The Three Journeys of Christmas

 

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

Kiwis are great travellers – we like to be going somewhere – we rarely spend a whole day at home.  And, of course, at this time of the year in particular huge numbers of us are journeying all over the place.  So that's one appropriate theme for this first Sunday of the New Year, the theme of journeys.  But New Year is also a time for looking forward, looking ahead, hopefully or otherwise according to our mood.  If the financial pundits are right, it's going to be a tough year, but if financial pundits knew what they were doing we wouldn't be in the mess we seem to be, so perhaps they're wrong.  Let's hope so anyway.

Journeying and hoping for a better future go well together, and they go well with the Christmas Season.  For at the heart of Christmas we find two things.  We find a people on the move; there are at least three journeys in our Christmas story.  And we find God working his purposes out to bring about the future he has had in mind from the beginning.

So what sort of journeys are Kiwis engaged in at this time of the year, and how do they relate to the journeys in the Christmas story?  First of all, not all our journeys are entirely of our own free will, to quote our marriage liturgy.  Sometimes they are made out of family or social obligations, and those are becoming ever more complex with re-constituted families adding to the rich tapestry of life.  How do we make sure that we are treating the grandparents fairly?  Is it our turn to visit, or theirs?  Do we have to visit the in-laws this year or can we skip them for a change?  Whose turn is it to have the children?  Every year we tell ourselves how much we are looking forward to spending Christmas with the family, but that doesn't mean that every member of the family is as much fun as all the others, does it?  Some of our journeys are simply required of us.

Others really are a source of excitement and pleasure for us.  We might be going to a favourite place for a holiday, or investigating somewhere we've heard about but never visited before.  We might have decided to start the New Year with a new adventure; white-water rafting, or exploring caves deep underground, or bungee-jumping.  We're on a journey of this kind because we really want to be.

Or perhaps we are taking the opportunity to pursue a particular interest, more of an intellectual journey.  If we're into genealogy, we may be going to a place where we expect to glean more information about a particular branch of the family.  Or if nature study is our thing, we may be going bird-watching, or walking in the beech forests, or collecting butterflies or wild-flowers.  We may be journeying to watch a sports event or the New Year's fireworks celebrations.  Journeys serve all sorts of purposes in our lives.

The first journey in the Christmas story is that undertaken by Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary.  It is rather like our first type of journey, a journey of obligation rather than choice.  However inconvenient, it had to be made; it was not an enjoyable experience.  It had all the difficulties of arriving at this time of the year without a prior booking – never a good idea.  Joseph may have come from Bethlehem, but it seems that he had run out of relatives to impose upon; and there was no room for them at the traveller's inn.

The second journey was undertaken by the shepherds, in great joy and high excitement, with a healthy dose of fear thrown into the mix.  They were on their way to see for themselves what they had heard about.  Most likely they were young men, constantly at risk of behaving badly, and egging each other on.  The account of their journey is full of excitement and noise, including a great company of the heavenly host singing in full voice.  And when they had seen for themselves, they went around telling everybody what they had seen – an early version of the tiresome tourist who thinks his holiday pictures are of great interest to everyone else!

We commemorate the third journey today, that of the mysterious Magi from the East.  Theirs is entirely different in nature and tone.  Theirs is an intellectual journey; look how much thought they have given to the gifts they would present.  Theirs is certainly quieter: a silent star rather than a choir accompanies them on their journey.  Their conversation on the way was probably scholarly – speculating on what they might discover as they continued their pursuit.

The Christmas story features three journeys, undertaken by different people, and all seemingly serving different purposes.  And yet they had two things in common.  First, they were all centred on the Christ Child; and, secondly, they all served God's purposes.  Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, because long ago God had ordained that little town to be the birthplace of the Messiah.  And the shepherds had to go to Bethlehem and see for themselves all that they had been told because God had decided to reveal the Christ child to the least and the lowly, and the shepherds fitted that bill perfectly.  And thirdly, the Magi had to find the Christ child because his birth was good news for the Gentiles as well as the Jews, and God had chosen them to represent that part of the truth of Christmas.

