don't pay the ... who?

 
SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

(November 13^th), 1988

 

 

There was a song doing the rounds some two or three years ago[1] whose words flirted with literary illusions, possibly lost on some listeners.

Don’t pay the ferryman,

don’t even fix a price.

Don’t Pay the ferryman

’till he gets you to the other side.

Ancient literature and religion frequently pay tribute to the belief that the dead passed over or through deep and sinister waters on their way to the hereafter. In a vivid scene from A Pilgrim’s Progress the hapless Christian finally crosses the river to enter the eternal city. In Dante’s Inferno the traveller descends to the underworld and is ferried across the River Acheron by the reluctant ferryman Charon. Dante and Bunyan alike borrow from Virgil, and Virgil in turn from Homer.

Arguably before even Homer there existed the notion of waters being part of the realm of evil and death.[2]  

The earth was a formless void,

there was darkness over the deep,

and the Spirit of God hovered over the deep.

                                                 (Genesis 1:2)

 

Christians quickly began to associate the death and Entombment of Jesus with the language of the waters of death known to them of old. It was after all the Jews, the People of God, who believed that they had passed through the waters of death at the time of the first Passover, and who had seen those waters closed behind them to claim the lives of their pursuers, the Egyptians. Christians soon began to talk of Jesus’ death as a “passing through” waters. Passing through the waters of death.

So it came to be believed by Christians that to pass through the waters of baptism as commanded by Jesus was to pass into and through the waters of death as experienced by Jesus, following the seemingly tragic events of Good Friday. In baptism we enter into the death of Jesus and emerge in him, alive, on the other side. [I wish that we were able more fully to enact the journey here, but it is as a step towards such re enactment that we entered the narthex before baptisms and returned to the nave of the church with the newly baptized.]

If baptism is a ritual by which we enter into the death of Jesus, then so too it must be one by which we enter into the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus emerges from the tomb-womb, just as the people of Israel emerge and are born anew out of the waters of the Red [Reed] Sea, and just as as these children will emerge and be born anew out of the waters of baptism.

So baptism is a sacrament by which we enter into the life of Christ.

The full experience of that sacrament is yet to come. Sacraments are a down-payment on the event of reunion with the fullness of God that is to come. Saint Paul, writing of baptism, says,

When we were baptized in Christ Jesus we were baptized in his death … we went into the tomb with him in death, so that as Christ was raised from death by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life.

                                                                      (Romans 6: 3-4)

It is to that new life that we are baptizing our children today. The fruit of our actions will only be known when these children in turn face Christ, first in their growing lives, and finally in the experience of death and judgement Then he will plead their cause before the Father. Then, after the last, [the eschaton], baptism reveals its value as a “grafting on” to Christ.

I wish one thing for these children, their families. I wish that they will grow up within the warmth of God’s church. To be Christians not only when it comes to filling in census forms. I wish that they will come to grow up in a warm and intimate relationship with Christ, a relationship in which his name rests easily on their lips not as a curse but as a prayer.

May they indeed

… be true to Christ crucified Do not be ashamed to confess their faith in him.

That is a conditional clause in the contract that we call baptism

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[1] “Don't Pay the Ferryman” was released by Chris de Burgh in 1982

[2] In 2025 I would argue that Genesis 1 was written a little later than the time at which the Odyssey of Homer was set down on papyrus. Nevertheless, it is possible that the biblical and Homeric legends were coterminous; the dating of either oral tradition is a shaky science.