Beloved Members of St. Martin’s,
This Sunday we will be blessed to have the Rt. Rev. Deon Johnson visit us for his scheduled Episcopal visitation. We will celebrate three children being baptized and being welcomed as full members of Christ’s universal Church. We will confirm and receive nine adults into the fellowship of the Episcopal Church.
When I say we, I mean all of us. The brilliant thing about observing these rites during a bishop’s visitation is that they take place among parishioners, gathered together in our beloved spiritual home.
And when I say we, it means, sadly, that I will be forced to watch from afar. My quite elderly mother was taken to the ER and then placed in the ICU on the evening of July 4 in Tulsa. Mom has no other family in town save a beloved former neighbor who immediately came and helped as the EMTs evaluated her and helped us get information to the medical staff over the phone. So late on Independence Day, I had to drove to Tulsa to be able to help care for and comfort my mother. I am very disappointed that I will not be with you all, especially on such a magnificent celebration, but I know that you all will carry on perfectly well under the able leadership of Bishop Deon. The celebration will go on!
As John Lennon sagely observed, life is what happens when your busy making other plans.
But my absence doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we will all stand together, in person and online, from bishop to baby, and affirm our baptismal covenant. In affirming that covenant together, we are making our promises not just to God, but to each other about the path we strive to follow in imitating Jesus.
So I encourage you to prepare for our liturgy, our work together, tomorrow by reading those promises again. You can find them online here. To summarize, we begin with the Apostles’ Creed, divided into three questions, each dealing with beliefs about one person in the Trinity. We then follow with a series of five questions (and 15 specific commitments) that are not about what we believe, but how we are called to live as disciples. This is why they begin with “Will you…?”:
And to each question, we respond, “I will, with God’s help.”
That response is a wonderful reminder to us about all of life. All that we do that is good and honorable and worthy, we do with God’s help. That’s a comfort to me as I and so many others care for my mother right now, and just try get through each day with steadfastness and even a bit of wonder in good times and difficult ones.
The beauty of repeating this covenant together every few months in the Church year is that is brings us together, no matter in what denomination we were baptized as children, into an expression of where affirm our intentions for living a life of faithful witness to the Gospel and its values, in counterbalance to the world around us. We may-- and will-- struggle with living into different parts of these affirmations at times. That’s not just okay, that’s human. But when we affirm these articles of faithful living together, we orient ourselves and recommit ourselves to be followers of Jesus by example, not just by label.
As we stand and make those promises together, the promises that outline also our faith as Episcopalian Christians, may we strive to live fully into them. God bless you, and us, all, in our unfolding journey of faith and faithful living.
In Christ,
Mother Leslie+