World Communion Sunday

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Matthew 28:16-20

In the United Methodist Church it is customary for baptisms to take place during the Sunday worship service. There are two reasons for this. The first is theological. In the sacrament of baptism we are celebrating a child as God’s gift to the universe. In the act of baptism the parents and the congregation together are committing themselves to surround the child with love and wisdom and faith. It is a sacrament that involves parents and children, and it is a sacrament that involves a whole community. That is the theological reason that we baptize children in a worship service in the presence of the congregation.

The second reason that we baptize children during the worship service is that we like to look at babies. This is a purely selfish reason. It is so pleasant to look into their faces; doing so touches our hearts.

In his teachings Jesus gave particular importance to children. He said that when we welcome a child in love into our community, we are welcoming God, and he went beyond that to say that to an adult must become a child in order enter into the presence of God. So the baptism of infants is for us a very sacred moment and a very pleasant moment as well.

When a mother and father look into the face of their infant they see a perfect being. We do not know exactly what goes on in the brain of an infant, but we suspect that when an infant gazes into mother’s face or father’s face they are seeing those perfect beings who have brought them forth into the world. So the infant and the parents are locked in a trance of love; joined in a mutual admiration society; totally smitten with one another.

This is a situation that cannot last.

There are no perfect human beings. In time babies and mothers and fathers will awaken from their trance and face the challenge of relating to one another as the imperfect beings that they are. It is like the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

According to this ancient Hebrew story there was once a woman and a man, Eve and Adam, in blissful ignorance, enjoying the fruits of the garden that God had planted. They were without a care in the world. The birds sang sweetly. The rivers flowed gently. Everything was just perfect. But this was a situation that could not last. In the whole long Bible the amount of time that human beings spent in the garden of paradise consists of less than two chapters. By the end of the third chapter of the first book of the Bible human beings are no longer living carefree in the garden of Eden. After about the second page of the Bible, human beings are living squarely in the real world with all its pressures and struggles and demands, this world of love and passion and sorrow.

The presence of an infant in our worship in the sacrament of baptism is like a flashback to the Garden of Eden, a place and time of innocence and wonder, before the real world and all its troubles crashed upon our heads.

We don’t live in the Garden of Eden. We live in the real world. Parents must raise their children in the real world. In the real world it takes great effort and sacrifice and much worry to raise a child.

We have focused on a single precious infant today, a single child who has been baptized. At the same time this is World Communion Sunday, and on this day we expand our vision to encompass the whole world.

Long ago the first followers of Jesus were mostly ordinary people. Very few of them would have been able to read. They were drawn to Jesus, to his teaching and his healing. In his movement they found a sense of belonging and purpose. It’s safe to say that they were not concerned with the “world,” or that they had any idea of ‘the world” beyond their towns and villages. The Church began as a band of ordinary people drawn by the power of Jesus to heal and comfort and teach – but it quickly became a people with a global vision.

In the last verses of the Gospel of Matthew, a Gospel that was written about fifty years after Jesus’ lifetime, Jesus sends out his disciples to all the world, to make disciples and to baptize. Baptism is a most personal and intimate blessing upon a single human being. As I’ve said today it is also a whole community circling around the child and representing all those who will nurture this child over time. But baptism is also a Christian sign of God’s universal love. It is a sign that we are part of a global community. “Go forth into all the world baptizing in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit.”

It was wonderful to hear about the dedication of the Dorcas Clinic (the new clinic in rural Ghana that our congregation has helped to establish) three weeks ago. On the scale of the world’s needs, it is a minuscule project. But on a human scale, it is a huge blessing to the thousands of people living in that region with no medical services previously available to them. And it is one small way that our congregation has a spiritual and a material link to the world.

One of the most immediate benefits of a clinic such as the one established in Yipala is that it can provide prenatal and postnatal care. Imagine the last serious medical problem you had or that someone you love had. Now imagine how things would be if you had not had medical attention. Most of us cannot imagine what it would be like to face illness, pregnancy and childbirth, childhood diseases, and to have to do these things without any skilled medical care. It is a staggering thought.

If we truly care for any individual child, we must care for the whole earth, because the issues that are shaping our world will impact every individual child. Unless we can achieve greater peace; unless we can address the vast disparities of poverty and wealth in our own country and the world, and unless we can reverse the ecological degradation of our planet, harm will come to every child.

We are a congregation that cannot ignore the world. Disaster has struck in the Philippines in recent weeks and days, and some of us have parents and sisters and brothers and nephews and nieces in the Philippines.

We are at war as a nation; we have had members of our congregation sent to war – in earlier times, and in our own time as well. We cannot ignore what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Among us there are refugees from dreadful conflicts in other parts of the world.

From Finland to Jamaica, from the Philippines to France, from Liberia to the Netherlands, from Ireland to India, from Germany to Mexico; we are global microcosm. A thousand invisible strings connect us across this planet to the global human family. Every child baptized in this church is truly a child of planet Earth.

Each child baptized in this church reminds us why it matters that each of us participate in Jesus’ ministry of healing and reconciliation and justice, on behalf of our universal home, our precious planet Earth.