Jan. 12, 2014: Baptism of the Lord
I asked the same question to the seminarians this week. This past week, I was at a retreat facility in Houma giving a retreat to a group of seminarians who just entered the seminary. For these seminarians, the past several months have been hard for them. Some of these men are transitioning from careers that had lucrative salaries; some stepped away from their education plans that could have led them to professional careers; all of these men sacrificed their plans to get married. For some, the question they were pondering was, “Did I make the right choice by coming to the seminary?” When I asked how many of them remembered their date of baptism, only two hands went up (I didn’t raise mine either).
Knowing the answer to this question is very important for the seminarians and for us. Jesus offers us baptism as the way to enter into communion with God -- God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit -- and to live our lives as God’s beloved children. Through baptism we reject the world and its temptations. We declare that we no longer want to remain children of the darkness but want to become children of the light, God’s children. We do not want to escape the world, but we want to live in it without belonging to it. That is what baptism enables us to do.
Pope Francis told the people gathered in the square, “To know the date of our Baptism is to know a blessed day. The danger of not knowing it is losing awareness of what the Lord has done in us, the memory of the gift we have received. Thus, we end up considering it only as an event that took place in the past – something that our parents have done for us--and, thus, has no impact on the present.”
The Pope continued, “A question can stir within us: is Baptism really necessary to live as Christians and follow Jesus? Isn't it merely a ritual, a formal act of the Church in order to give a name to the little boy or girl?” The Pope then posed this thought provoking question: “Is there a difference between a baptized child versus an unbaptized child? Or are they the same?” Let me take this question one step further. Is there a difference between you (who are sitting here or reading this homily) and an adult who is not baptized?”
Those of you who said that there is a difference, how does this difference manifest itself? How does this difference manifest in your daily life? St. Paul makes this distinction about those who are baptized, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him 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’ (Rom 6:3-4).” Baptism is not merely a ceremony, not merely a rite of passage. Our baptism is our entry into a New Covenant bond, a new family, a new life, a new birth, a new creation. It is through baptism that we now can call God, Our Father. Through birth a child is given to parents; through baptism a child is given to God. At baptism the parents acknowledge that their parenthood is a participation in God’s parenthood, that all fatherhood and motherhood comes from God.
Christian baptism gives us the power to live in a way that we could not do on our own. Baptism with the Holy Spirit does not merely express a desire to live a better life; it actually changes the person, uniting the soul with Christ’s death and resurrection and filling it with his divine life, so that it has the power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Filled with Christ’s Spirit, the Christian can begin to love not with his own fallen, selfish love, but with Christ’s divine love overcoming his weaknesses. As St. Paul wrote, “yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
Pope Francis urged everyone to live out the meaning of their own Baptism in their daily life. He said, “We must reawaken the memory of our Baptism. We are called to live our Baptism every day, as the current reality of our lives. If we manage to follow Jesus and to remain in the Church, despite our limitations and with our weaknesses and with our sins, it is precisely through Baptism that we have become new creatures and are clothed in Christ. Let us ask the Lord from our hearts to be able to experience ever more in everyday life this grace that we have received at Baptism. And let’s not forget our homework: find out the date of Baptism!"
