From the Rector
Dear friends,
This Sunday, the First after the Epiphany, when the Church, in her annual calendar, celebrates the Baptism of Jesus, my wife and I will be in Arizona to attend our Godson’s baptism.
At every baptism, I am taken by the words of welcome the assembly offers the newly baptized: “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood" (BCP 308).
What a wondrous mystery. That we are made a new family in Christ, born again into a household, Christ’s own Body, knit together in love, renewed by grace, and sent to walk as living lights in the world. This is an especially beautiful occasion for my wife and me because we are also Godparents to our Godson’s sister, who was baptized in 2021.
I was baptized as a fourteen-year-old at Hillcrest Baptist Church in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I remember only a little of that afternoon: dunked three times way up behind the worship stage, after summer camp, in what was essentially a jacuzzi, wearing an extra-large, itchy, zip-up baptismal gown. My close friend’s dad baptized me. That would have been 1998. The churches of my upbringing did not baptize infants, as we do in The Episcopal Church.
My Godson is five months old. His smile beams. I’ve yet to meet him in person.
The gift of grace that surrounds and fills him by the Spirit makes us siblings in Christ. He will be my brother in Christ, and as strange as it may sound, he’s also your sibling in Christ, although you’ve never met him.
What a revelation of divine love, that he will be filled with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own for ever.
His mother, my former colleague at Saint Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson, where I served for seven years before moving to Birmingham, will officiate the liturgy and also baptize another child whose two sisters I baptized in 2018.
My Godson is a child of God, eternally, and nothing will separate him from God’s love, nothing in this world, and nothing in the world to come. And that is what I pledge to share with him every chance I have: reminding him of Jesus’ love, a love that never fades or diminishes. I love what the psalmist says:
"For you yourself, O God, created my inmost parts;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I will thank you because I am marvelously made;
Your works are wonderful, and I know it well.
My body was not hidden from you,
While I was being made in secret
And woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
All of them were written in your book;
They were fashioned day by day,
When as yet there was none of them.
How deep I find your thoughts, O God!
How great is the sum of them!"
(Psalm 139:12–16)
Even at such a young age, he is made a prophet of God, to speak and live the truth of the Gospel, as he grows in wisdom, knowledge, and love of God. And that is true of you also: that God knows every hair on your head, and knew you indeed before you were born. You are marvelously made, friends. I pray you never forget that, and if you ever do, I will be here to tell you again and again: you are wonderfully and marvelously made.
Your brother in Christ, Fr. Peter
