The 6th Sunday after Pentecost_8 am baptismal letter-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
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.”[i]
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.”[ii]
Your
sister in Christ,
Melanie+
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