Dead and Risen: The Grammar of New Life

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Lord, give us eyes to see and ears to hear, that we may learn Your Word together as a family. We give You all praise and honor and glory, in Jesus’ holy Name. Amen.

Good morning, Encouragers. Alleluia. Christ is risen!

The Collect we prayed a few minutes ago contains a remarkable phrase. We asked God to “…put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect.” In other words, we ask not only for the desire, but for the power to act on it. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole shape of the Christian life.

But before we can desire anything new, something old has to die. That’s what Easter is about. That’s what today’s Baptisms are about.

The Epistle said it plainly: “Ye are dead.” Not “ye are struggling” or “ye are improving.” Dead. And then, in the next breath: “your life is hid with Christ in God.” This isn’t poetry. It’s doctrine. And it’s the grammar that governs everything else we do today.

The morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark. She came expecting death. What she found instead was an absence. The stone was moved. The body was gone.

Her first reaction wasn’t joy, but confusion. She ran and told St’s Peter and John: “They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.”

Neither Peter nor Mary yet understood the scripture that He must rise from the dead. But John, we are told, saw and believed. He saw the evidence of deliberate order, not robbery, not hurry, not chaos, but the quiet aftermath of something God had done, and he believed.

Easter morning requires this kind of sight. It requires the willingness to interpret emptiness as fullness, absence as arrival, death as the beginning of something that can’t be stopped.

Isaiah heard that grammar centuries before. “He will swallow up death in victory,” he wrote. And: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he will save us.” Easter tells us that the waiting isn’t empty. It’s the waiting of people who have already seen the stone moved.

Today, between the lighting of the Paschal Candle and the reading of the Gospel, something ancient happened at this Font. Five souls were baptized into the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

The Smith family came forward together, Kristoffer and Leslie with their children, Lottie and little George. They didn’t come as individuals. They came as a household.

The Church has always understood that the family is a little church, a small society gathered under the mercy of God. The Smiths’ coming to the Font together is a picture of what God intends in a larger sense, that no one navigates grace alone.

Young Bradley also received the sacrament today. His parents, Logan and Adalyn, brought him, and it was a joy to baptize their son. I married Logan and Adalyn this past December, and Logan himself was received into the waters of baptism at this very Font only a couple of months before that. Now Bradley follows him. This is how faith moves through time, one generation at a time, one act of obedience at a time.

The ancient Church didn’t choose Easter as a baptismal day by accident. They saw what was there. Baptism is, in the language of Saint Paul, a burial and a rising.

The old man is buried. The new man rises. It is, in miniature, the shape of Good Friday and Easter morning. To be baptized is to be crucified with Christ. And to be crucified with Christ is to be raised with him.

This is why Saint Paul could write to the Colossians with such confidence. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above.” Not “try hard” or “aim higher.” Risen. Done. It happened. Now live accordingly.

Set your mind on things above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God, because that is where your life is. Not in some vague spiritual sense, but genuinely, sacramentally, really, hid with Christ in God.

Baptism does not describe an aspiration. It announces a fact.

When Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, he came with a genuine question. He had seen the miracles. He knew they pointed to something. But he could not yet understand what he was hearing. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus heard biology. Jesus meant theology.

“Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” The water is real. The Spirit is real. The birth is real. The flesh produces flesh. The Spirit produces spirit. And what the Spirit produces cannot be undone by what the flesh produces.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” We can’t trace the Spirit’s work the way we would trace a genealogy. But we can see its effects.

We can see it in a family that comes to the Font. We can see it in a young father who was himself baptized only recently, now bringing his son.

We can see it in what happened Wednesday night in the Service of Shadows. The candles went out one by one until only the Paschal Candle remained.

Then that light was hidden, and we sat in the dark, and a loud noise broke the silence, and the Candle returned. We didn’t explain it. We enacted it. And what we enacted was the whole shape of the Gospel:

The apparent victory of darkness, the earthquake, the return of the Light that cannot finally be put out. The Spirit moves in exactly this way. And we find ourselves, if we have eyes to see it, inside a story that is not our own.

But what does any of this have to do with us today, if we weren’t baptized this morning, if we have carried our baptism for decades without thinking much about it?

Colossians answers that. “Your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.”

We are already buried with Him and raised. We entered this condition when water was poured on us and the Name was spoken over us. WE may have been too young to remember. It doesn’t matter. It happened. It’s a fact about us that nothing in this world can reverse.

The question is whether we’re living from that fact or running from it. Saint Paul doesn’t shame us. He calls us to what we already are. We are risen with Christ. So seek what is above. Not because we must earn it, but because it’s ours.

Today, five more souls bear the mark of that victory. They have been buried with Christ in these waters and raised with him. But baptism is not the end of the story for any of them. It is the beginning.

The promises made at this Font will need to be lived, trusted, and returned to again and again. Faith is not something that happens once and is done. It is the lifelong work of saying yes to what God has already said yes to in Christ. The seal is real. The grace is real. And the call to persevere in faith is just as real.

The light of Christ burns in this room this morning. Give thanks to God.

That’s all we’re asked to do: to give thanks and to live accordingly, until the day when what is hid becomes fully revealed, and Christ, who is our life, appears, and we appear with him in glory.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Remember the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, how He said, “It’s more blessed to give than to receive.”