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Children can remind us adults of deep truths about ourselves. I was sitting in a doctor's office one day when a mother came in with her toddler. The child was about eighteen months old. I watched as the little boy hung onto his mother's skirt for a while. Then as he gained confidence in his new surroundings, he began to explore the room. From time to time, however, he would glance back to make sure mother was still there, and now and then he would toddle back to grab her skirt again to hang on for a while. But gradually he began to widen his circle of exploration, until at one point he ventured all the way out into the hallway before he returned, once again, for a reassuring check with known reality. What I was observing was an early stage of the two lasting gifts that parents can give their children, roots and wings. It is also an early stage of the growth of faith, not only of the child's faith but also of the adult's faith, as both mother and son explored the limits of independence and trust. Alan Watts once observed that the difference between belief and faith is that "belief clings; faith lets go." "Faith," he added, "is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don't grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. [In order to swim] you have to relax. [So it is with faith.] The attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, or holding on. A person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead he is holding tight. But the attitude of faith is [to relax and] to let go and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." To have roots is to enjoy the assurance of the known. Roots provide a sense of identity, a sense of knowing who you, the security of knowing that you belong to a particular place or family and that you are loved and held dear by those who love you, no matter what. To have wings is to enjoy a trust in the unknown. Wings are a gift that love and hope provide. Love, holding the beloved dearly but lightly, furnishes the beloved with wings by encouraging an openness toward the larger world and a trusting expectancy toward the unknown. Wings are the gift of the freedom to search out one's own version of life, the version of life God has written on your heart, not on someone else's heart. Wings, in other words, are the instruments of faith and the means of vocation. Baptism, which is the focus of our celebration today -- Jesus' baptism and our own -- is all about the gifts of roots and wings, and about our response to those gifts. "You are my beloved Son; in you I delight." Such assurance was God's gift of roots to Jesus, God's assurance of his love for his Son, the anchor of Jesus' sense of identity, the security of being held dear by a loving Father, no matter what. Jesus was loved by God, accepted. And with these roots, with this assurance, Jesus could be driven out into the desert and, even when tested by Satan himself, not despair, not lose hope. And out there, out in the desert, out in the testing of the world -- that's where we come to grips with the other gift of God, the gift of wings. When, in Matthew's Gospel, John the Baptist protests that he should not baptize Jesus, but that he, John, should be baptized by Jesus, Jesus says, no, that he must be baptized by John because he has a vocation, which is "to fulfill all righteousness." Jesus, the Beloved of God, the Chosen of God, is to be baptized for a purpose -- to fulfill all righteousness, to fulfill the justice of God. I can remember, as a young person, having great difficulty with the idea that God had a chosen people, a particular people God apparently favored over all others. This remained a problem for me until I finally realized -- along with St. Peter -- that God does not have any favorites, that God has plenty of love and chosenness to go around for everybody, until I realized, in other words -- again along with Peter -- that to know that you are the chosen of God, God's beloved, does not mean that God loves you more than other people, so that you might become a favored spoiled child. To be the chosen of God means that God has a particular job for you to do, a personal responsibility, a special vocation. To be the chosen of God means that God has wings to give you for a special mission. It's God's way of saying -- to the people of Israel, to Jesus, to you and me -- "My child, there are some big things out there for you to do!" "Behold my servant, in whom my soul delights," says the Lord. "I have put my Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth my mishpat to the nations." That's the word Isaiah used -- mishpat -- God's justice. When we think of justice, we often think of fairness or equity or compensation, even of penalty, of tit for tat, an eye for an eye, of punishment that fits the crime. But that's not what mishpat is. Mishpat, the justice of God, is not an eye for an eye. It's not retribution or punishment, or even compensation or equity. Mishpat, that which Israel is to bring and which Jesus is to fulfill, is the righteousness of God. Mishpat is how God makes the future possible. God's justice, his mishpat, is to set things right again, to reestablish things so that the future which God created to be, might be. God's mishpat, his justice and righteousness, as the Jewish Publication Society translates it, is the teaching of "the true ways of God." The Chosen of God will set straight the relationships between the world and God by teaching the true ways of God in order that we, in a future where possibility is redeemed, might be what God created us to be. Mishpat is God's gift that makes it possible for us to be what God hopes for us and gives us wings to be, because he loves us. This is why Jesus was baptized for repentance. Not because Jesus had sinned and needed to be punished, but because, if the Beloved of God, God's Chosen One, is going to do the work of redemption, if he is going to bring us God's mishpat and teach the true ways of God and restore us to that relationship with God that makes the future possible, then God's Chosen has got to jump into our danger with us in order to do it. He has got himself to walk that true way with us in the real world we live in. Sometime during the 19th century there was a mail boat that was returning to the mainland from the West Indies. Among the passengers was a man with a dog. One day a child was playing with the dog, tossing a stick for the dog to retrieve. One of the tosses went too far and skidded off the deck and into the sea. And the dog, one of God's most trusting creatures, did as trusting dogs do. He jumped in after it. Immediately, the dog's owner, in distress, ran to the captain of the boat and begged him to turn the ship around and rescue the dog. "Stop the mails for a dog!" growled the captain. "I can't do that." "Then you will stop the mails for a man," said the dog's owner, and he jumped overboard with his dog. And the boat was turned, of course, and both man and dog were rescued, redeemed, saved for future life. "The Word was made flesh and made his home among us" and made the future possible by showing us the true ways of God. That's the scriptural way of saying that God loved us so much that, though he himself was in no danger, he jumped into the waters with us to save us. Jesus was chosen, anointed, baptized, not for himself, but for others, for us, so that he might walk our way with us to make our repentance, and therefore our redemption, possible. This