Going therefore, teach you all nations. Baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. These words very familiar to you are taken from the conclusion of Saint Matthew's story of our lord's life. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
As I said the first Sunday of Lent, Lent is a joyous time. It's a time when we are invited and urged and command to look at what we are. What we are. And in order to do that, the church is inviting us to go back to Genesis to the creation of the human race. And then in six weeks, we are carried from that beginning of the human race, mind you, millions, maybe millions of years ago, who knows, All the way down to our lord's birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension.
But then he's still with us in his living church. And so what the church is the living voice of Christ is saying, look at you. Look at yourself and realize the huge cycle of God's grace and love in which you are a participant. You. From the beginning of the human race all the way down to this Sunday in Garrett Park in March, the second day of after Saint Patrick's Day.
Keep that in mind. Keep this view of life. We can get so lost in little things because I ask you, what in life is enormous compared to that view of what you are? It gives you the proper perspective of how to deal with what is good and what is not so good. Now last Sunday, I had intended talk about sin.
But as I try I was we had something else going, and I was cut down. And there's no but you see, I can't talk about baptism without talking about original sin. It's impossible. Now last Sunday, I did talk a bit about original sin, and I tried to point out is that the Christian life is not dedicated to avoiding sin. That's a negative.
It's a nonexistent thing. We aren't created. We weren't redeemed by Jesus Christ simply to escape vice. We were created by god to come back to himself. That's why God made me to bring go back to him.
And the actions in this life is how I do it. And that is virtue. And the contradictory or the contrary, I should say, is vice, sin. Because sin, you see, we don't like that word sin today. That's eliminated.
We have antisocial conduct. Because sin brings in God. Sin brings in me. Sin brings in eternity. Sin brings in Genesis.
Sin brings in original sin. Sin brings in my weakness, but sin brings in my savior. And don't you ever forget it. But the point of the Christian life isn't to live without sin. That book never committed a sin in its life.
So what's life if it's only sinless? It's virtue that counts, and that's not a book. That's life, and that's what ties us with God. Now, that's actual sin. That's our conduct.
That's the conduct over which I have a certain amount of responsibility, not a 100%. By law. Furthermore, as I told you last Sunday how Aquinas brings in the third part of his summa, I don't I can't go back to god on my own. I can't lift myself by my own bootstraps even if I had boots on. Without me, our lord said, you can do nothing.
And that means you can't pursue virtue. You can't go back to god except in and by and through our lord. Keep that in mind. You're not alone. Now this matter of baptism has to do with some kind of a restoration.
And for some I I know the reason alright, and I reject every bit of it. It's it's today called initiation. It it that puts it in the same category as getting into a into a fraternity or a sorority or the KSC or the Masons or what have you. That's great, isn't it? That's a big improvement.
Anybody can see that. That's the big improvement of turning the altar around when we turn our back on our lord in the tabernacle. We are people here and now, and we are funny, as Flannery O'Connor would say. We're grotesque. And I wanna give you some empirical fact I say empiric experiential.
There's something wrong with the human race. I'm not the one to discover that. It didn't begin with our lord. Our little reading group this year has been reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. And our last meeting, here we have Aristotle who died in March in Greece, where he he talks Aristotle is talking in his in this book on ethics, four hundred years before the Christian era and telling you telling his readers or his hearers, that's what it really was, telling them that there's some kind of a conflict inside of them.
There's some kind of a battle going on, that it that they can that they can know what virtue is, and yet they don't do it. How do you explain such nonsense? Then take Ovid. He was born about forty three BC, died about eighteen AD. Ovid.
Here are his translation of his Latin from the Metamorphoses. I see the good, I approve it, and I do the opposite. Now that's that's not a Christian talking. That's not somebody who knew Genesis. That's not somebody who talked about Adam and Eve and a snake and the devil.
That's a Roman poet before Christ. There's something going wrong with the human race. It didn't wait for Saint Paul, but he said it better than all the rest. Saint Paul says, the good that I would, I do not. And the evil that I would not, that I do.
How do you explain it? Well, we explain it because there's such a thing as original sin. Now when it comes to matter of truth, you wanna get it straight from the spring, from the fountain. So Vatican two I wanna quote from Vatican 2. You see, it it makes dull reading.
I know that. But this is what counts. This is what counts. I don't know anything about baptism and original sin except through the authority of the church of Jesus Christ. It's not something I'm I create by wishing.
It's not something I had because I wanted, I needed, or it's because I discover it. Now here's what Vatican II and the Gallium et Spes, the church in the modern world. God made man in a state of holiness. Here's where the here's where the eighteenth century philosophers Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and all the rest, here's where they had something going for them. God made man in a state of holiness.
