Letter to a Godchild

The 13^th Sunday after Pentecost                                                       August 22, 2010

The Baptism of Maxwell Aubrey Rife                                              The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

Texts: Romans 6:3-11

            Mark 1:9-11

 

This week as I thought about Max’s baptism, I reread a little book entitled Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith by Reynolds Price.  Price is best known as a man of letters and as a celebrated novelist.  To date, he has published 37 books, including 14 novels, one of which won the Faulkner Award for Fiction (A Long and Happy Life, 1962).  What I didn’t know until recently is that Reynolds Price is also a man with deep Christian convictions, something of a rarity among celebrated writers of contemporary fiction.  Last year, in an interview on NPR, he described to Terry Gross how he experienced a vision of the risen Christ and was miraculously healed from a debilitating cancer of the spine.  More about that momentarily. 

 

Letter to a Godchild is the text of an actual letter which Price wrote to his godson, Harper Peck Voll, who was baptized in 2000.[1]  Price was not able to be present for the baptism or to spend much time with the child during his formative years (the family lived abroad).  Consequently, he wrote a letter as an account of his own religious life, in the hope that as Harper grew older, he would read it and benefit from it.  Later, it occurred to him that his reflections might be useful to parents, godparents, or anyone concerned to see children grounded in the Christian faith, so he had it published in 2006.     

 

Part of the charm of Letter to a Godchild is that it is written with knowledge that Price’s godson will not read it until some point in the future.  It is written from the point of view of an adult to an adult and therefore will not mean much to Harper until he is maybe in his twenties.  Price looks beyond the child’s baptism to a future existence, shaped by all the influences of modern Western culture – good, bad, and indifferent.  The letter is compelling because Price writes as a man who is beginning his eighth decade and weathered his share of the “inevitable devastations – physical, psychic, and intellectual” that come with aging and has been sustained through them by a vigorous, living faith.[2] 

 

Reynolds Price’s book provides a helpful framework for understanding what we are doing here today.  Jason and Sonya and Max’s godparents have brought him to the waters of baptism.  They want him to be grounded in the faith that has nurtured them.  And we, the community of the baptized, stand with them.  Like Reynolds Price, we have found the way that leads to eternal life.  Our lives have been set on a course that has changed us irrevocably and will continue to change us.   It is not that we think we are better or more religious than other people.  We do not claim to have found a program or a method: “Ten steps to living the victorious Christian life.”[3]  No, we have found a person – the Lord Jesus Christ – or been found by him, as St. Paul expresses it.[4] 

 

Think for a minute about what your own baptism means.  Through baptism, our lives have been united to Christ’s life, and his life has been united to ours.  Listen to how Paul puts it in our reading from the Epistle to the Romans:

 

We were buried with Christ by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.  For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.[5]

 

So close is our relationship to Christ that Paul uses the picture of being plunged into the waters of baptism to describe it (he means baptism in a lake or large body of water, not a font).  To be baptized into Jesus Christ means to be united with him in the most intimate possible relationship.  Our identity is fused with his identity.  Our past is redeemed by his death.  Our future is assured by his resurrection.   

 

Now admittedly, baptism is a human act.  Parents and godparents promise to follow Christ and to raise their child in the knowledge of love of the Lord.  The minister blesses the water and pours it on the child’s head.  Nothing spectacular about that.  Many religions have initiation rites of some kind, including ceremonial washing.  If that’s all that happens, then we can all go home and say that it was a nice service, and that’s the end of it.

 

But what if God is present in and under these human actions in the baptism service?  What if God is not only present but is the one who actually does the baptizing?  John the Baptist said: “I baptize you with water. But one greater than I is coming . . . .  He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and with fire.”[6]  What if Christ actually breathes his Spirit into Max’s life and promises to remain with him for a lifetime?  If that is the case, then something mysterious and wonderful happens in baptism.  It means that as Jason and Sonya and Max’s godparents make promises on Max’s behalf, God makes promises along with them.  As I baptize with water, God promises to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. 

 

In the Introduction to Letter to a Godchild, Reynolds Price explains what he is up in the following words:   

 

It has seemed feasible to me that, by describing succinctly, and as honestly as I could manage, the advancing line of my own religious life, I might provide a useful sense of how one person’s existence shaped itself round an early inexplicable event and moved onward from there till now, to the start of my eighth decade.[7] 

 

I was struck by his statement that a person’s entire existence can be “shaped. . . round an early inexplicable event.”  Price is referring here to a powerful childhood vision in which God revealed to him that the awesome creative power that sustains the entire universe also embraces us personally.  This mystical experience in his early childhood has shaped and directed him through a lifetime of powerful and sometimes conflicting influences – academic life, writing, friendships, and cancer –so that he knows that his life has been formed around this singular vision of the living God. 

