Author: CCW

Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the baptism of his granddaughter Jeanne at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Toronto.

“And he took them up in his arms, put his hand upon them, and blessed them”

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.

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“For our citizenship is in heaven”

“For our citizenship is in heaven”, Paul writes. “Whose is this image and superscription?” Jesus asks the Pharisees who sought to “entangle him in his talk”. These readings complement wonderfully the readings for All Saints’, both the image of heaven from Revelation as “a great multitude” beyond all number of “all nations and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God the Trinity and the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. How? Because they reveal the summum bonum, the highest good for our humanity as restored to our being in the image of God. They set before us what belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity.

Christ’s question to the Pharisees is really his question to us: in whose image are we and what is written over us? Questions and claims about the images of the self proliferate and abound in our culture. That we are imago dei or imago Christi or imago Trinitatis speak to the deeper reality of our being with God and in God, to our heavenly citizenship even in and through the tribulations of our lives. We are reminded of our blessedness. “His banner over me was love”, as the Song of Songs puts it.

The Beatitudes show us what it means to be in the image of God or Christ or the Trinity – they are all the same reality – and speak to the ultimate or highest good for our humanity. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics says that happiness is our greatest good. The word he uses is eudaemonia. What he means by happiness is not what we might assume. Happiness for us is mostly subjective and personal, passive and accidental; in short, something existential. For Aristotle happiness is objective and substantial; in short, living in accord with virtue. It is the activity of the rational soul acting in accord with the qualities of human excellence. While the treatise focuses on the moral practices that belong to that activity, in the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of practical life, he argues that the highest activity or form of happiness is contemplation; moral activities are secondary. Contemplation is about what is the highest in us, the life of the mind, because it seeks what is everlasting and complete as distinct from what is passing and incomplete. The highest form of happiness approximates the life of the gods because the highest power in us, in his view, is the mind.

He says that “we ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality”, words which sound like Paul, to “do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest in us”, which is the life of the intellect. This kind of intellectualism may seem off-putting but it speaks, I think, to the deeper understanding that today’s readings in the context of All Saints’ provide. He says that “the life of the gods is altogether happy, and that of man is happy in so far as it contains something that resembles the divine activity”. The word he uses here is not eudaemonia but makarios, meaning blessed. It is the very word which Jesus uses nine times in the twelve verses of the Beatitudes.

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