The Sixth Sunday after Trinity (July 24, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

This morning, St. Paul has us considering the sacrament of Baptism. Now I’m very excited because in just a few weeks, we will have a couple of baptisms which are days of great excitement. For me, there are so many great privileges in ministry, but the most special moments of my life as a priest have been getting to baptize my own sons. Jude was baptized at the Easter Vigil in 2018 and Rowan was baptized on All Saints of Day in 2020. Remember those moments gives me shivers because the sacrament of baptism truly is a miracle. The Sacrament of Baptism is a wonderful gift Given to humanity by God because it’s how we become Christians: (1) it remits all our sin, original and actual; (2) it gives us new life; and (3) it makes us children of God. Baptism is a new birth. This means that it has an enduring relevance to the Christian life because (a) it immerses us into the story of Christ; (b) it regenerates us by giving us new life; and (c) it obligates us to fight against the devil, the world, and the devil.

Stories matter. The story we place ourselves in determine how we live; we conform our lives to stories. To some, the story is about the individual’s triumph over any social or collective constraints; others tell the story of the collective triumph of utopia; and, what has become more prevalent now, perhaps the most dangerous story the Church faces is that there is no larger story in which we play a part: there are only stories we make up — this sounds freeing but it’s actually the tyranny of chaos. In Baptism, we are immersed, literally, into a new story, the story of our Lord Jesus Christ who, by his Cross died to sin, destroying its power. And because death could not hold any power over him, he was raised from the dead and lives for God. Baptism, then, makes us a part of this story; it “plants us,” as St. Paul says in our reading this morning, in the likeness of his death so that we are placed into a new story. The language Paul uses to describe this reality is genealogical: we are transferred from the genealogy of the First Adam, our primordial Father whose sin led to death into the genealogy of the New Adam: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit” (1 Cor 15:45).

The benefit of joining this new genealogy is that we experience something called regeneration. Regeneration means being given a new life and this is what enables us to the story of the redemption and play our part as Christians, little Christs. Regeneration is the experienced at our baptisms, this is clearly stated immediately after Baptism when the priest says, “Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child (this Person) is regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits; and with one accord make our prayers unto him, that this Child (this Person) may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning.” This new life is transformational because, as St. Paul says, “knowing that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin.” In Baptism, we have died and brought to New Life; just as the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt and brought to freedom by passage through the Red Sea, so we are brought from slavery to sin to newness of life through the waters of regeneration in baptism. And so what is true of Christ is true of us, at least in germ. As Anglican theologian LS Thornton once said, “For us ‘the new’ has begun [in baptism]. Therefore ‘we shall be also’ united with ‘the likeness of his resurrection.’” But this requires participation, it requires moral development, it requires us to grow in holiness.

Every covenant in the Bible features a promise and an obligation. The covenant with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had a promise (walking with God) and an obligation (not eating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). The Abrahamic Covenant had a promise (descendants, land, and blessing) and an obligation (circumcision and obedience). The Mosaic Covenant had a promise (that Israel could stay in the Promise Land) and an obligation (all the laws given to Israel through Moses). The Davidic Covenant had a promise (that a descendent of David would remain on Israel’s throne forever) and an obligation (that they would walk with God and obey him). Similarly, the New Covenant has the same structure: we are given a promise (eternal life with God in the beatific vision) and an obligation: that we renounce the devil and his works, the pomp and glory of the world with all its covetous desires, and that we renounce the sinful desires of the flesh so that we will not follow, nor be led by them. These vows are ancient, we have attestation of some form of them from Tertullian who lived from 150-220 and St. Cyril who lived in the 3rd-4th century. By renouncing Satan, we are undoing the sin of our primordial parents who chose to rebel with Satan against God. By rejecting his works, we reject the sin of pride which is the root of all sins, the sin which caused the devil to fall, the sin that we participated in when we listened to his words that we could be like God. By renouncing the vain pomp and glory of the world, we are refusing to settle for what is lesser instead of what is greater. According to St. John, we are to “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” As I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean we hate those who are trapped by the world, but we do disavow the machinations of the world that participate with the devil and his demons to work against God. And finally, we renounce the sinful desires of the flesh, so that we will not follow, nor be led by them. This refers to concupiscence which is a symptom of the disease of Original Sin that we get from Adam and Eve. It’s that part of our flesh that longs for what we shouldn’t have. Because our old man is crucified with Christ in Baptism, we renounce these lusts and pledge to fight against them.

But of course, the Christian life is not just saying no: we renounce what’s evil so that we can pursue the Good. In the Baptismal rite, we pledge to follow the Catholic Faith as it’s laid out for us in the Apostles Creed and we agree to “obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of our lives.”

Brothers and sisters, it is vital, absolutely vital, that we not presume on grace by squandering the great gifts we have been given at baptism. When we remember our baptisms, which we should do whenever we enter the Church and dip our fingers in the font and make the sign of the cross, and when we see someone else get baptized, then we should remember the grace we have received and live up to that grace. We resolve to “manfully” fight the devil, sin, and concupiscence and we do that when we cling to the faith as it has been delivered to the saints and when we obey Paul’s words at the end of our reading this morning: “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.