 

I don’t think that I am distorting Price’s message to identity baptism as an “early inexplicable event” that can shape a human life through a lifetime of varied influences.  Baptism introduces into our lives a powerful force that holds together “the beginning and the ending of our lives . . . .  our life’s course, all its fantastic ebbings and flowings.”[8]  There are moments when our life seems to us like the pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle, randomly scattered about without apparent connection or order.  What does it all add up to?  Is it possible that our life is a whole, rather than “a thousand separated moments and episodes?”[9]  

 

In baptism, God answers that question with a resounding Yes! We have a unifying center, and that center is Jesus Christ, the single integrating point of our entire existence.  The course of our lives is shaped and ordered around this center, often in ways that we are not even aware.  Through baptism, God the Holy Spirit becomes our True North, the central guiding force in our lives. 

 

When Reynolds Price was 51, he was diagnosed with cancer.  Doctors discovered a tumorous mass on his spinal cord that was essentially inoperable with the surgical procedures available at the time  (in the 1980-s).  The only treatment was radiation, a procedure which, he was warned, risked leaving him “a paraplegic or worse.”[10]  A few days before the treatments were to begin, he was lying in bed, awake, and experienced “a visionary moment” that has forever altered the course of his life.  Here is how he describes it to his godchild:

 

I was half-upright in my bed; then suddenly without apparent transport – and I was certainly not dreaming – I was lying on the stony shore of a huge lake.  I know at once that I was by the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinnerth, as it’s called in modern Israel) – and in a moment, a man whom I know to be Jesus had silently beckoned me into the water with him. 

            In another moment – still silent – he was washing the foot-long wound from the failed surgery that had gouged for hours deep into my spinal cord; that wound was also the proposed site of my weeks of radiation.  At last Jesus spoke, only a four-word sentence – “Your sins are forgiven.”  But nearly overwhelmed as I’d been by a month of surgery and the discouraging aftermath, I pushed him onward for the answer I most wanted – “Am I also healed?”  As if I’d forced it from him, he said only “That too.”  And though he gave no obvious sign of anger at my questions, he said nothing more and waded back to land, through the water ahead of me.  The experience ended there as inexplicably as it came.  It had been nonetheless a long moment as vivid as any other in my life – and as undeniable in its force.[11]

 

Now it’s important to know that Price was in fact rendered a paraplegic by the radiation and has been confined to a wheel chair ever since.  Nevertheless, he has a deep conviction that in those two minutes he was “essentially healed:”

 

By healed I mean that I was repaired in the sense that a man I had every reason to trust had guaranteed me a long stretch of ongoing vigorous existence.  The fact that my legs were subsequently paralyzed by twenty-five X-ray treatments – two years before a new device made the removal of the tumor possible – was a mere complexity in the ongoing narrative which God intended me to make of my life.[12]

 

Sometimes, hearing about someone else’s miraculous healing arouses suspicion (“Clearly an illusion,” we think) or irritation (“What makes her think she’s so special?”).  You must decide for yourself whether you buy Reynolds Price’s account.  To me, it has the ring of truth, in part because he has come to understand healing to include more than the physical repair of the body (important as that is).  For Price, healing refers to a relationship with God in which he has been sustained by the Lord for an active, productive life and a vigorous faith. 

 

Price’s description of his “Kinnereth moment” is also deeply evocative of baptism, even though he does not make the connection explicit.  Remember the setting: he is standing next to Jesus; both are waist-deep in the water of the Sea of Galilee.  His pencil sketch of the vision looks a lot like the descriptions of baptisms in the early church, and particularly, of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River.  Price beautifully captures Jesus’ healing touch by depicting the moment that the Lord pours water on the foot-long wound on his neck.  And remember the words he first hears from Jesus: “Your sins are forgiven,” the same words Jesus spoke to the paralytic who was lowered from the roof of a house on a pallet.[13]  Price’s miraculous vision of healing points to the promise of the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection life. 

 

The final words which Reynolds Price heard from Jesus might be a word to each of us, who today renew the promises made at our own baptism.  According to Price, Jesus “said nothing more and waded back to land, through the water ahead of me.”[14]  The baptismal life is a life of obedience, following in the steps of the one who was baptized for us and now bids us follow him in a life of joyful service, in this world and the next.