Feb. 4, 2007





By Harry T. Cook


Luke 5: 1-11


On this Sunday, the congregation of St. Andrew's will do a bold and, some would say, arrogant thing. It will reach out through the performance of the ancient liturgy of baptism to claim for itself and all of Christianity a child barely a year old. We will do this, of course, at the request of the child's parents. It will be, in a way, a response to the mandate set forth in today's gospel reading to the effect that people who claim to follow Jesus should be catching people, rather than the fish the original disciples were said to have been catching before their encounter with Jesus.


Officially, Christians are supposed to be gathering to their numbers as many new fish as they can net. The more orthodox would say that salvation depends on it. But I doubt most people believe that, if only because in the almost 20 years I have been pastor here a couple of hundred baptisms (mostly of infants and young children) have taken place, and in very few cases have the promises of parents and sponsors been fulfilled in any consistent way. Such baptisms have no practical effect and may as well not have taken place.


Perhaps baptism is only the expression of a vague intention having something to do with the appeasement of anxious grandparents. In any event, many people appear to believe that baptism is an elective - kind of like an audited course in which there are no examinations, no homework and no mandatory attendance. And, indeed, the pouring of water over a human head in the name of one god composed of three persons cannot, at least to rational persons, make the difference between eternal life and eternal death.


So what does it mean? What, beyond following tradition, are we doing when we baptize? What do we want to have happen as a result? The Baptismal Covenant, which has all the earmarks of most New Year's resolutions, actually binds those who affirm it to a wide array of commitments - among them the support of parents and godparents in giving the baptized a thorough immersion in Christian learning and practice, the intention to turn the abstraction of one's religious feeling into the concrete service of others' needs, and the striving for justice and peace among all people - the respecting of every individual being the sure sign of such striving.


Those are serious promises and commitments, to which the almost universal response over time sounds something like, "Yeah, yeah." And the life of the church demonstrates the shallow nature of that response: with Sunday School teachers teaching to near-empty rooms, with church treasurers lying awake at night trying to figure out whom to pay and whom to stiff, with parish clergy slouching toward madness wondering why their best efforts often come to naught.


The given name of the child we will baptize today is "Destiny." Now there's a name to get your attention. In a rational philosophical system, destiny is not something waiting to jump out at you from behind a rock somewhere up the road. Destiny is what one makes for himself or herself, and with the help of people who care. What will Destiny's destiny be? Will it have anything whatsoever to do with the words that will be spoken today over her and because of her?


To what wagon is her star being hitched today? Stars are fixed in space but move with the rest of the universe in its apparently infinite expansion. You can nevertheless navigate by the stars and arrive at the desired destination. Destination. Destiny.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.