Real Christmas journeys take us into the presence of Christ; and the whole point of the Christmas story is that he is to be found by all sorts of people in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places.  Some of us may be more like the shepherds: we may have had some sort of overwhelming experience that has set us on the journey.  God may have come to us through our emotions, our feelings, through high excitement, joy or even fear.  Others of us may be more like the Magi, coming to God through intellectual curiosity, thinking things through, trying to make sense of this "Christian thing".  And others will acknowledge that they started on the journey because it was expected of them; they were brought up in the faith by their parents, and simply did what they were told.  In that case their journey is more like that of Mary and Joseph.

What we are talking about here is journeys of faith; and what is important with such journeys is not how or why we started, but where we are going, or to whom are we going?  The start of a New Year is a good time to reflect on that question.  Over the past year, have we moved closer to Christ or not?  As we start the New Year, how dedicated are we to the journey we are on?

We started our Advent journey way back on the 30^th of November, with the great cry from Isaiah, "O that you would rend the heavens and come down."  At Christmas we celebrated God's astonishing answer to that plea: he did indeed rend the heavens and came down.  So now let us start our journey into this New Year with this cry from the same prophet: "Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you: see, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you."

May 2009 see the fulfilment of that prophecy in our land, in our church, and in all the nations of the world.  Amen.

Thank God for St Paul!

 

Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 9:1-22; Matthew 19:27-30

Over the last two weeks I have been speaking about the need of the Church in this modern world to recognise that the centuries of Christendom have ended: that we can no longer expect that people will consider themselves Christian simply because they were born in a so-called Christian country.  We can no longer expect that most people will have their infants baptised.  I'm not sure that any study has been done on this issue, but my guess is that today fewer and fewer parents who are not themselves members of a church even consider the possibility of having their children baptised.

So in the future, I have been suggesting, if the Church is to gain new members it will need to be through adult conversions and baptisms, which, of course, are exceedingly rare in most Anglican Churches.  In other words, we will have to regain the wisdom and practice of the early Church, the Church of the first three centuries of our history, before Constantine & Co made Christianity virtually compulsory throughout the Roman Empire.  We may find that task daunting: people no longer feel embarrassed about rubbishing the Christian faith.  For some reason, it is still not okay to rubbish other faiths, from the other great world faiths, to the frankly bizarre, but it's now okay to dismiss the Christian faith as childish, unscientific twaddle.

Given that intellectual and social environment, we might feel that the task of bringing adults to faith is beyond us; and I was pondering this issue this week as I watched the marvellous sight of the inauguration of President Obama, and saw him standing on the steps built by slave labour not all that long ago.  As he said himself, his own father would probably have been denied service in the restaurants of Washington just 60 years ago.  Who would have thought attitudes of millions of Americans could be changed in such a short period of time?  Who would have thought that the dream one of the great prophets of our time, Dr Martin Luther King, would come to fruition in our own lifetime?

Such is the power of truth; such is the power of proclaiming the truth, of seeing the vision and explaining it to others; such is the power of God's will for this world.  And where was that truth proclaimed through all those years, the dark periods of American history as well as its better moments; where was the vision seen and kept alive; where was the will of God declared over and over again?  In the Church, by people who share the faith we proclaim here in our church this morning.  The Civil Rights Movement, and before that the Movement to Abolish Slavery, was born in the Church.  Not that all members agreed, not that our record in the Church is spotlessly pure.  Far from it.  But good people, people of true faith, carried the torch of truth in that country, and millions of people were in the end able to overcome their history, their fear of the other, the stranger, and to overcome all that had divided them for so long, and elect a president on merit, without regard to ethnicity or other marks of tribalism.

