A Baptismal sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at St
Andrew’s Dawson Street, Crook, Sunday 2nd October 2011
Congratulations to Barrie and Joanne on Emileigh’s baptism. May the welcome your child has experienced today here in church infuse your family’s faith life for all time!
Here’s a delightful story. At the recent wedding of Zara Phillips and
Mike Tindall, the bride’s cousins, Princes William and Harry, read an extract
from Margery Williams’ classic children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit. The story is about a boy who receives a
Velveteen rabbit for Christmas. The
Velveteen Rabbit is snubbed by other more expensive or mechanical toys; they
fancy themselves as real. One day while talking with the Skin Horse, the rabbit asks the
horse what it means to be “a real person”. The horse replies that it means
being loved. “It doesn't happen all at once. You become real. It takes a long
time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have
sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.” “Generally, by the time you are
Real, most of your hair has been loved off, your eyes drop out and you get
loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all,
because once you are real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't
understand – once you are real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for
always.”
Well it is a long time since I read that story to my children. Years
later Hollywood still tells the same tale in children’s movies like Toy
Story and Shrek, which is why they speak to parents as well as
children. Love transforms. It makes us beautiful in the eyes of those who love
us. It makes us real.
That is the great truth at the heart of the Christian faith. God’s
love makes us beautiful in His eyes – and in ours when we see ourselves
reflected in His. That is what makes us real: not physical beauty which fades
over time, but spiritual beauty which can grow over time. We allow ourselves to
be made real by God’s love, with all our imperfections, pain and limitations. It
was the poet W.H. Auden who said:-
Beloved, we are
always in the wrong, handling so clumsily our stupid lives................
One thing that always
strikes me is how little Jesus himself has to say about sin. He seems much more
concerned with lack of love. Perhaps that is really what sin is ultimately, the
failure of love. It was at Jesus’ baptism in the
River Jordan that God’s said “This is my son whom I love, listen to him.” Here
was a moment of sheer intense intimacy, a moment in time when God’s heart was
revealed to his son. God’s greatest command is that we should love one another.
Where do we find love? In the tiniest hazelnut, says Mother Julian: it
exists because God loves it. In the entire sweep of the universe, says Dante,
because it is ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’. But today love has
a human face in Emiligh. And to her very young life we bring our own memories
of those who have loved us into life, whose lives are interwoven with ours and
made us what we are.
Barrie
and Joanne – God is committed to
the flourishing, well being and happiness of your family, you have
embarked on this great journey of love, not only of loving each other but on
loving Emiligh and Jordan. As parents you are going to be their role models of
what human love is like, you are going to be the role models of what God’s love
is like. Having five children on my own you I can assure you will be in for
some challenging times and experiences. Let’s face it - recent UNICEF reports
on the upbringing of British children are not very encouraging; Britain
according to this international agency is the worst place in the developed
world to be a child; parents and their children are locked into a consumption
cycle where mothers and fathers rarely say no to their children’s’ demands;
children sit in media bedsits where they have their own TV, internet, game consoles
and phones. Oh really – is our popular modern British culture as bad as all
that? As couples say in rocky relationships in popular B movies – it’s not us
UNICEF; it’s you.
Well who
said bringing up children would be easy? In every serious relationship there
will be ups and downs, moments of tension, discord, in human terms there will
be nights with a crying child, falling out, tears, naughty children may have to
be disciplined, there will be
frustration about the lack of employment opportunities, insufficient
funds and days when we just feel down, tired and bored. And with all the
pressures of family life it is often difficult to make headway. But Joanne and
Barrie you are surrounded by loving families with offers of help and support,
sleep-overs, shopping, grandparents love giving their grandchildren back to
parents. Use them. We as a church are here to help you too, our doors are open,
you have our telephone numbers, we too can provide help and support, education
and teenage training. Alas human beings live in a world of good and bad and
that makes our lives and relationships painful and complicated but not so
with God. God will never give up on you, even if you
run away from him. Joanne and Barrie never stop loving each other - you are for Emileigh and Jorja what human
love and family life is like and can be for the rest of their lives – they will
learn from you, you will be there examples. And in all this we, as we are able,
together, will do everything possible to keep our promises to love, help and
support you.
So today I want to give thanks for our
popular modern culture, children no longer go to work up chimneys or go down
mines when they are out of trousers, we do not require children to enlist as
soldiers in military campaigns, work in sweat shops making trainers and clothes.
I want to say a great yes for children growing up in a free Britain, in our welfare state,
the greatest act of communal generosity in history. Here in Crook magnificent
Sure Start Children's Centres provide a variety of advice and
support for parents and carers from pregnancy right through to when children go
into reception class. Four/fifths
of children are literate, 40% will go to university and many in Emileigh’s life
time will live to be a hundred. We are a nation that gives ever more to
charities, we are increasingly tolerant of class, colour, gender, race,
religion and sexual preference, advances in medicine and scientific discoveries
take our breath away, just think in Emileigh’s life time men and women may have
reached and have set foot on Mars. But our greatest cause of thanksgiving this
morning is that God has committed himself yet again to one
more human family, the Rayner’s here in Crook, and in the lives of this lovely
family with whom today we join in celebration, we see that embracing, renewing
and hopeful vision of God’s faithful love, a love that like the Velveteen
rabbit discovered makes us real.
One reason we find such children’s stories childish is that, in them,
things work out the way we hope they will. The good win, the wicked are
vanquished and the heroes live happily ever after. Life isn’t like that, we
tell ourselves. But it could be less unlike it than it is. Which is why it is
not naive to see the world through the eyes of love, for that is how God sees
us.
May God bless you on your
journey, and may your child’s baptism open your eyes to live the faith more
fully.
AmenRay Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit
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