The Rev. Canon Melanie Dickson Lemburg
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Crossett, AR
The 20th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 25C
October 26, 2025
A letter to Issac Cole Morman upon the occasion of his baptism.
Dear Issac,
Today is an exciting day for you and for the Church! It’s your baptism day, a day when you will stand before God and this congregation and make vows about how you will live your life, and we will make vows to support you in that. This is the next step in your life of faith, the next step on a journey that actually began at your birth.
Because you see, Isaac, when you were born, you were already known and named and claimed by God as God’s beloved, just like all of us. God creates us because God wants to be in relationship with us. God cherishes us and claims us as God’s beloved at our creation.
In your baptism today, you are saying yes to being God’s beloved; to living life as God’s beloved. It’s a beautiful life, a life full of meaning and purpose, to live your life as God’s beloved, and it is also not easy. That’s why we live this life of the beloved here in community. We need each other as companions on this way, and our tradition gives us a pathway to live out this life of the beloved in our baptismal covenant.
You will be making these promises for the first time officially today, but it will not be the last time. Over the course of your life of faith, you and the rest of us who are God’s beloved will recommit ourselves again and again, to this path, this way of life.
Our gospel passage for today gives us one of Jesus’s parables that shows us a small glimpse into why we need these words of our baptismal covenant. In a world where we are all so quick to judge and to be certain of our own righteousness, our baptismal covenant can hold up a mirror before us, a mirror both of how we are called to live as God’s beloved and also in all the ways that we fall short of doing this.
I once heard the line, years ago, “I am no better and no worse than anyone else;” and to me, this is what is at the heart of our baptismal covenant. “All of us fall short of the glory of God,” is how the apostle Paul puts it. But that’s not where we are left in this, always falling short of living into our life as the beloved. It’s why you will answer today, not just “I will”. But “I will with God’s help.” Because none of us can be truly faithful in this without God’s help and the support of each other.
And the gift of our baptismal covenant is that it gives us perspective. We don’t need to so self-abasing as the tax collector, because we know we are created as God’s beloved, and we also shouldn’t be contemptuous and judgmental like the Pharisee because when seen in the honest light of our baptismal vows, each one of us can understand where our shortcomings are.
Reading this gospel parable alongside our baptismal vows today gives us the opportunity to truly reflect on our lives and to examine where are the places we have veered too much toward self-righteousness these days? It doesn’t take much to get caught up in and swept away by our culture’s knee-jerk reaction toward blaming others while protecting our own self-righteousness. We might also ask ourselves who we enjoy looking down on, even as our baptismal covenant holds up the mirror for us in the call to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves. We might also examine the ways that we have made ourselves too small, where we have not lived into the full potential of our belovedness. What does true humility in right relationship with God and others, within the framework of our baptismal covenant really look like in each of our lives in the midst of our current reality?
It’s no easy task, this living out life as God’s beloved. There will be times when we need you, Isaac, to remind us of our belovedness, and there will be times when we can help you remember. It’s the beautiful gift of Christian community, this reciprocity of remembering, and we are all so glad that you are now on this journey with us!
Your sister in Christ,
Melanie+
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