Sermons
"Baptized by the Holy Spirit"
Gracious God-may we live out your hope for the world; in your Holy Name
we pray.
Amen.
The thing I love to do most as a priest
is to baptize someone.
In my ten years here at All Saints
I have baptized 71 people
-two of whom cried.
Two of the babies cried
-several more of the adults cried
-but they were very quiet about it.
I love the physicality of baptizing
-saying the name,
splashing the water,
making the sign of the cross
-it doesn't get much better.
However, what I have realized
is through the years
I have largely focused on the baby-
- on the person being baptized.
But a letter I received recently
has made me think
much more about the people making the promises
-the parents,
the godparents
and all of you-
all of us-who witness the promises being made.
This letter made me realize
that there is the possibility,
if we take it seriously,
that we too can be changed
and touched by someone else's baptism.
I want to tell you
the story of Walter.
Walter was an infant-
-an infant who spent his entire life
in a pediatric intensive care unit.
I never met Walter.
I never saw him,
touched him
or held him.
But he is no less real to me.
I learned of his life
from a friend of mine, a physician,
who wrote to me not long ago.
Let me share with you some excerpts from his letter.
Greetings from New Mexico,
I hope this letter
finds you well.
Do you remember
my asking you a question
about a child I cared for
who had died,
and I had to decide
whether to baptize him or not?
Walter was a special child,
maybe because he was abandoned
by everyone but us.
His mother had left him,
possibly too drug addicted
to care for a child.
She also had untreated syphilis
during her pregnancy,
which left Walter with
developmental and congenital deficits,
which ultimately led to his death.
Her guilt may have kept her away.
He was a ward of the state,
but the state could not save him.
So we loved him.
The nurses actually made him clothes.
Not bought him clothes,
but after a long shift at the hospital,
they hand-made him clothing.
We all knew
he had a short life ahead of him.
Realistically,
he had 2 years at best,
and these would not be good years.
Probably he would never
be able to feed,
given he had almost no gut left,
and if we were successful,
he would have left us
for a state sponsored long-term care facility,
where no one
would have the time
to pick him up, or hold him.
He would be a forgotten child,
unloved,
kept alive
because we ethically
cannot do otherwise,
but not given a life.
So I do not grieve
that he has died.
I grieve that life
had so little to offer him.
Life is not fair, or just.
Suffering is given out
in uneven portions.
We grieved,
or at least
I grieved,
at Walter's death
because life had given him so little.
So on the day
when I knew
Walter was close to dying,
I could see the rest of the staff
working under a heavy burden.
We had taken care
of all the medical issues,
but our spiritual needs were left unmet.
I called the chaplain
to help us with the burden.
Rightly so, he wanted to know
what I wanted him to do.
I asked him to come
and perform
an anointing for the sick,
as some kind of ritual
to signify
that Walter's spirit was leaving us,
and that we loved him,
and that
we sent him to God
who would love him even more.
But I couldn't say all that.
So the minister was confused.
He wanted to know
if I wanted
Walter Baptized.
Baptism is something he could do.
Baptism would have showed
we loved him.
But I am also a secular person.
I have to think about
how my actions
may affect other religious people.
My own personal belief
is that baptism
is a promise
to raise your child
in a way
that he or she will
know God's love,
and to educate them
about Christianity.
I, like you,
don't really have
a strong belief in original sin.
So I wasn't asking
the Chaplain for baptism, (to save his soul)
but a prayer for his illness,
and an anointing for our grief.
But since
I would not tell him
what ritual we really needed,
what he did do
is anoint Walter with oil
and the sign of the Cross,
and we prayed the "Our Father."
I guess I feel it wasn't enough.
So my nagging feeling
of something left undone remains.
Should I have baptized Walter?
Would I feel I had done everything for him then?
After all
I did not have
the "right" to baptize Walter.
He did not belong to me personally.
[And what about the other people there from different religions?]
Maybe baptism
was not what I was asking for.
Maybe,
after all,
what I'm asking for
is the time to publicly grieve
for all those people
I have cared for and lost?
We are expected
to sign the certificates and move on
our grief still left with us after the dead are gone.
Ö. Maybe this is what I feel is undone.
********* ************ ******* ***********
I sat with this letter
for quite a while.
I reread it several times.
As I read it
I cried for Walter,
I cried for his mother.
I cried for my friend
and I cried for the nurses
who stitched his clothes
and then I cried for all of us
-who long to do our very best
and constantly worry that we fall short.
I wished desperately
that every person
from that intensive care unit
would have a chance
to read my friend's letter
and see their work,
their love and
their pain,
so thoughtfully and reverently set down.
If ever there was a letter
that lays out Holy Ground
this is it.
Slowly, after wiping my eyes
I began to formulate a reply.
This is a portion of what I'll say to my friend.
Walter was baptized.
My friend-
you and the nurses
were his parents and godparents and sponsors.
In the opening chapter
of the Gospel of Mark,
John the Baptist says,
"I have baptized you with water.
(But the one who comes after me)
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
This is the story of a child
-not baptized by water
-but rather by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Walter was baptized
-He was baptized with
the clothes you made,
the care you gave, and
the tears you shed.
Walter was baptized.
Not by water
-but by the spirit
-not by a chaplain-
-but by the power of God
-acting through your hands and your hearts.
Walter was baptized.
He was loved.
He was not left alone.
He was cared for
and cherished and
held as one of God's own.
Walter was baptized.
The people who cared for him,
loved him,
the people who promised
to themselves and to God
that they would not let him
live or die alone
-were nothing more and
nothing less
than the conduits of the Holy Spirit.
And they will never be the same again.
For they know the reality of love in all its dimensions.
The power of baptism goes both ways.
Whether we baptize
knowingly with water
or
unknowingly with the Holy Spirit.
I invite all of us here now
-who witness these vows today
-to risk doing all in our power
to support these children
in their new life in Christ.
Baptism has the power to change us all forever-if we dare to let it.
Amen.