Who would have thought it possible?  How often we heard that comment from ordinary Americans this week.  And who would have thought it possible that Saul of Tarsus would turn out to be, in the words of the Lord spoken to a highly doubtful Ananias, "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel."  Saul was a man on the way up; a Jew, well-versed in Greek, and the holder of Roman citizenship.  He was a brilliant scholar, and would in time have become a famous Rabbi.  In worldly terms he had everything required for a brilliant career and a successful life.  And then suddenly he threw it all away; and the obvious question is, why?

Well, we know his answer to that question, and the Church has been preaching that answer for two thousand years.  The official, orthodox answer is that, one day, on the Road to Damascus, he encountered the Risen Christ, and his life was turned upside-down.  That's his answer, and our answer, to the obvious question of why such a gifted and well-connected young man, with a brilliant career ahead of him, should suddenly abandon the lot and become an ardent preacher of the Christian gospel.  And my challenge to those who would rubbish this official answer is simply this: what is your answer?  How do you explain the transformation of Saul of Tarsus, arch-persecutor of the Church, to Paul, the greatest of all the apostles of our history?

Let the doubters scoff.  Better still, let them read the Scriptures for themselves and ask a simple question: does the scriptural account have the ring of truth about it or not?  If the New Testament is a spin job, designed to show the Church in the best possible light, why is this story of St Paul's conversion recorded in the way it is?  Why do we find Ananias speaking back to the Lord in the way we do?  Ananias, a godly man of prayer, apparently thinks that Jesus has not kept up with developments, and does not know that Saul has been persecuting the Church, so he tries to correct him!  It's a nice comic touch, and has (to my ears, anyway) a ring of truth about it.

Perhaps even more telling is the reaction to Paul by the saints in Jerusalem.  St Luke puts it this way: When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple.  Does that have the ring of truth to it?  It sure does to me!  They thought he was trying to infiltrate their group, to do it harm.  There is no suggestion that these great leaders of the Church in Jerusalem were blessed with great spiritual insight, and immediately saw in Paul a fellow servant of the Lord.  They smelled a rat, and they tried to get rid of it.

Saul/Paul was a hard nut to crack.  He was not an evil man, but a godly one.  In his own way he was following what he genuinely believed was the right course.  He had dedicated his life to God.  He was a great scholar of the Scriptures; he was a man of prayer.  He was convinced that the Christians were heretics and blasphemers and he was determined to stand up against them.  Whatever happened on the Road to Damascus convinced him utterly that he had been wrong, and so he changed direction (repented or was converted, to use church language).  And what happened then?  Believers ministered to him, and brought him to baptism, and the rest, as we say, is history.

I finish where I began.  We need not doubt the power of the gospel to convince adults of its truth.  We live in an age of astonishing change, not all of it good, but some of it marvellous.  Those of us who lived through the so-called Cold War – I was in the Sixth form at the time of the Cuban Crisis when many people believed that the end of the world was a real possibility – never believed that we would see the Berlin Wall come down.  It came down – in part, through the work and prayer of a Polish Pope.  This week we have seen an equally astonishing event.  Good does overcome evil.  Right does prevail against wrong.  God is working his purposes out in and through history.  Those who believe it, proclaim it, and  work and pray for it, are, in the new President's phrase, on the right side of history.

Just as so much of American history seems to be embodied in President Obama's personal story, so today we celebrate St Paul, one man whose personal story encapsulates the history of our faith.  The truth of the Gospel of Christ was so powerful that it transformed Saul's life, and overcame all intellectual, cultural and religious convictions and prejudices of one of the greatest and toughest human minds.  And did you notice how it started?  Not with words of condemnation or a demand for an apology.  It started with a question: Why are you doing this?  That's where, perhaps, we need to start.  To invite the cynics to reflect on that question.  Why are you doing what you're doing?  Why are you doubting?  Why are you going in this direction?

Those questions are just as relevant to people today as they were in Paul's day.  And the answers are just as important.

 

Starting at the Beginning

 

Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51

Last week in my sermon at Holy Trinity I talked about baptism; and I took the opportunity to talk about how our baptismal practice is going to have to change in the future.  I pointed out that it is now generally accepted that Christendom has finished; there is no longer a belief that certain nations are Christian and that any child born in them is Christian by birth.  That was a widespread belief during the heydays of Christendom; that's what underlay our practice of "christenings" – nobody ever talked about adults being "christened" – only infants and children were christened – and a very large percentage of them were.  It was not thought of as a major spiritual event; a christening was simply a glorified naming service, a ritual recognition that the child was one of us by birth.

But all that is passing away.  The canon law of the Church still stipulates today that a wedding may only take place in a church if at least one of the parties is baptised; so when a couple approach me about having their wedding in the church the first thing I have to check with them is whether or not either of them has been baptised.  When I started in 1990 I never struck a couple where that was a problem; in all cases both parties had been "done" as infants.  Twenty years on that has already changed, and my guess is that today only a minority of infants born in this country are baptised.  Which leads us to the obvious question: if we become members of the Church by baptism, where are the members of the Church to come from in the future?

And the answer, if there is one, must be through adult baptism, a practice that predominated in the Church for the first three hundred years of our history, but almost fell into disuse during the centuries of Christendom, except, of course, where missionaries made converts in some distant non-Christian land.  So the challenge of the Church in the post-Christendom future will be the same as it was in our pre-Christendom past – to convince adults of the truth of the gospel, to convert and baptise adults, and to encourage adults to share their faith with their children.  So how do we go about that?  Well, today's readings are a good place to start.

The first lesson this morning is one of my favourite comedy sketches in the whole of our Scriptures.  The author, whoever he was, obviously had great fun telling this story of the call of Samuel.  Let's just picture the scene.  We're told that this scene is set in the temple, but, of course, this is not the great Temple built by Solomon.  This is a sort of proto-temple; it may even have been a tent.  It was wherever the Ark of God was being kept at the time.  Eli the priest was attending it, and Samuel had been given to him by his mother, Hannah.  The story takes place at night.  Samuel, a young lad at the time is lying down in one part of the temple, and Eli in another.  The author tells us that Eli's eyesight is failing; but since there is no further reference in the story to his physical sight, this may be a veiled reference to his lack of spiritual awareness.

Then God calls to Samuel by name.  Samuel hears his name called – but he naturally assumes that it must be Eli calling him, and so he goes brightly to his master and presents himself.   Eli sends him back to bed.  It happens again, exactly as before.  Then, when it happens a third time, the penny drops for Eli.  Why did it take so long?  Well, the author has already told us: In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.  Eli the priest was not used to hearing or seeing God.

Nor, of course, was Samuel.  He was too young.  Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord.  The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.  So Eli had to tell Samuel what was going on, and how to respond if it happened again.  And it did happen again.  God had a message that he wanted Samuel to tell Eli.  It concerned Eli's children, and Eli's failure to discipline them.  His sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them.  It seems that God had already warned Eli about this, but Eli had not done anything about it.

So what have we got in this story?  We have an old priest who has failed to listen to God directly.  So God needs a messenger to speak to Eli for him.  The only person to hand is young Samuel; but Samuel doesn't know God's voice.  Eli has to interpret for him, so that Samuel can give Eli a message about his awful children!  As I said, it's a great little sit-com; but what message does it have for us?  Following on from last week's theme, it says quite a bit about how adults and children come to faith.  It says that Eli has been falling down in his responsibilities as a parent.  It says that God can speak directly to children, but children need the guidance of adults to recognise God's voice, to understand what is going on, and to respond appropriately.

Above all it says that institutional religion, represented by Eli, is in itself inclined to blindness and deafness.  It requires the direct intervention of God – the prompting of the Holy Spirit – to breathe fresh life into the Church.  It requires obedience to the Word of God, however awkward that may be.  We can understand Samuel's reluctance to pass on God's message to Eli.  But passing on the message is precisely what the Church is called to do.

We meet variations on that theme in our other two readings.  St John is already dealing with the identity of Jesus; and in this first chapter of his gospel he has already said some amazing things.  Frankly, it is most unlikely that John the Baptist said of Jesus in those early days: "Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"  It is much more likely that St John the great theologian put those words in the prophet's mouth.  They are part of his struggle to make the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus clear, a struggle which went on for some time in the infant Church.

Be all that as it may, when we get to the calling of the first disciples an interesting pattern emerges.  According to St John, it was John the Baptist who first pointed Andrew in the direction of Jesus, and we know what happened next.  The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, "We have found the Messiah" (that is, the Christ).  And he brought him to Jesus.

We find this same pattern in today's story; and this time, apart from another comedic touch, a point of interest is how often the word "find" is used.  Jesus is leaving for Galilee, and, "finding Philip", he calls him into discipleship.  Philip then "found" Nathaniel, and told him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph."  We should notice in passing how down-to-earth this description of Jesus is, in comparison to the words attributed to Andrew.  But above all we should notice that the first task of a disciple is to seek and find others and share the good news with them; and bring them to Jesus so they can see and hear for themselves.  Nathaniel is unconvinced by Philip; he has the same view of people from Nazareth as we have about people from Auckland.  But when he meets Jesus he is quickly convinced.

St Paul reminds us of the ongoing need for teaching in the Church.  Evangelism is not enough.  Having brought people into the faith, he continues to teach and encourage.  And his exhortations are the sort that Eli failed to give to his sons.  True belief should be manifested in our way of life, our lifestyle, as we might call it today.  That is not a matter of law: we are free to make our own choices, but the choices we make reveal the sincerity or otherwise of our faith.

In March our diocese is having yet another conference to consider our future.  We could start by recognising that we are rather like old Eli; still faithfully doing what we've always done, but with little expectation of hearing God or seeing visions.  We could start by recapturing confidence in the gospel, boldly and consistently preached, to convince and convert adults.  We could start by reviewing our lifestyle in the light of biblical teaching.  We could start by learning from our own past history, the good and the bad.

That's how we could start.  Or we could play it safe and have another conference like all the others we've had in recent years.  Eli would have enjoyed those, but Samuel would have run away.

Precious Infants

 

Texts: Jeremiah 31:15-17; 1 Corinthians 1:26-29; Matthew 2:13-18

Well, Christmas is over for another year, and this First Sunday after Christmas can sometimes seem a bit flat.  But not this year: this year this First Sunday after Christmas is anything but ho-hum in the Church Calendar, and is especially exciting for this congregation this morning, as we welcome Ethan Scott Haines to the family.  We'll get to him soon, but first I need to say something about this special day in the Church Calendar.

We are marking the Massacre of the Holy Innocents; and I must confess right away when I was preparing a list of services for December and January, I hesitated when I got to this one.  This commemoration is fixed for 28 December, so in most years it doesn't fall on a Sunday, and we can successfully overlook it.  But not this year: here it is on Sunday 28 December, the First Sunday after Christmas.  And when I noticed that back in November, I wondered if I should duck it.  Isn't it a bit heavy for us just three days after Christmas?  Are we ready for it; are we in the right mood for such a solemn commemoration so soon after Christmas?  Could we stick with the theme of love and joy, peace and hope just a bit longer?

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this commemoration is a real part of the Christmas story.  The Massacre of the Holy Innocents, as we see from our Gospel reading this morning, remembers the orders given by King Herod to kill all baby boys born in and around Bethlehem in the preceding two years in an attempt to get rid of the child who, according to the Magi, had been born to be King of the Jews.  That event only makes sense in the context of Christ's birth; it is part of what Christmas means.  It underlines for us how extraordinary the Christmas story really is – that God should chose to come to us as a defenceless baby in a world that all too often destroys the young and the vulnerable without mercy.  Herod is only one example of tyrannical leaders down through history who have taken up genocide and infanticide as part of their policy to retain power.

So, yes, I thought, we will follow the Church Calendar and commemorate this event today.  And then Rose approached me and said that Amber and Scott would like to have Ethan's baptism on Sunday, 28 December, and would that be alright?  And, of course, the way she said "Would that be alright?" made it clear that the right answer was, "Yes, that'll be fine!"  But then the same worries re-surfaced.  Would it really be appropriate to talk about the Massacre of the Holy Innocents with Ethan present?  Hopefully, he won't understand what I'm on about, but it might give the heeby-jeebies to Amber and Scott, and the rest of the party!  Should I change plans or not?

And once again, thinking about it made me realise what a gift it is to have Ethan with us this morning, on this particular day of commemoration, and just three days after Christmas; because Ethan reminds that what we were talking about at Christmas, and what we are talking about today, is real flesh and blood, real babies and infants.  At the heart of the Christmas story is a real baby.  Sometimes that simple fact can be disguised with all the nonsense that we have added to the Christmas event through our carols, our pageants, our cards and all the rest.  I can never quite forgive the author of "Away in the Manger" for insisting that baby Jesus didn't cry.  I'd be seriously worried for the health of an infant that never cried – definitely a case for the Plunket Helpline there!  Look and listen to Ethan, and you will see and hear what baby Jesus was really like.

And the word that comes to mind is helpless.  Babies are completely dependent for their survival on those who are caring for them.  And there is nothing like having a baby of your own to drive that point home to you.  I think Ethan is about 10 weeks old now (is that right?), so perhaps Amber & Scott are over the first nervous moments; but I can still remember my own from almost 37 years ago.  My first child was born in Bethany Home in Wellington; and in those days the conveyor-belt system of delivering babies had not been invented.  Mothers and their infants were not looked upon as unfortunate charges on the hospital budget: the practice was for them to stay in hospital for 8-10 days after birth – particularly for first-borns – before being sent home.  So my wee daughter would have been about 10 days old when she came home.  And I can still remember those first few nights, when I woke up every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing!

So at the heart of the Christmas story is the astonishing decision God made to come to us through the birth process; to suffer the trauma of birth, and to put himself into human hands, completely helpless and dependent!  Ethan reminds us of that.

And on this day when we commemorate the Massacre of the Holy Innocents we are reminded of just how much at risk infants are.  It is not just accidents by well-meaning parents and others that threaten their existence; sometimes they have to contend with the darkest side of human nature turned against them.  In recording the story of Herod's murderous edict, St Matthew recalls the Exile of the Jews when their land was conquered by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C.  He refers to Rachel weeping in Ramah because her children are no more.

Rachel was the second and preferred wife of Jacob, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, and through them the matriarch of Judea.  Ramah was the place where the Jews were assembled before being carted off into exile in Babylon; and according to one of two traditions, it was also where Rachel was buried.  That's why Jeremiah uses this image of Rachel weeping for the lost children at Ramah (although Matthew goes with the alternative tradition and favours Bethlehem as Rachel's burial place).  Perhaps of even more significance, Rachel died in child-birth, again reminding us of the reality with which we are dealing in our Christmas story.  At Jesus' birth, Mary herself was in danger.

In our short lesson from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, the great apostle is putting the Corinthians in their place.  They were a boastful lot, to put it mildly; they were particularly proud of their spiritual gifts – they could speak in tongues, they had words of knowledge prophecy, and so on.  But St Paul pricks their bubbles; God is not impressed by such things.  God chooses the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, the lowly and the despised.  Today, if God was choosing one of us for some important task my money would be on Ethan, if only because today he is the most Christ-like of us all.

And so to Ethan.  I said in my Christmas Eve sermon in St Barnabas that what we had in the Scriptures that night was a birth notice; but one with a difference.  For the Scriptures say, "Unto you a child is born; to you a son is given."  And they weren't addressing Mary and Joseph – they were talking to us all.  And I think there is something very important in those words for us all to ponder, especially in this country as we come to the end of this year.  We have a horrendous record for massacring holy innocents; and perhaps a good first step to stopping this outrage is for us to learn that all babies are born, not just to their parents, but to us.  They are given, not just to their parents, but to us.  If we are one people, all members of the one human race, all members of the one family under God, then all babies are born to us, and are given to us.  It is, therefore, our business if any of them are being mistreated or harmed in any way.

And if that is so through birth, how much more true is it through baptism!  As soon as I have baptised Ethan this morning with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you will say to Ethan, "Child of God, blessed in the Spirit, welcome to the family of Christ."  Welcome to the family of which we are members through our own baptism.  Today he is given to us as a brother.

This morning, then, as we gaze upon Ethan, let us see in him the miracle of Christmas; and let us commit ourselves anew to pray and work for a world in which all babies are welcome, and loved and nurtured and treasured.  May we have the wisdom of the Magi to defeat the tyrants who resort to genocide and infanticide; and may we as a country be always ready to offer sanctuary to refugees and their infants, as Egypt gave sanctuary to the Holy Family!  Amen.

Baptism is also for Adults!

 

Texts: Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 19: 1-7; Mark 1:4-11

I am now in my twentieth and last year of regular preaching – my retirement year; and I am reminded of a man who had worked in the Public Service for many years in a high position, who told me that a retirement year properly used was a wonderful thing.  Firstly, if you are ever going to have anything useful to say it is likely to be when you are at your most experienced.  And secondly, you can now say all the things you have always wanted to say, because you no longer have any future ambitions to jeopardise, and the worst thing that anyone can do to you is to hasten your retirement by a few months.  You have been warned!

I don't intend to take my friend's advice too far; but having preached my way through six and a half three-year cycles of the Lectionary, and having preached somewhere around 1200 sermons, I am tempted to use this last year from time to time to sum up one or two key themes, and to do so against the backdrop of a real question mark over the future of the Church in a secular state such as New Zealand, and, in particular, over the future of the Anglican Church in this diocese.

Today we celebrate The Baptism of Christ, and so where better to start than with the fundamentally important issue of baptism?  The first thing to say about Jesus' baptism is that it didn't happen in his infancy; he was about 30 years old at the time.  It was not the start of his faith journey, but a very important confirmation of it.  It was only after he had been baptised that he began his public ministry.  And when he began his public ministry, he addressed himself to adults – he set out to convince adults of the truth of his gospel, to convert them – and only when they were convinced and converted, they would be baptised. 

That's the basic model we see in the Scriptures; that's the basic model followed by the Apostles, and by the early Church right through until the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine and his successors radically changed the rules of the game.  By "establishing" the Church as the official religion of the State, they changed it from a religion of personal conviction and choice, to one of social necessity and convention.  Nations were recognised as Christian nations, their citizens being Christian by birth and descent.  Baptism became Christening, a ritual recognition of a pre-existing status.  The norm became infant Christenings instead of adult baptisms.

And it stayed that way for centuries in the Western world, a necessary incident of what we know as Christendom.  Today, we might argue about when Christendom ceased to exist, but most people recognise that it has happened.  We no longer believe that nations are Christian; we believe in diversity of religious belief, and atheism carries little if any social stigmatism today.  And within the Church we say that we recognise that Christendom has gone for ever, and we (or some of us!) even say we are glad it has; yet we are still behaving as though nothing has changed.  And this is especially the case with our baptismal practices, and our present obsession with ministry to children and young people; or, rather, our present panic over the absence of such ministry.