is the vocation Jesus hears at his baptism, the wings God gave Jesus to bring the true teaching of God, God's mishpat, to the nations, which is to risk himself for those he loves. Roots -- the baptismal assurance, the heavens opening and the Spirit of God descending on the newly baptized with the assurance of God's love, no matter what: "You are my beloved Son; in you I delight." And wings -- the baptismal vocation, the covenant of mishpat, the covenant of God's true way, God's righteousness. Roots and wings are the enduring gifts of every baptism -- the gifts of our baptisms as well as of Jesus' baptism -- because God knows that roots and wings, love and vocation, are what we need, not only as children, but as human beings. Do you remember what James and John asked of Jesus on the way to the Cross? "Master," they said, "when you come into your kingdom, let one of us sit on your right hand and the other on your left." And Jesus said that that wasn't really his to grant, but that he did have a question for them. "Are you able, James and John, to be baptized with the baptism with which I am going to be baptized?" Now this took place long after Jesus' baptism with water by John, so what could Jesus possibly be talking about here? What can he mean by asking such a question two or three years after he had been baptized by John? He's talking, of course, about his death. Jesus is asking, "Are you able to live and die as I live and die? Are you able to die to self as I die to self? Are you able to serve others rather than seeking to be served? Are you able to be a servant, even to death on a Cross?" That was why Jesus was baptized by John in the first place. Jesus was baptized for repentance, plunged into this real world with us, so that, with the roots of the assurance of God's love for him, he could bring us God's mishpat, even it meant death on a Cross. "I came into the world for this," he said -- to teach the true ways of God. So, what about us? Why are we baptized? In his letter to the Romans St. Paul asks, "Do you not remember that when we were baptized, we were baptized into Christ's death, buried with him, brought down into the grave with him, that as he who took on our sinfulness and death was raised from death by the Father's power, so may we, too, begin new life, live a different life, the life of Christ." So that we may have wings as well as roots. So that we may be like him. So that we might not only know that we are loved, but might walk the way of God's redemptive righteousness in the world. So that we may live the life and mind of the chosen of God. Twenty-two years ago this week, on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed in the Potomac River shortly after takeoff from National Airport in Washington, D.C. There were six survivors of that crash. In the icy water, Arland D. Williams was using his faith to swim when a rescue helicopter's rope was lowered to him, and Williams passed the rope to another survivor swimming nearby. Four more times the helicopter returned to Williams, and four more times he gave the rope to another person in the water, and each was rescued. When the helicopter returned a sixth time, Williams was gone, sunk, immersed, drowned in the baptismal waters of the Potomac. Arland Williams, in dying for his friends, did not flunk his baptism. His faith did not fail him, and he did not fail life. Trusting in the future even in those dire circumstances, Arland Williams accepted the vocation of his baptism, and lives. "Have this mind for yourselves," writes St. Paul. "Have the mind of Christ, who, though himself equal with God, did not count equality with God something to cling to, but humbled himself to serve, taking the form and life of human beings. And humbling himself even more, he took the life of a slave, accepting even death on a cross for us." Have this mind, this life, says Paul, for it is the wings of baptism. Jesus, you'll remember, plays this out with his disciples when he gathers them together just before his death. At his baptism, Jesus was given wings to teach the true ways of God. And on the night before his death, he disrobes, down to a loin cloth. He strips down to the dress of a slave and washes his disciples' feet, assuming the life of a slave. Like us, the disciples were scandalized. No master, no teacher such as Jesus, was supposed to behave that way. And Jesus asked them, "Do you understand what I've done to you?" And then he said, "Then do it for one another. I've done this," Jesus added, "as an example for you, so that you may copy me and live with me. I've been baptized into your life of need so that you, like me, may assume the life of servants." And then he threw in the clincher: "Now that you know this, blessed are you if you do it." The power to do it is the gift of wings we are given at our baptisms. Turn to page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer, to the covenant we seal with God when we are baptized. The first question, there toward the bottom of the page: "Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?" What this means, basically, is: Will you be faithful about going to church and saying your prayers, giving thanks for the assurance and love and redemptive mishpat God has given us in Christ? The second question: "Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?" Will you, in other words, commit yourself to a life of goodness? Will you do all in your power to see that evil does not get a foothold in your life? And note how, with this and every subsequent question, we say that we will, with the help of God, because we know how difficult, even impossible, it is without God's help. The third question. And note here how the questions begin to turn us away from preoccupation with ourselves and to turn us away even from the church itself and toward the world outside the church: "Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?" In other words, now that you have the assurance of the known, now that you have the roots of God's love for you and know the benefit of Christ's baptism for you, will you keep that benefit to yourself, or will you share it with others? And we respond: "We will share it, with God's help." Finally, the fourth and fifth questions, which lead us even further away from mother's skirt: "Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive" -- the word "strive" means more than merely to accept; it means "to work for" -- "will you strive for mishpat, for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?" In other words, will you use the gift of wings God has given you? The first question of our Baptismal Covenant -- Will you go to church and say your prayers, giving thanks for God's redemptive love in Christ? -- is the elementary question of gratitude. It's one of the first things we learn as children: to say "thank you." Will we remember to come together to say "thank you" for the love we receive in the childhood of faith? It is elementary religion, the basics, the religion of our faith in the known. It is our response to the assurance of our roots, the faith we receive while still clinging to mother's skirt. It is only the beginning of our baptismal commitment. The end of baptismal commitment is the question of the maturity of our faith, the religion of our trust in the unknown, the question of our trusting openness to the larger world : Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. This is mishpat, the wings of faith. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |