Easter 2B, 2009   Year B

It’s wonderful to be baptizing Trent and McKenna this morning. Just last Sunday it was Easter, and we were celebrating God’s promise and gift of new life in the resurrection of Jesus. That’s amazing in itself. It was something no one could ever have imagined, yet it tells us about God’s love and purpose for us in a way that we can completely recognize. We know that’s what God is like. God’s wonderful and creative design for us has to mean something more than we can imagine. Like the overalls my little brother used to wear said, “I know I must be special - coz God don’t make no junk!”

Now, today, we get to see that promise from God come true in the lives of two little ones. That adds new dimensions to our understanding of what new life in God really means. First of all, it’s not just eternal life in the sense of life beyond this one. New life in God is here and now. It’s meant to be experienced by us here and now, as we look at the world with the eyes of the risen Jesus. As God says to McKenna and Trent today, “You are mine, I love you and I am proud of you,” we can also hear Jesus saying, “You will always be with me, and I will always be with you - I promise to live my new life in you.” And we can recognize that God has said and is saying the same things to each of us as well.

What does that new life look like? We get some interesting snapshots in the Scripture readings you’ve just heard. First, we heard from Acts a story about the very beginnings of the Christian church, even before the name “Christian” had been invented. The followers of Jesus, and all those people who were starting to join their movement, stuck pretty close together. We’re shown this picture of them sharing everything. I don’t know about you, but I have a mixed reaction to that picture. On the one hand, I can imagine what a wonderful feeling it would have been, to be part of something so exciting and so generous. On the other hand, I find myself thinking, “Like that’s going to last.”

And of course, it didn’t, and it never has. Attempts by human communities to share their lives completely and perfectly have inevitably collapsed. A lot of people get hard-headed about that and say, “See, we’re just not meant to live like that.” But I think that’s a mistake. We know what’s needed to live in a perfect community. Some of the requirements can be spelled out in human terms. You have to choose to be there - you can’t be forced. You have to trust all the other people. And you and everyone else has to be worthy of that trust. No wonder it doesn’t work!

But when I say that, I’m still speaking in human terms. And the reality is, it did work, however briefly, for the very first group of Jesus’ followers. The thing is, they had one more thing going for them. They had Jesus at the centre of their life together. Some of them had met him, in a completely literal way: shaken his hand, listened to him talk, shared a loaf of bread. Others had encountered him in extraordinary circumstances, alive again after they’d seen him die. Still others had never met the man Jesus “in the flesh” but came to know his presence in those who had.

It was Jesus at the centre, who gave them all the spirit of excitement and generosity, trust and trustworthiness, that allowed them to live a new life. The kind of life we’d all want to be part of. Jesus at the centre wasn’t an idea, a religious belief or political philosophy. He was completely and utterly real. Something, someone, you could hear and see and look at and touch, as the letter of John says. He was there, living their new life with them - or perhaps they were living his.

The thing is, “they” are “us”. We are still the same people who were there in the book of Acts. We haven’t changed that much. We still want to be part of something exciting and generous; we still need to trust and be trusted; we still share the conviction that our lives are intended for something extraordinary and that God has a purpose for us. And Jesus is still here for us, still here with us and in us, still including us into his new life.

We can still shake his hand - you’re going to do that in a short while, when we exchange the peace - look carefully at your neighbour and I’ll bet you can see Jesus looking out through their eyes. We can still break bread with him - we’re going to do that too. We can still hear him speak, when we pray or listen to Scripture. We can still meet him in the community of people who share his name and his life, not to mention in all the people beyond this community to whom Jesus has directed our attention, telling us that what we do for them we do for him.

And today we’re taking one more step. We’re introducing two new people to that new life, that new way of living, which is the hallmark of the followers of Jesus. As Jesus says to Trent and McKenna, “I am going to live in you, and you in me,” we also have something to say to them. We can borrow John’s words as we say to them, “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.”

Our commitment, as parents and godparents and members of a supporting congregation, isn’t just to talk religious to these little ones (or others like them). Declaring the word of life to them means more than that. It means living, ourselves, in the spirit of excitement and generosity and trust and trustworthiness. It means demonstrating that in small ways. Maybe we can’t organize a whole society around sharing, but we can organize our families that way; we can find new ways to open our lives to people beyond our families; we can be part of something bigger than ourselves; maybe we can even make small steps to make our world look more like the new way of living that God is offering us. That’s how we show what it means to live the new life of Christ.

Declaring the word of life to Trent and McKenna also means introducing them to the person who is at the centre of our life together. Showing them that there is someone they can hear and see and look at and touch, someone who wants to ‘include them in’ as well. Jesus is here for them too, just like he was for Thomas and the apostles. He will come to these children like he did to the upper room, and he will be just as ready for them to test out their doubts and questions. It will be our privilege to watch them grow in that new relationship they have with Jesus, and to see them become, in their turn, people who show the world the meaning of new life in Christ.

But we don’t have to wait for that. Because right now, today, in the midst of our act of worship, Jesus allows both them and us to reach out and touch him. In the water of baptism, in the bread and wine of communion, but most of all in the people we will look at in a brand new way over the coming week - we meet and see and touch Jesus, and we learn what it means to live a new life in him.

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