I want to say three things about that.  Firstly, I do not share the view of the Baptist Church and others that there is no authority for infant baptism.  Our baptismal liturgy quotes from Peter's so-called Pentecost sermon, in which he says: Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.  And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The promise is for you and your children...   There's the pattern that I believe the Church followed in its first 300 years, before Christendom was created by imperial decrees.  Adults were convinced of the truth of the gospel, were converted, were baptised and their children were baptised, too.

But that is not the pattern we follow today; and it is not even the policy we advocate.  We are constantly told that the future of the Church depends on the children and youth of today: that they ARE the future of the Church; and that unless we reach the children and youth of today we will have no church in the future.  Well, let's examine that claim a little more closely.

As I have already said, that is not how the Church grew in leaps and bounds in the first three centuries of its existence.  Jesus did not emerge from the desert to set up small groups for young mums and their children – he knew nothing of music and movement for pre-schoolers – he set up no Sunday Schools or youth groups.  His ministry was to the adults, who were then expected to minister to their own children, to bring them into the fold with them.

Secondly, the present approach in my view devalues children and youth in two major ways.  It implies that the children and youth are not really members of today's Church; they are sort of members-in-waiting of the future Church.  They are to the Church what the age- grade teams are to the All Blacks – not present All Blacks, but All Blacks of the future.  Well, I want to say that the Maisy's of the world are as much members of the Church of today as any of us.  She has been baptised; she takes communion; she and all others of her generation within the Church now are today full members of the Church.

But there is a darker side than this to our present advocacy of ministry to children and youth.  It smacks of the old idea of getting them when they're too young to think for themselves in the hope that they will stay with us for the rest of their lives.  A few years ago the Bishops increased the preferred minimum age for Confirmation from 11-12 to 16, and there was a terrible hullabaloo.  As predicted by their many critics at the time, there was a sharp fall off in the number of candidates for Confirmation.  Why?  Because the sheep-dip approach of former years was replaced by the inquiring minds of individual teenagers.  Instead of large numbers of youths leaving the Church soon after Confirmation (it was sometimes known as the 'passing-out parade'), a large number left before Confirmation.  By the age of 16 they were far less likely to be confirmed because of family pressure; those who went ahead did so because they wished as thinking individuals to make a genuine public commitment to follow Christ.

I believe that if we want the Church in this country to have a future we should put our time, energy and resources into the adults, rather than the children and youth.  Bring the adults into the Kingdom of God, and they will bring their own children and young people with them.  To do this we need to believe again in the power of the Holy Spirit to take the Word of God properly and convincingly proclaimed deep into the listening hearts of those to whom it is proclaimed.  I do not believe that it was ever God's intention that all people, or even a substantial majority of people, should become members of the Church, any more than it was ever his intention that all Gentiles should become citizens of Israel.  Just as Israel is to be a light to the nations, so the Church is to be a light to the world to show them the Kingdom of God.

The Spirit will call some into the Church to share in its mission, just as Christ called a few disciples to share in his ministry.  Those whom the Spirit calls, let those be baptised and confirmed.  And let them bring their children with them for baptism.  What we can do for the children and youth of today's church is what we should do for the adult members of today's church – encourage, nurture, teach, and challenge.  What we can do as parents and godparents is to take seriously our responsibilities to fulfil the vows we make when the children are baptised – I will love this child and share my faith with him/her.  What we can do as a congregation is to remember the words addressed to us when a child is baptised here:

As the community of faith we rejoice at this baptism and will share with this child what we are ourselves have received: a delight in prayer, a love for the word of God, a desire to follow the way of Christ, and food for the journey.

To sum up: our ministry of proclamation in word and deed should be addressed to adults.  When they are convinced by the Holy Spirit of the truth of the proclamation, they should be baptised.  Adult baptism should be the norm.  The very word "Christening" should be struck out of our vocabulary.  Only the children of members of the congregation should be baptised; and the congregation should accept joint responsibility with the parents and godparents to raise the child as a member of the worshipping community.

I must add that not much of that is the present policy of the Anglican Church in this diocese.  Until it is the real question mark over our future will remain.