Baptism is a door into another world.
Like the wardrobe in CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It takes us from this world into another world
And this other world is more actually more real than this world
In this world, this is God.
This bread stands for all the things that this world offers
The satisfaction of our physical desire
The craving for experience
I have been struck this week listening to the commentary on Radio 5 live on the Olympics. I think that it is quite telling that the focus of the commentary is far less on what is happening in the actual event, or even on the athletes expertise or skill or strength. Instead it is on their emotions and feelings on winning or losing.
This bread stands for all the things that we live our life for: sensation, love, stuff, thrills, status, adventure, security
The people in the story we read have just seen Jesus feed a huge crowd with 5 loaves and 2 fish. They are wowed. They say, ‘Move over Rachel Reeves. We need this man as chancellor of the exchequer!’ ‘Move over Sir Keir Starmer, move over King Charles. We want this man to be our king. If he can do this stuff – produce food out of nothing and feed us for free – what can’t he do’.
The crowd are, we’ve been told, looking for Jesus because they want to make him king!
But Jesus knows them. He knows that they have missed the point.
They do not really want him to be their king, their ruler, because this (bread) is their god. They are being ruled by their stomach.
“Very truly you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of loaves” (v26)
“You are working – seeking, pursuing – for food that perishes” (v27)
And that is the problem.
It is not that this is bad. Far from it. We need it.
It is that this stuff will never fully satisfy and it will perish
It will never fully satisfy. Someone said last week of Elon Musk or Bezos, or one of those people who are unbelievably rich, who are spending staggeringly huge sums of money on anti-aging cures, that when they were young, they wanted to be rich. Now that they are rich, they want to be young.
And this stuff will perish. You know what happens when you go away for a couple of weeks and forget to take the bread out of the breadbin. You come back, and the bread bin is moving. It is zombie land. The dead bread has come alive.
If this is the thing that we pursue, if this is what we live for here and now, then it will not satisfy and we will perish.
But baptism opens a door to another world.
It gives us a glimpse of another world that is very different to this one.
It is a world where we belong
We were created by God to have a relationship with God
And without that relationship there will always be a huge hole in our lives.
In the baptism service, we mark William with a sign of the cross.
I like to think that as a branding!
God is saying to William, “You belong to me, and I belong to you. Not just for this life, but for eternity”.
And in this baptism world we belong to Jesus and Jesus belongs to us. When we are with him, we are in our true home.
And it is not just a belonging to God, but a belonging as a member of the people of God.
And so in this service we welcome William as a member of the people of God, of the Church.
As a baptised person you have your human family, but you have a bigger, indeed more important, family – because it is the family gives you your ultimate identity and that will last for eternity: the people of God.
I speak of the mark of the cross as a branding, but another way to think of it is to think of it as a kiss of God on the forehead of William
At the baptism of Jesus there was a voice: ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I take delight’
As we mark William with the cross, it is a sign in which God is saying: “William, I would take you as my beloved son”.
It is a world of mercy and forgiveness and new beginnings
The main act of baptism is the use of water as a symbolic washing.
It is the gift of a clean slate, constant new beginning.
This new baptism world is not like the world of bread, where there are very few second chances, where an inappropriate comment or action taken when we have lost it mean that we are cast into the outer darkness; and often means instead that we are driven into ourselves.
No, this baptism world is very different. However many times we mess up, we can always say: ‘Yes, I have done wrong” (of course, we need to admit it), but this baptism world is one that recognises that we will mess up, that we will – to use the old word, sin – but it begins with washing. There is always, with God, forgiveness. There is always in this new world the possibility of a new start.
It is a world in which we are offered bread which satisfies
The bread of this world comes into our stomachs and changes our metabolism.
The bread that God offers us does not just come into our bodies and change our bodies, but it comes into our hearts and changes our desires and it comes into our minds and changes how we see the world, how we think.
The bread of this world is a person, and as we receive Jesus, listen to him, read his word, meet with his people, receive holy communion, put our trust in him, he comes into us and changes our heart and our mind. And he does that through his Holy Spirit.
The third symbol of this service is a candle, a lighted flame, which is a symbol of the gift of the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit gives us a new desire to live for God and for the things of God
Holy Spirit gives us a new strength so that we can begin to live as citizens of this new world
Holy Spirit gives us new vision – so that we open our eyes and see this new world, this baptism world.
And then we see this stuff – bread (and all it symbolises, this physical world) – in a new way: not as something which controls us, drives us; not as something for which we live – but as a gift from the God who loves us, and which points us to the God who loves us:
The God who is with us now and who will be with us long after all of this has perished, or the things that we live for have perished, or long after our own bodies have perished.
So baptism is a gift which opens the door to a new world.
Those of us who have received this gift stand at the entrance to this new world
Today, we place William on the threshold of this new world
Of course, he is a baby, and he needs you to help him take his first outings into this new world
We can look back to the world symbolised by bread, to the things that this old dead world offers us, and zombie like we can seek the dead things of a dead world that cannot satisfy and lead to death.
Or we can turn and look to this new world – this new world that has been given to us - and “work for the food that leads to eternal life”. We can seek the person of Jesus, who loves us, who died for us so that – however many times we sin – we are washed clean, forgiven, and can make a new beginning; and who, through the fire of his Holy Spirit, will come and live in us and transform our desires and our minds.
As Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever puts their trust in me will never be thirsty”.
