Sermon: Our baptismal calling

Ezekiel 2:1-3:4, Galatians 1:11-end

Last Sunday Canon Jagger preached about the baptism of Christ and ended his sermon by quoting from the hymn we were about to sing. I want to begin from there today because Charles Wesley's prayer and today's readings are about our own call to follow Christ which follow from what we considered last week.

O thou who camest from above

The pure, celestial fire to impart,

Kindle a flame of sacred love

On the mean altar of my heart.

There let it for thy glory burn

With inextinguishable blaze,

And trembling to its source return

With humble prayer and fervent praise.

Canon Jagger said that at Christmas it begins to dawn on us what a momentous thing God has done in the incarnation: in taking flesh God has tied himself to us. He quoted Gregory Nazianzen, the early church father "What is saved is that which has been united with God". Becoming a Christian is more than our decision to say "yes" to God, it is the outworking of the incarnation in our lives, we are united to God in Christ and thus saved.

Most, if not all, of us here can look back at a time, or probably several times, in our lives when we have in some way expressed our commitment to Christ; this is expressed definitively in baptism but is something that we live into day by day and at times perhaps articulate more specifically, perhaps in the context of responding to a particular sense of calling to something new in our lives. I suspect that both Ezekiel and Paul would concur with that sense of re-articulating their commitment at particular times, although both were taken by surprise by God, something any one of us should be open to experiencing because, if I can put it like this, God doesn't always play by the rules of the game we think we are playing but changes game and invites us to follow him. It's a bit like the time someone picked up a football and ran with it, and rugger was born. Sometimes God invites us into something totally unexpected.

Take Paul, for example. By his own testimony he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a purist when it came to following God. He was a Pharisee, a group of people who get a bad press in the gospels because they are seen as opposing Jesus, but if we understand their commitment to observing the letter of the law in the way they believed was right we can understand why Jesus was so threatening to them and why Paul opposed the new Christian sect vehemently to the extent of persecuting the Christians to death: Acts tells us that he approved of the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. We cannot fault Paul for his dedication to what he believed to be God's way. But it was misplaced dedication and his conversion when, so to speak, God started running with the football in his life, led him to baptism at the hands of an understandably cautious Ananias. Then there are the mysterious three years out of the public eye referred to in the reading we heard today. Scholars try to piece together his movements in that period but the results are inconclusive and all we know is that following this radical reorientation of his life Paul spent three years growing into his new life in Christ: this leader of the opposition to Christians did not emerge immediately as a leader of the Christians but withdrew out of the public eye and matured in Christ before re-emerging for a tempestuous life as an apostle of Christ.

Ezekiel was a different character to Paul. He grew up during the reforming reign of King Josiah of Judah and then the disastrous shorter reigns of his successors. He served as a priest from about 593 to 563BC so instead of serving at the temple in Jerusalem as he might have expected, he had to help people keep the faith throughout the traumatic events of the siege and eventual destruction of Jerusalem, and then go with them into exile in Babylon where a whole new form of temple-less worship had to evolve. If Paul's call was as evangelist and teacher of the new Christians, Ezekiel's was as pastor and prophet to a downtrodden and fearful, but also unreceptive and rebellious, people called to keep faith under devastating circumstances. It says much for Ezekiel that he could remain faithful and sustain others through these events. But he was something of an odd ball, at least by our standards, to the extent that one commentator suggests his strange modes of presentation like the one we heard of him eating a scroll could be due to the disorientation of his experience of being exiled. There is something of the slightly whacky about him. We encounter him living with a group of refugees by the side of a canal in southern Babylon, modern Iraq. He sees a strange vision that defy description and then experiences a call to listen to God and speak to the people to help them survive in exile. Remember, this is a man already dedicated to serve God being given a new calling among his exiled compatriots. Like Paul, his calling was a hard one.

Set these two stories of people being called by God in the context of the season in which we find ourselves living, Epiphany, the season of revelation. Last week reminded us that our discipleship begins with baptism - the event that places us in Christ gives shape and direction to our life thereafter. We are in Christ, "What is saved is that which is united with God." But today's readings in the context of the Epiphany season challenge us with the way we who are committed to follow Christ will respond to God's ongoing revelation of his glory.

