Love and Baptism

Easter 6-B;May 17, 2009
Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Welcome, to the family and friends of Olivia Jayla! Thank you, Olivia, for bringing them with you today!

How many of you are new to the Episcopal Church, or to Episcopal baptisms? You know what everybody says: Those Episcopalians are so sweet. When they baptize you, they do it in a Jacuzzi.

The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.
Just stand up and kneel down and say what the others do.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.*

Well, all church jokes aside, isn’t that what has brought us here? Love? “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” “This is my commandment, that you love one another.” Love is laying down one’s life for one’s friends. On this 6th Sunday in Easter, it is all about love.

I think that each child, to the proud parents and grandparents, is the Baby Jesus, and each child is an embodiment of love, just as Jesus was an embodiment of God’s love for all humanity.

Such love of God for the world is often described as sacrificial; God sacrifices everything for us. Well, is it a sacrifice? I mean, when you love someone so much, as a parent loves a child, as love between spouses, wouldn’t you do anything for that person? And could anything you do for a person you love be a sacrifice? Perhaps we humans are not called upon to express our deepest love in that way, but wouldn’t we give all that we are, and all that we have, for someone we love, and not even care? Not even think about it as a sacrifice, as something we are giving up. Love is all there is.

Love can be a worry; maybe those of us who are older siblings maybe once upon a time felt like when a baby was born into our families that there would not be enough love to go around. How many of us can resonate with the honesty of the older brother discussing with his father his new baby sister: “But you’ll still love me more, won’t you, Dad?”

In a world of zero sum games, of collapsing economies and falling values, where mortgages can’t be re-negotiated and wages drop and prices rise, why wouldn’t we think that love is just one more limited commodity? There doesn’t seem to be enough of other things to go around; it stands to reason that love is the same. Could it be that every human being is born with, say, a Cup of Love, and that if you spill any of it along the way, there might come a day when you won’t have any of it left?
That is the trick the world tries to play on us, that there is not enough love, or that we are not worthy of love, or that no one will ever love us.

But what we are doing here today – what God tells us here today, and everyday – is proof that, contrary to all those forces that try to tell us otherwise, we know we are loved, we know how to love, because we have been loved first, and you, who have brought Olivia here today, have wrapped her in that love.

When we baptize Olivia, we incorporate her into an understanding of the world that is contrary to that of the zero sum game. We baptize Olivia into the confidence that God continues to love the world God created – and that means God loves all of the world -- all of the world – the lovely bits, the confusing bits, the forgotten bits, the dark bits – all those bits together, for only a God who loved all of this world, and all of us in it, would throw himself into our lives with the passion and compassion of Jesus.

* Thanks to Garrison Keillor, for this commentary on church life.