En el nombre de Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador.
In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Amen.
So many of the conflicts in our world, and in our churches, are about power - who has it, who wants it, and what they do with it. Our own denomination, The Episcopal Church, is a daughter of the Church of England, established when Henry VIII drew a line in the sand for Pope Clement VII clarifying that the British monarch alone had power and control over the church in England and its finances. That church, btw, was Roman Catholic, as was Henry until the day he died.
Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, established the Church in England as the via media, the middle way - a church that could welcome Catholics and Protestants to worship together, as one family. Elizabeth commissioned the greatest literary and theological minds in England to write a Prayer Book that could be used in common by both sides: what we now call our Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth was determined to establish peace in England and to stop the killing of English Protestants by English Catholics and vice versa. Her effort was successful and peace was maintained for nearly 50 years in England during her reign. This is the church from which we, the Episcopal Church in the USA, descend.
We were born over a dispute of power. The Pope said he had it. The King said, Oh no you don’t. I have it. The same can be said of the Great Schism of 1054 when the Eastern and Western Churches split. There was a point at which there were 3 popes - each one excommunicating the others. Excommunications that lasted until 1964. Finally, there is the Protestant Reformation. All of this contributed to our identity as Catholic and Protestant Christians in the Episcopal branch of our family tree.
Conflicts like these may seem rather silly to us now, but only because we have the benefit of a perspective that follows the intervention of God’s mercy and redeeming love.
Power is what our Scripture readings are about today. Power that belongs to God alone who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us.
How we understand God’s power matters, especially on a day we are celebrating the sacrament of Baptism. Let’s begin with the Collect.
In this prayer we call ourselves unworthy because of the sinfulness we know we have and hope to hide - maybe even from ourselves. It’s as if we think we must be sinless to merit God’s love and provision. That makes me sad because as every parent knows, we don’t love and give to our children what they need because they are worthy. They are worthy because they exist. The same is true for us all as children of God.
A focus on worthiness tends to celebrate those with power and judge those without it. Are the billionaires among us rich because they are of more value than the poor? Are their riches a divine reward for their hard work or faithfulness to God? Clearly not. As the saying goes, “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.” (George Monbiot)
God’s power isn’t about the distribution of blessings to some and curses to others. It’s a guarantee of a loving, merciful relationship, in all of the possible circumstances of our lives.
Our relationship to God isn’t as a cowering, fearful creature, but as a beloved child. That’s why Jesus takes a child in his embrace in today’s Gospel and reminds us that it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.
As I said two weeks ago, when we are like a child we are open, trusting, and rely on our heavenly parent to know how to take care of what we need and to be ready to do it. When we are like a child, we offer our love freely. We know we’re part of a family and aren’t expected to ‘go it alone.’ We know we don’t know everything and trust that God does. When we are like a child, we trust God to guide us, to keep us safe, and to bring us home, no matter what the earthly path before us looks like.
We are created by a Community of Love, the Trinity, to live in community. As our awareness of our relationship with God grows, we see that community broaden through ever-expanding circles from our families of origin to our friends and faith communities, to our human siblings around the world, to all of God’s creation.
Our communal relationships begin and grow in God. God alone is power. We are not powerless - we just aren’t God.
We also aren’t unworthy. In our Eucharistic Prayer, which you will hear in a few minutes, we give thanks to God, saying: “In (Jesus), you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.
That is exactly what our sacrament of Baptism demonstrates - our death to all in the world that would harm and divide us and our rebirth into life in Christ which unifies us, makes us one, and guarantees that we are never alone.
Today, Henry Mulchek will be Baptized. We will pour water over him and anoint him, symbolizing his full initiation into the Body of Christ, his redemption and release from earthly bondage, and his entry into unity of life in the Holy Spirit - a unity we all share. We affirm that unity by renewing our own Baptismal vows.
So, let’s do this. I invite the candidate for Baptism, his parents and godparents, and all the children of the church to come forward to the Baptismal font.
