by CCW | 9 November 2024 20:00
Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the baptism of his granddaughter Jeanne at St. Bartholomew’s Church[1], Toronto.
My thanks to Fr. Hannam for the privilege of being here tonight to baptise our granddaughter, Jeanne. The service, as he rightly says, speaks for itself about the power and meaning of what we are doing. Let me add only a few footnotes.
“That time of year”, as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”. Yet in the dying of nature’s year, in the season of scattered leaves, and in the culture of scattered souls, we meet for a gathering. The gathering is the occasion of Jeanne’s baptism which is about her being gathered into the Communion of Saints, the spiritual gathering of redeemed humanity which signals the home and end of our lives. This evening she is enrolled in that heavenly city having been “made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven”.
Her baptism is a reminder to all of us of our being born anew, of our being born upward into the things of God through our own baptisms. Something happens. Something is done. What is done is by grace, the grace of God which seeks our good and perfection. Last Saturday was All Souls’ Day within the Octave of All Saints’, a poignant reminder of our common mortality but also a reminder of the golden thread of the life of Christ which runs through our common grave and death to gather us into his infinite life. Death and resurrection. Through baptism we are incorporated into the death and resurrection of Christ. Baptism signals the restoration of our humanity to its truth as imago dei, imago Christi, imago Trinitas – they are all the same reality. Jeanne is named in God’s own naming of himself as Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
The point is that we are more though not less than the experiences and circumstances of our lives. Baptism restores us to our created identity in God and to our life with God in Christ. The Beatitudes, read on All Saints’, are the qualities of grace bestowed upon us that properly define us in the dignity and grace of our humanity. They are all the forms of the kingdom of heaven made alive in us. They provide us with a way to face the uncertainties and disorders of ourselves and of our world and day, the things which belong to sin and evil. Simply put we are gathered to God in his infinite goodness and mercy. “Grace is everywhere”, as George Bernanos puts it; mercy, we might say, is everything.
Louise Penny, in her latest novel, The Grey Wolf, comments on the stained glass window that adorns St. Thomas’ church in the fictional village of Three Pines which serves as a centering point in many of her Armand Gamache mystery novels. The window depicts three brothers who marched off to their fate in the Great War, never to return home. Yet they are there in the window which commemorates their sacrifice. In a wonderful and poignant phrase, she observes that “there was in the little chapel, the stench of shame” – meaning, I think, the sense of horror at the catastrophic carnage of the 1st World War that destroyed civilisation and consigned an entire generation to oblivion – but then she adds “and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable”.
Such is the mercy of Christ who gathers us into his everlasting love of the Father in the eternal bond of the Holy Spirit. Our gathering is our remembering of the infinite goodness of God in which we find the highest good for our humanity even in the face of the realities of sin and evil. “The overpowering fragrance of forgiveness” belongs to the deeper meaning of our remembering. All remembering is of God. It is our participation in his infinite knowing and loving of us that overpowers all sin and evil.
It begins with baptism and continues in the life of prayer and praise, in sacrifice and service, in Word and Sacrament. It is a beginning which presupposes a continuing in the same, as Hooker notes. Lancelot Andrewes, drawing on Augustine, reminds us that baptism and communion are gemina sacramenta, “the two twin-sacraments of the Church”. They are twinned together, inseparably connected.
Such are the pilgrim ways of those who going “through the vale of misery use it for a well”. Blessings upon blessings and thus are we blessed. For as Cranmer says “he that keepeth the words of Christ, is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling-place or temple of the Blessed Trinity”. Such is our prayer and blessing for Jeanne, the blessing of this service.
Fr. David Curry
St. Bartholomew’s, Regent Park
Eve of Trinity XXIV, 2024
Baptism of Jeanne Elizabeth Gerbrandt Curry
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/11/09/sermon-for-holy-baptism-eve-of-trinity-xxiv/
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