The Life of the Baptised
1992 (Year C) 28 June / Trinity 3
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
The secondary school I went to had a barbaric initiation rite. All the first-year pupils were thrown over a wall into a blackberry bush – the best that a new person could hope for was to be the last to be thrown – at least that way the bush was fairly flat when you landed in it. When I first went to work the initiation rites were less physically painful but hardly less embarrassing. I was sent for a long stand, ‘Just wait over there,’ I was told. Half an hour later I was still standing. I even went to fetch a glass hammer, fool that I was.
Every group has its own way of allowing new members to join. And when we’re in then we’re linked, bonded, to all the other members. We give support to them and we can expect to receive it. Once we have been admitted then we’re asked to keep the organisation’s rules. So the Israelites were told in the first reading we heard today – ‘You must diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God as well as the precepts and statutes which he gave you.’
The church, which has inherited so much Jewish tradition, maintains its own initiation rites. Almost all of us have been baptised and the likelihood is that we were brought as children. We then went on to be confirmed as young adults. Once we’re enrolled, as it were, we can expect to give and receive support and it seems to me that this church is better at it than most.
But our rules are more difficult to grasp, particularly in a time we feel uneasy about such things. There are of course those who would try and reduce Christianity to nothing more than a set of rules. When visiting bereaved families they will often say that the dead person was truly Christian, ‘She never did anybody a bad turn if she could do them a good one,’ they’ll say. The assumption being that all you have to do to be a Christian is to be nice to your neighbours and friends.
The fact is that the life of the baptised is not characterised primarily by lives spent observing rules and regulations as our Jewish ancestors did. ‘Love the Lord your God and your neighbour as yourself’ doesn’t compare with the detail of the great books of laws in the Old Testament, and yet the life of the baptised is characterised by lives lived in community, of individuals bound together. The writer of Saint John’s Gospel records Jesus as saying ‘I am the Vine, you are the branches, cut off from me you can do nothing’. All our lives are dependent on Jesus. It is in him and through him that we develop. As Christians it is simply not an option to live our lives on our own or for ourselves. We are joined forever to God, who we are encouraged to call ‘Father’. We are joined to Christ – as St Paul says that when we were baptised, ‘we were baptised into his death.’
The characteristic of the life of the baptised is a community being beckoned into freedom. We are called to leave all that binds and ensnares behind. It is life that leads to joy. ‘I have told you all this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy complete.’ It is a call to salvation.
In the Old Testament salvation called the community, in the first place, to social and political liberation. Undoubtedly God saves by releasing the oppressed from their labours and by rescuing them from slavery. And as God frees his people he adopts them as his children. Salvation is misunderstood if we stress the aspect of of social liberation and do not put equal stress on the fact that the Exodus leads to the covenant between the liberating God and the liberated people. The Life of the Baptised aims at a life free from slavery lived in obedience to God’s will.
And when the history of the life baptised is told I hope that it will be a record of a people’s journey into God. Not a story about a group of people obeying sets of rules and regulations governing even the smallest of their actions. A journey made by ordinary people to their divine destiny. For we are a pilgrim church, constantly on the move, reflecting on our experiences in the light of our understanding of God. Our corporate life is characterised by this dialogue between ourselves and our creator. It is supported in the knowledge that we are one with God, not because of the good things we have done but simply because of his grace and mercy. AMEN