|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
Proverbs 9:1–6 |
Psalm 34:9–14 |
Ephesians 5:15–20 |
John 6:51–58
|
In the hot days of mid-summer, from the time I was six years of age until I was about ten, I would visit my great aunt who had a summer home surrounded by the leaf tobacco, alfalfa, and wheat fields of Amish farmers in Lancaster County. Her vegetable garden was her pride and joy, and every morning after breakfast, in what became a ritual, we would go out to pick some peas or beans for supper. “Oh, no,” my aunt would say, shaking her head, “I don’t think there are many peas on the vine today.” I would get down on my hands and knees and exclaim, “What do you mean no peas, look at the pods here underneath!” and soon I’d have picked several pint baskets.
Why is a child so good at finding pea pods or wild blueberries? Certainly a large part of the reason is simple trust. The child expects to find; after all, pea vines are supposed to have pea pods, blueberry bushes should have berries. That’s why they exist, to produce a lot of fruit. The child isn’t jaded by an adult cynical world that complains about an unpromising environment. The child can easily pick quarts of peas where an adult rejects as barren, or find buckets of blueberries where the adult shakes his head and walks away.
Jesus talked about having faith as a child, because God is a universally generous sower, providing humanity a harvest. Sure, some seed is going to be devoured or choked off, but the seed of a trusting faith relationship will provide a bumper crop of thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold.
As we get older, we tend to close off or limit our enthusiasm about God’s potential. We anticipate that God’s promises need to be pared down to our vision of reality. But that isn’t the message God wants to convey to children at their baptism. Rather God expects us to find the fruit of God’s love in the world around us. It is as if we were invited to a grand Easter egg hunt. We are not expected to provide the eggs, decorate them or put them around. That is already done. We don’t know how many there are. God assures us there are plenty. We are in the garden, as it were, to pick up the eggs, to guide others to some and to share the joy of their discovery and their beauty with one another.
In one sense, baptism is always an invitation to experience the healing power of forgiveness and being able to begin again, the sense of thankfulness and generosity, the spirit of peace and forbearance, and a whole bounty of wonderful gifts of Christ’s grace.
As the theologian Marcus Borg reminds us, the Gospels contain two levels of material: namely, both memories of Jesus as he walked this earth before his death, and the extensive metaphoric reflections of the early church as it struggled to define the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. While the Gospel of John contains some actual historical incidents, John’s Gospel in particular is widely believed to be largely the reflection of later Christian communities as they discovered and witnessed in their own lives the living, risen Christ.1
The Gospel passage today reflects the community’s witness that we may expect Jesus to faithfully and dependably nourish us, and that the living Jesus offers us real hope and strength in our lives. The phrase of what is translated as “the Jews” disputing among themselves over the meaning of the way Jesus feeds the people of faith, may reflect controversy between early Jewish Christians who left their synagogue and their friends, neighbors, and family members who continued as faithful members of the synagogue, or the particular phrase could have reflected the controversy within the Christian community itself in how early Christians defined the meaning of the Eucharist. Exactly how Jesus feeds us is still a matter of honest, differing opinion among the various branches of the church. The important thing, usually lost in the heat of controversy, is that we are fed. God finds a way to reach our hearts in spite of our opinions.
Today we are about to baptize and be reminded that Vivian is part of us. The main point to remember is that we all have a responsibility to support her, Mark and Heather, and all her family as she grows in the knowledge and love of the Lord. We all are called to gather here with the trust of a child that the living Jesus will feed us, that we will be nourished. We trust as a young child who goes in search of peas on a warm mid-summer morning, that in seeking God’s signs of God’s grace in our lives, we will find the harvest of the rich food of goodwill that God provides and desires us to eat.
1 cf. “The Nature of the Gospels” in The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
