A sermon preached on Sunday, April 27 (Easter II) at St. Augustine's, Wiesbaden
Acts
2:14a, 22-32, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19 – 31, Psalm 16
Today we celebrate
a Baptism, our first one this year at this church. Through Baptism by water and
the Holy Spirit Carla June Cross will become a member of Christ’s body the
Church and we will welcome her into our even larger family, one that stretches
way beyond these walls! And the themes I picked up from today’s readings,
especially from the Gospel, seem very appropriate for this occasion: they are
the themes of promise, gift, mission, and faith.
One thing happening when Jesus appears
to the disciples in the locked room is that he is fulfilling a number of promises
he had made to them before his death. He brings peace: “Peace be with you” are
his first words to the disciples, recalling his earlier promise. “Peace I leave
with you; my peace I give to you.” (John 14:27) This word peace or in Hebrew shalom
means more than the absence of conflict. It stands for God’s blessing, for the
promise of wholeness, for the peace of reconciliation, and for the
absence of fear. The promise of Baptism is similar. It is a blessing from God
and it imparts forgiveness and new life in God. For all we really have to fear
is God’s absence.
Jesus promised
the disciples joy: “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no
one will take your joy from you,” (John 16:22) and they are filled with joy at the
sight of him. This is the joy of Jesus’ presence and in Baptism we promise that
the candidate will be Christ’s own for ever. This is as much an occasion
for joy, as the fact that we celebrate a
new member and a new witness and I will pray later that Carla receives the gift
of joy and wonder in all God’s works.
We find the
biggest promise of all in the First Letter of Peter, it is the promise of an “inheritance
that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” so nothing material like land
or buildings, but God’s kingdom. Holy Baptism is, to quote from the Catechism,
“the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of
Christ’s body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.”[1]
But in Baptism
the promises are not one way, we also make promises, or for most of us today, we
repeat and reaffirm promises we have made before: to renounce evil, to turn to
Christ, to follow and obey him, to proclaim God’s word, and to serve Christ. We
do this knowing that these are promises we cannot keep on our own, but only
with God’s help, in particular with the help of God’s Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is one of the two gifts Jesus gives the disciples in that locked room on that first Resurrection Day. He breathes it on or into them, recalling God’s gift of life to humankind in the second Creation story: “then the Lord God … breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) They have been given Jesus’ own life by the Spirit, for without it we would not be capable of manifesting God's presence and doing God's will as Jesus did. The second gift is forgiveness, both the power and the responsibility to forgive. Forgiveness is part of our calling as Christians, not just the formal forgiveness of sins that I can grant in the absolution, but the everyday forgiveness of the other – the forgiveness without which reconciliation, between God and humanity and between one another is not possible. Carla will be baptized by water and the Holy Spirit. She will receive the forgiveness of sin – which is for her as for us both a gift and a mandate.
Jesus commissions the disciples, they
are sent into the world just as the Father has sent him – they have a mission,
from the Latin missio, meaning I
sent. The disciples are sent to bear witness to Jesus and to
be the presence of Jesus in the world and to be God’s agents of change of the
world. Their mission is to carry on Christ's work, not to begin a new one. This
is the same mission we accepted at our Baptism, as we will affirm later in the
Baptismal Covenant. We promise to continue in the apostles’ footsteps to
proclaim God’s Good News, not our own, and to serve Christ, not the church, not
ourselves, not our own group or party. How we live and act is itself a major part
of our witness to the world, especially how we live and act with one another –
in unity with God and with one another.
Faith, and Thomas’ supposed lack
of it, are of course at the centre of the Gospel story. I’ve always found it a
bit unfair to call Thomas ‘doubting Thomas.’ For one thing, the other disciples
clearly also had their doubts too. As we heard last week, Mary Magdalene was
sent by Jesus to tell them: ‘I have seen the Lord.’ (20:18) But as the
disciples have locked themselves in a room out of fear, they clearly were not
convinced until they saw him and the marks in his hands and side. Which is all
that Thomas really wanted: just to see the same evidence his friends had seen.
I also think that Thomas was more disappointed and sad than in doubt. He wanted
to be able to share in the same joy and see his risen Master in person. He had
that chance, we don’t of course, but that does not make our faith in Christ any
less important.
Last week I went to see the
film/movie Philomena, which I really
recommend it’s a very moving story. The cynical journalist, played by Steve Coogan,
is very critical about the line from our Gospel, “Blessed are those who have
not seen and yet have come to believe.” He wants evidence, he wants proof and
he does not want to be told what to think. But that is not really what this
line means. It is the confirmation that the faith of those who come after the
disciples, who see Christ ‘only’ in their hearts or who ‘only’ experience him
in the Eucharist, that their faith is as blessed and as valid as the faith of
the first witnesses.
In the end Thomas gets to say one
of the most important lines in the Gospel when he acclaims Jesus as “My Lord
and my God.” This is what all the signs and events and the long, long
discourses in John’s Gospel have been leading up to – to the realization that
Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God.
A very similar confession is part
of the Rite of Baptism when, in Carla’s case her parents and godparents on her
behalf, will promise to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and follow and obey
him as Lord. There are a number of reasons why we retain infant Baptism in the
Anglican tradition. For one thing, why should children be excluded from
membership in Christ’s body? I seem to recall Christ having specifically
commanded, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is
to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” (Mathew 19:4) And I also
think that it helps remind us of how children believe. As those of us who have
read bedtime stories to our children know very well, children have no problem
at all in believing things based on words, on what someone they trust tells
them.
And that is the faith we need to
recall from time to time. A faith built on relationship and on trust, based on
the promises that were fulfilled in Jesus, as witnessed by the disciples and
passed on to us in Scripture. It is a faith sustained by the gift of the Holy
Spirit that was not just given to the disciples two thousand years ago, but to
us all. So with no more delay let us baptize Carla into her new life in Christ
by water and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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