A few weeks ago, we celebrated Mother’s
Day, and the children who were in the Sunday School planted lovely little
petunias in buckets as gifts to their moms. It was an apt gift – what does a
mother do but to help her child grow and blossom? To be fair, we should
acknowledge that fathers do the same thing, encouraging, caring, coaching, guiding. Parents do wonderful things for their
children, purely out of love for them.
But there is a mystery in all this
parenting business, isn’t there? You never know quite what will encourage your
children to do better, to try harder, to explore bravely. What works for one
child may not work for another. It isn’t simply a matter of putting a seedling in
the dirt, adding water, and then sitting back to enjoy the show. Some marvelous
thing happens that energizes a seedling, or a child, and suddenly, there is the
blossoming wonder. And doesn’t it surprise us, when we see our child grown and
graduating from school, or doing marvelous things at work, or becoming parents
themselves? We look at our child and we remember the moment when the child was
born, took her first steps, went off to kindergarten. And for all our hard
work, we recognize that it is God’s work in that precious child that makes
their unique gifts come to fruition.
In a few minutes, we will baptize
three little children. It is a beautiful exciting time, and doing this on
Father’s Day makes this extra-special, because we are dedicating them to their
heavenly Father even as we celebrate their earthly fathers.
One of the things that always strikes
me as we celebrate baptisms is how little we know about these children. They
are at the beginning of their lives – how could we know anything about them? We
can only guess at how they might develop over the years and what kind of people
they will become. One might be a soccer player. Another might be a nuclear
physicist, and another might write the great American novel. Or they might do something
we can’t even imagine, because it hasn’t been invented yet.
Each precious child is like one of
those mustard seeds that Jesus talks about in the Gospel we heard today. Who
knows how they will grow? Only their heavenly Father, who sparks their souls. If
we try to imagine what we will become, the full breadth of their possibilities,
we most likely will underestimate them, as those who were around the toddler
Jesus probably did. But God knew what Jesus was about, just as God knows what
each and every child is about. God is the God of possibilities, the most
expansive and surprising and exciting possibilities.
We don’t know the mechanics of how a
child develops into the adult we will see twenty years hence – that’s some of the
mystery of the God of possibilities working in us. It’s like the seed that
sprouts and grows and eventually becomes a full-grown grain of wheat, ready for
harvest. We don’t know how they grow. We do know, though, in plants and in
children, that growth and development is inevitable, and that the child we now
see in diapers or in little light-up sneakers will one day be an adult that
contributes to a better world.
In a way, the story of that growth is
like a parable. Each of us is a parable, a retelling of the love of God for
every one of his children. Each of us shows how uniquely God has gifted us, and
how miraculously He has shaped us into the people that we become over time.
We learn this from Jesus, the teller
of parables. Jesus not only tells
parables, he becomes a parable, a pattern for relationship with the Heavenly
Father who formed us all. Think about it: he was a child whose beginnings were
less than auspicious. He was born into a simple family, under difficult
circumstances. And yet he grows into someone we could never have imagined if we
had been present in the Galilee in the year of his birth. He shows us through his life and death how we
should live our lives – bravely, with great love and concern for all of
creation, recognizing that the things that truly matter are not earthly power
or wealth, but love. He is the mustard seed which grows into a mighty bush
sheltering all the birds. He is the child of possibilities grown into the one
who redeems all humanity.
We are the seedlings, still striving
upwards toward the sunlight. These children who will be baptized are the
smallest and most fragile of seedlings, and in their baptism we will ask God to
continue to spark their spirit with love, to wash away any misdeeds that they
may do, to hold them close. Just as a plant needs water to grow, so too do we
need the water of baptism to help us grow.
But unlike those little plants the
children gave us for Mother’s Day, once we have been watered in baptism, we
never need another watering. We are infused by God’s love and protection. We
will continue to grow and blossom, each in our own unique way. May the water
which washed and fed us in our own baptisms sustain us and enliven our hearts,
to be as generous and in love with God and each other as Jesus taught us. May
we be more than mustard seeds…rather, may we be the most vibrant and
luxuriously leafy as the greatest garden.
Bless these children, and all
children who are baptized today around the world. Bless those of us who are
given the charge to care for them, to water them so they may grow. May the
blessings of the Heavenly Father, the God of all possibilities, be upon us all.
Amen.
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