A different position on baptism

LOUISVILLE — On Palm Sunday, the Rev. Wilson Kennedy and his spouse stood alongside their godson Charlie and his parents while the child was being baptized.

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“I was awash in the beauty of this moment,” Kennedy said during the Wednesday Chapel Service held online for staff of the Interim Unified Agency. “This child, so important in my life, had no clue why he was in the arms of his pastor in front of all these people” while “being sprinkled with water in the name of God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit our Sustainer, one God, mother of us all.”

Kennedy, Associate Director of Special Offerings and Appeals in Ministry Engagement and Support, shared a meditation during a service honoring Presbyterians’ recent generosity to One Great Hour of Sharing, which more than 5,000 Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations received recently. Isaiah 58:1-12 was the text for Wednesday’s service as well as this year’s One Great Hour of Sharing.

“While I have performed many baptisms in my pastoral ministry, it all seemed fresh as I witnessed this sacrament from a different position,” Wilson told those in worship. “For me, all the topsy-turviness of the world, all the new things we are living into, all the fear and uncertainty that fills my mind and keeps me up at night were laid bare in the image of this child being welcomed into the household of faith,” which proclaimed these words from the Reformed Church of France: “Little one, for you Jesus came into the world. For you he lived and showed God’s love. For you he suffered the darkness of Calvary and cried at the last, ‘It is finished.’  For you he triumphed over death and rose in newness of life. For you he ascended to reign at God’s right hand. All this God did for you, little one, though you do not know it yet, and so the word of scripture is fulfilled: We love because God first loved us.”

The experience of Charlie’s baptism “has reframed my reading of today’s scripture from Isaiah 58,” Kennedy said. “All the proclamations and exhortations made by the writer speak boldly into our present moment and call us back to what is most important — worship of God, which compels us to action in the face of tyranny.”

Isaiah has a name for those who “live into the fullness of their call,” Kennedy said: repairers of the breach.

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“Yes, it is our task to speak truth to powers and principalities, to love God and love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and to do our work with glad and generous hearts,” Kennedy said. “Yes, it is our task to center worship of God in all we do, and to seek to live out a distinctive ecclesiology that reminds us that we are better together than we are  as individuals, and that we come together to discern the mind of Christ, as the Apostle Paul suggests to the earliest churches.”

In our repair work, “I have come to realize that I — and I dare say all of us — can only do our small part to be called ‘repairers of breaches,’” Kennedy said. “Our work is not insignificant, but we will hardly see the fruits of our labor in this lifetime.”

Nowadays, when Kennedy reads Isaiah 58, he sees Charlie.

“I saw his precious eyes, looking all around at the stained glass as he was told he is God’s beloved child and nothing can ever change that. I heard his gentle cry when the water touched his head. I felt his tiny hands on my hand,” Kennedy said. “You see, friends, our work to live into being called repairers of the breach matters today, yes. But this work is not just for us. It’s for Charlie, and it’s for all those who will come after us.”

By grace, “we are asked to do what we can,” Wilson said. “So may we live into the boldness of that freedom and respond with continued action, even when we are not assured we will see its completion in this lifetime.”

Watch a video here that illustrates how gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing strengthen the work of the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and the Presbyterian Hunger Program.