Christ Church, Falkirk

Readings:

1 John 3. 1-3

Luke 24. 36b-48

Sermon:

When I spoke to Evie’s Mummy, Elizabeth, yesterday, she said that Evie was very excited about her Baptism today. Indeed, it is a particular joy for me today, to baptise someone who’s been so excited about her baptism for weeks now!

Quite often what we do in Church doesn’t appear to have much to do with excitement. We come in, we stand or sit in or at pews, everything is pretty orderly, with words to say, and words to sing at points. When we come up for our ‘shared meal,’ Communion, we queue in an orderly fashion. We don’t really, as Episcopalians, tend to do ‘excitement.’ Certainly not the grownups, anyway!  

But this season, and today particularly as Evie is baptised, is definitely a time for excitement. Two Sundays I spoke of the reality of Easter, the season when we celebrate Jesus’ rising from death, as an embodied experience. Recall Mary outside the tomb, going to embrace her risen Lord; then the story last week of Thomas’s fervent wish to touch the marks of the nails in Jesus’s risen body. And now today - one of my favourite resurrection stories. Jesus appears among the disciples (locked in an upper room in fear), and offer for them to touch him, and know that he is real. Most wonderfully, Jesus then eats a piece of fish in the presence of his amazed disciples. Yes, Easter is an embodied experience - the reality of a risen body, Jesus’ body alive again - still bearing the scars, but alive to a new life which can never be lost.

Yet in the Gospel today we heard that initially the disciples were started and frightened – they did not believe their eyes. They were certainly not excited, at this stage, anyway. Luke’s account reads: ‘Jesus showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ 

It’s that middle bit I find so human, so typical! The disciples did not believe because of their joy and amazement. Isn’t that such a human response? Their joy and amazement seemed to them impossible, because they just couldn’t believe Jesus was alive again. Surely it was too good to be true! This was, after all, a miracle! Their joy and amazement at something so wonderful, prevented the disciples from accepting that Jesus was with them again. Not as a vision, dream or ghost – but as a living, breathing person.  

It is this reality that is the exciting news we continue to celebrate today. The reality of Jesus overcoming death, and risen from death himself – enabling us to glimpse what God promises us too, who believe. We, too, are promised this same new life through our belief in the one who overcame death, and now lives again, for ever and ever.  

And it is this reality that Evie, continuing in the faith handed down through the generations, is witnessing to in her Baptism today. Just as those early disciples became the first witnesses to the good news of Jesus, Evie will witness to her faith in Jesus and the new life she is beginning today in him. 

And it is an embodied experience for Evie too. She will be baptised with water; anointed with oil; and partake, with all of us, of our shared meal of bread and wine; a meal which is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet we will one day share with all of the faithful, the whole company of heaven, in the place where we will see our risen Lord face to face.