Strangely for someone who is not a football fan, I've found myself making a connection between some of the events in the world of football and our calling as Christians. Even with half an ear tuned to the sports news on "Today" it is hard to escape the conclusion that the world of sport is very fickle at times - managers are hired and fired by results and someone who quite recently was heralded as the saviour of the team can be fired for going through a bad patch. No doubt some of my colleagues will put me straight afterwards but the contrast is stark between God's calling of Paul and Ezekiel which endured for the long haul and our world of celebrities with identities dependent on instant and continuing success. Our first and foremost calling as Christians is not to results but to union with God, it is there that our security and identity lie. Our calling by God should then have results, but they follow from our union rather than being the determinants of God's relationship with us. God will not sack us, although he will go on challenging us, calling us to new and deeper discipleship right up to our dying day.

Charles Wesley's hymn captures this poetically when he wrote, as we sang last week,

Kindle a flame of sacred love

On the mean altar of my heart.

There let it for thy glory burn

With inextinguishable blaze, ...

"With inextinguishable blaze" is not dependent upon our effort to keep the flame burning, it is the consequence of our being in Christ, united to God and thus saved. But it should blaze, our discipleship, our godliness, should be evident. Like Ezekiel and Paul, our callings are wide-ranging and for Christians they all stem from that primary calling to be in Christ. In that sense what we do with our lives doesn't matter, although in other senses it matters enormously. But it all begins with baptism, and baptism is one of those things that we cannot do for ourselves, we are baptised, we do not baptise ourselves but the church baptises us into Christ.

Perhaps this can be illustrated up by an experience I had several years ago. The first person I ever baptised died five minutes later. It was before I was ordained when I was working for a summer as a hospital chaplain. One night when I was on call for the whole hospital and sleeping there, I was called urgently to the neo-natal intensive care unit to baptise a thirty day old baby, one of premature twins. His sister was healthy and at home but he was dying. With his parents and the medical team gathered round his incubator, I reached into it and baptised this tiny scrap who was attached to mass of wires and monitors. As I made a sign of the cross and said, "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever," then prayed, "Strengthen him, O Lord, with your presence, enfold him in the arms of your mercy, and keep him safe for ever" I was struck by how his impending death gave new meaning to our baptismal calling because there was nothing he could do to live into it on earth except to die. In human terms he was going to fail but his calling was not dependent on human success. He was entirely in God's hands.

Then the doctor disconnected the wires and tubes, lifted him out of the incubator and the nurses wrapped him in a white blanket, the first time in his life that he had ever been clothed, just like the white robes in which the early church clothed the naked newly baptised before they were led into the gathered company of the saints waiting to greet them. It gave new meaning for me to the imagery of being clothed in Christ. Then this tiny newly baptised Christian was given to his parents who held him for the first time in his life and took him to a side room to hold him as he died and entered the company of the saints in heaven.

Was it worth baptising him? Yes. I was profoundly aware that this was my new brother in Christ and we were doing what we could to prepare him for glory. What did he achieve in his life as a Christian? Nothing in human terms, but that didn't matter. Next day I went to church and three healthy babies were baptised so the commission after baptism took on its more familiar meaning as we anticipated a long lifetime of discipleship. Were their baptisms more significant or meaningful than the emergency baptism in hospital? No. Baptism is when we are united to Christ, what happens afterwards on earth is different for each one of us.

We have heard about Ezekiel and Paul's experiences and can set them and our own lives in the context of our calling to be united to Christ. The question of what will happen afterwards is in God's hands with our co-operation, but none of us know how long we have to live - only this week we were reminded that, but for the skill of a pilot, there would have been a disaster at Heathrow. Around the same time Paul wrote to the Romans, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die we are the Lord's." In baptism we are baptised into Christ and commissioned to live and to die as God's own child. We are never too old or too experienced to keep responding to God's revelation to us and to live into our calling as Christians; perhaps this Epiphany, this season of revelation, can be another chance to be surprised by God into further fidelity whether we live for another seven days or seventy years.