example of Jesus of Nazareth.
So the question I have for you is … Why would we want to do such a thing to this perfectly lovely baby, to this infant who has never done anything to us? You do remember what happened to this Jesus whom we’re pledging her to follow? He was killed – rejected by the religious authorities and executed by the State as a threat to the established order. All that striving for justice and respecting the dignity of every human being was wreaking havoc on the social policies and traditions of the age. And the folks in charge were having none of it. For the most part they still aren’t. They killed Jesus and a good number of his followers, and they’ve never stopped. The faces have changed, as have the methods and the excuses. All too often it’s those who call themselves followers of Jesus and purport to be defending the faith who are doing the killing, or at least, cheering on those who do. But the fact remains, those who truly work for justice for all people; who insist on standing up to the powers that oppress the children of God; who refuse to compromise their integrity or hide either their talents or their passionate indignation are too often killed – by governments, assassins, or the inexorable toll of poverty and marginalization. Never to turn back from the path Jesus mapped can land us into some dangerous places.
Even should this child we love manage to find a less dangerous route, we have still promised to do everything in our power to deny her the contemporary version of the good life. Not for her this season’s American dream – the self-absorbed search for endless self-gratification; the quest for beauty and power and money enough to satisfy every appetite; the cult of celebrity bought at the expense of the loser class. No, if we are successful in fulfilling the promises we are about to make, the vows we are about to take before God and one another, this child will be denied, will deny herself, everything that modern culture has taught us defines success.
Why would we deny her that? Because we want for her so very much more.
We have learned, from our sacred texts; from our forebears and teachers; perhaps from our own experience, we have learned that money and prestige and power and beauty and celebrity and things can never assuage our deepest fears or sate our greatest hungers. They may sometimes bring pleasure but the pleasure is fleeting and never fully satisfies. We want more than that for this child. We want this child to have the rich, full, deep life that, paradoxically, can never be reached through the unrelenting attention to self-fulfillment that television and ad agencies preach from their bully pulpits.
Many years ago I had a dream. I still think of it as a dream about my vocation to the ministry. In this dream I, along with many other travelers, was invited into a grand castle. We were tired and hungry and our beautiful host invited us into a huge formal dining room. A wide table ran the length of the room, piled high with every food one could imagine. Heaping platters of roasted meats, bright vegetables swimming in exquisite sauces, vast bowls of dew-bespeckled fruits ready to burst their skins with ripeness covered the full length and breadth of the table. The aromas alone made us weak-kneed with desire. Our host smiled and urged us to eat to our hearts’ content. There was, she assured us, no end to the banquet before us. Her servants would replenish the feast as quickly as we could eat it. No platter, bowl, or goblet would ever become empty.
And suddenly I knew – this was not real food. It was merely an illusion. It had no substance to nourish us nor would it ever ease our hunger. Quite the contrary. We were so very hungry and this mock food looked like it should satisfy and delight us. If we began to eat it, its inability to truly feed us would make us hungrier still. With each bite we took we would become more desperate for sustenance and would crave the feast that appeared to be before us even more. We would seize more and more, quickly becoming captives at the table, unable to stop desperately ingesting the illusion that then left us hungrier, and more desperate, with each bite. Eventually we would starve – waste away and die – having spent the balance of our lives in this devil’s playground with all our energies devoted to ingesting that which could never bring us life or joy or satisfaction.
My job, in this dream, was to stop us before we took that first bite and became trapped, unable to pull ourselves away from the fake castle and its table, unable to return to the less glamorous, but ever so much more substantial and sustaining, real world. Our job, which we take on this day, is to teach this child the difference between illusions that will destroy the good within her and things of substance upon which she can build a life worthy of her talents and her passion.
Here is what we have come to know. A life devoted merely to self-gratification, to sating our appetites, to the endless search for pleasure, will never satisfy the deep hunger within. And the more we devote ourselves to such a quest the smaller we become as we struggle to deform ourselves into creatures petty enough to be so easily satisfied. We were created to be more than that. We were created to be big … vast … infinite. We were created to be one with God, the force that creates and animates and sustains all that is, seen and unseen, known and yet to be discovered. We were created to know, and fall daily deeper in love with, the wondrous grandeur and complexity of the whole created order. We were created to take our part in the care and keeping and unfolding of that creation, to play our part in a holy task that began before history and will continue beyond the scope of our imagining.
We come today to Baptize this child, beloved of God and us, into the fullness of life. We come to begin the life-long process of reminding her that someone as gifted and precious as she can never be reduced to mere appetite and ambition – and neither can any other of the children of God, gifted and precious in their own right. We come to begin teaching her that she matters and what she does matters, that every choice she makes shapes the world for better or for worse. Every time she meets the world with greed or jealousy or malice she will make the world that much meaner a place. Every time she embraces the world with integrity, love, respect, and peace she will make the world that much more holy a place. We come to remind her that she is a part of creation, intricately and intimately linked to everyone and everything that is. We come to encourage her to spend her life exploring and enhancing those connections.
We come to remind her that she has it within her to walk a path of holiness and righteousness and we come to pledge her our support. We ask her to do this not because it will make her life easier, for it is unlikely that it will. Probably it will make her life far more difficult than it would be if she chose a more self-absorbed path … a smaller path. The path of holiness and righteousness may someday get her killed, it will certainly bring her hardships, but it will assuredly make her whole. In knowing and embracing her connection to the whole of creation she will become big: bigger than any solitary soul has it within itself to be; big enough to be God’s own partner in the on-going creation of all that is; big enough to know a peace and joy and fullness of life that simply is not available to the self-referential, that cannot be contained by those who have made themselves small.
We come to Baptize her into the fullness of life.
posted by KHR+ | 4:47 PM
