6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B 8 am baptismal letter

The Very Rev Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 6th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 8B June 30, 2024 A letter to Sophie Winslow Smith upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Sophie, Today is a big day in your young life. Today is the day of your baptism, a day when we gather to accept on your behalf that God has loved you and known you since before you were born, that God has claimed you as God’s beloved. Your parents and godparents are saying “yes” to your belovedness on your behalf, and they are making promises about how they will raise you to help you nurture your belovedness and to teach you how to see the face of God’s beloved in every person you will encounter in your life. And we your church are making promises that we will also support you in this work of growing into your belovedness, even as you will teach us more about our belovedness as well. Our gospel reading for today gives us a glimpse of the hope that can be found in following Jesus. I read a quote this week about hope that I want to share with you: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense…Hope is not optimism….Hope is a discipline and… we have to practice it every single day.” We see in our story from Mark 5:21-43 that both the unnamed woman and the desperate father Jairus have hope that leads them to action, either for themselves or someone they love. They don’t just sit there and wish for things to get better, they take a step forward in their faith, acting to approach Jesus and ask for (or in the woman’s case, take) what they need. True hope is not just a practice, a discipline. It also involves action. Today, sweet Sophie, your parents and godparents will make promises on your behalf of how you will live your life, and they make promises to raise you in this life of discipleship to Jesus. And we will all renew our own baptismal covenant alongside them. As we do this, we remember that in our baptism, we are invited to practice this hope by loving action on behalf of not just ourselves but also our neighbors. Notice how in the last five invitations of baptism, the first two are practices that help us nourish our own hope: continuing in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers, and resisting evil and whenever we fall into sin, repenting and returning to the Lord. But the last three are about how we turn outward and practice hope in the world around us: proclaiming by word and example the Good News of God in Christ, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, and striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being. Our baptism calls us to practice hope through loving action for ourselves and for others. That practice of hope will look different for you in different seasons of your life, sweet Sophie, but it is our job as your family and your faith community to help you discover what that looks like, what it means for you to practice hope. In closing, I’ll leave you with a reflection written by Bishop Stephen Charleston about hope. He writes, “I have a little broom called hope. I use it to sweep out the corners of my life where the dust of my past has settled and the shadows of my heart cling like cobwebs. It does a good job. I sweep fear and worry out the door, leaving only sunshine where the dark spaces once pretended to rule. I have a little broom called hope: please feel free to borrow it whenever you like.” Your sister in Christ, Melanie+