Day: September 8, 2024

“Be not anxious – Behold, Consider, Seek”

I can think of no better antidote to the anxieties of our “anxious generation” than what this day has set before us, first in Alec’s baptism, itself the result of a long gestation and period of questing, and, secondly, in the readings for this Sunday which speak so directly to the contemporary disorders of our lives and our institutions. Both recall us to the things which matter most, the things which belong to God and to our life in the body of Christ.

Paul makes a point of calling attention to the “large letters” that he himself writes in his own hand to the Galatians. This is similar to what Alec’s baptism makes visible for us, namely, “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” Such is the meaning of dying to ourselves and living to God in Christ, to our being incorporated sacramentally into the life and death of Christ. We are “a new creation” not at the expense of the body but through its redemption. Like Paul, we bear in our bodies “the marks of the Lord Jesus”, the signs of sacrifice, literally, the sign of the Cross.

This is the true meaning of being born again. It is about being born upward into the things of God but only through Christ’s sacrifice and love for us. This is exactly what Jesus explains to Nicodemus in the Gospel reading for “those of Riper Years” as the Prayer Book so quaintly puts it. Yet the context of that expression is crucial for it is about hardships and sufferings that are part and parcel of our lives and, indeed, of the history of our institutions in their folly and disarray; they are nothing without the principles for which they stand.

Why ‘Riper Years’? Because it refers to adult baptism, the baptism of those who can answer for themselves as distinct from infant baptism which for fifteen years or more had been banned during the English Civil War and the reign of Cromwell in the mid-seventeenth century. And yet, somehow the principles of the Christian Faith survived and were revived in their classical forms.

What I want to emphasize is that the principles which define and shape our spiritual lives are the things worth living for and are always there to be reclaimed despite the ravages of sin and folly and the ruins of institutions. With the restoration of the English Church in its reformed catholic nature, there was a need for a service for those who did not receive baptism as infants, hence “those of Riper Years” who could answer for themselves the questions which otherwise would have been answered on their behalf by parents and godparents. Those who are baptized as infants, those who are literally without speech (in-fans), are meant to grow into the understanding of the vows made on their behalf and to own them for themselves.

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