But from the very dawn of history, man abused his liberty at the urgent of personified evil. Notice, the council doesn't say devil. It says personified evil. Man set himself against god and sought to find fulfillment apart from him. We do it all the time.
Therefore, man is split within himself. All of human life shows itself to be a dramatic struggle between good and evil. So here you have I started with Aristotle, Aristotle, March, and we're coming right down to Vatican II, which is in our memory. And here you have the evidence, I say pragmatic empirical evidence, and the authority of the holy Roman Catholic church speaking in the name of our lord, there's something wrong with us. We are we we didn't turn evil.
We are not we did not through that original sin, whatever it was, as Luther pointed out, we didn't become a manure pile which the grace of God covers like a nice blanket of white snow. Oh, I know. That idea was never Catholic. Never. Never.
Never. That's purely Lutheran. But that's a view that many people hold, that we are evil. We are not evil. We are creatures of god, but we are not as we came from God.
That is for sure. There has to be a restoration. Aristotle didn't have any answer to the problem. Ovid didn't have any answer to the problem. And let me tell you, while Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the rest of them, the encyclopedias, those great brains of the enlightenment, the age of reason, of which our nation had a part course, They had a they they had the glimmer of the truth.
But they went wrong in turning from God as its explanation. There's the difference. Old man Russo and his social contract, that's a that view of humanity as being wonderful, naturally good, but in some way was perverted, and now by its own power can restore itself. That's optimism beginning with the enlightenment, the age of reason, coming all the way down to Karl Marx, we can have our utopia here, not in heaven. And man can do it alone, said old man Marx.
So did Rousseau. So did Voltaire, so did all these wonderful utopians. And they're all dead wrong. They're not wrong about the description of of the situation, but they're wrong about the explanation of it and the hope of doing something in spite of it. In spite of it.
God became man and sent his son to save us because we needed that saving. And the key to it is baptism. Baptism. Now the same council in its constitution on ecumenism has this to say about the sacrament of baptism. I wanted to quote the council of Trent, but let's be right contemporary.
Because according to some people Vatican II practically threw out trench, you know, and that's a lot of air. In its constitution on ecumenism, the council said, By the sacrament of baptism, whenever it is whenever notice these words. This is from the document on ecumenism. By the sacrament of baptism, whenever it is properly conferred in the way the lord determined and received with the appropriate dispositions of soul, a man becomes truly incorporated into the crucified and glorified Christ and is reborn, it's not an initiation, and is reborn to a sharing of the divine life. Do you ever think of that?
That you have been reborn into the divine life of Jesus Christ living in his church? As the apostle says, for you were buried together with him in baptism, and in him also you rose again through faith in the working of God who raised him from the dead. Now absolutely coincidentally, I I went to get my old vulgar bible out. Something that I'd read in George McDonald's a number of years ago, but I couldn't put it together. And this happened happened yesterday.
I'm not exaggerating. I went to get that my old Vulcan out. I opened it. And what should I find? I found the exact quotation from George McDonald that I wanted.
Here it is. Asleep in the mud, George says. Asleep in the mud, man dreamed himself awake on a pedestal. Asleep in the mud, man dreamed himself awake on a pedestal, but he's in the mud asleep. When what wakes us up?
God's grace. And what matters is that we recognize we're in the mud, but we're no longer dreaming of being on a pedestal. There's where I ought to be, and I can be there through my lord and savior, Jesus Christ. And that's what Christ does in baptism. It is not, as I've said many times, anyone who's seen the birth of a baby, it's nothing compared experientially to seeing a baby born.
It has none of the drama, the emotions, the feeling. Nothing happens that you can see back in that fountain of water, except maybe the baby starts crying. But with the eyes of faith, and that's what we're dealing with here, folks. We're not dealing with a scientific laboratory. With the eyes of faith, we see this little baby that was given by the love to the world by a man and a woman.
We see that little baby in the mud. Child of God, but in the mud, and transformed by the pouring of the water and the saying of the words. Transformed a new life, a new future, a whole new panorama of existence. Not only has that baby now a new destiny, but it is given a whole a whole treasure of ways and means to achieve that destiny through our lord and savior Jesus Christ, who once lived and roamed around that land over in Israel and who lives today in his living church, not in a book. In his living church who speaks to you today from this pulpit in Garrett Park.
And so let us realize what this baptism means. It isn't something you should think of in terms of somebody else being back there at that fountain. It's where you have been. It's what you must realize. You ask what you are worth, you are incorporated into the divine life.
That's what you're worth. January O'Connor has a wonderful story on this about the Holy Ghost. But that's where each one of us is. We been we have come from God. We're destined to go back to God.
We cannot make it without Jesus Christ, and we make a good beginning by his grace in baptism. Where we come to grips, where we are reborn, where we are a new person with only one destiny, that is to be with God forever in heaven. So be it. The name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.