Sometimes the stars simply align, and everything just happens smoothly and easily. On a day of baptisms across the parishes, we are given two readings which offer the whole thing up on a plate.
So, the starting point is this: which would you prefer for your child this morning: a burning coal on the lips, or abandoning the biggest catch of fish ever to walk around Israel with Jesus? Both events are life-changing, both require huge faith, and both present opportunities for wonder. If only it were as simple as that.
For brevity's sake, we shortened the Isaiah reading. In a quiet moment, see where God takes Isaiah, once he has accepted the call to be a prophet – it is scary! And what about the four fishermen? They were promised a life of catching people – whatever that means – which would involve watching Jesus heal sick people, multiply loaves and fishes, confront the religious authorities and ultimately die on a cross – was that what they signed up for?
Isaiah prophesied, for many long years, in the teeth of bitter opposition and impending disaster for Israel. The four fishermen struggled daily with the sayings and actions of Jesus, still not fully understanding what was going on around them until that glorious Easter morning.
Let us not imagine that the aftermath of baptism is easy. The promises that will be made today demand a lot of work – they call for both active and passive involvement in the life of these children – prayer, encouragement, being an example, walking together – and the Holy Spirit, let loose in these children, can be very insistent. Whatever ideas you may have mapped out for these children's life may be very different from what God has up his sleeve. Are you prepared for that?
And all of us – are we fully prepared to take on what we will promise for these children? To be welcoming, and to uphold them in their new life in Christ? What exactly does that mean? There are plenty of children here – do we pick these two out for special attention, or seek to encourage every single one?
And what about this "catching people" thing that Jesus has with these four fishermen? Is that relevant to us today? Should we be going out and catching people for Christ? The inference is that we should, that we, by our baptism, are disciples of Christ just as much as Peter & Andrew and James & John. We are involved in that function of the kingdom, that outreach, that making sure that everybody knows about the love of God, in practical as well as spiritual ways.
We cannot all be prophets, like Isaiah. We cannot all be apostles, as these four fishermen became, but we can all play our part in pointing people to Christ. Our conversation is to be based on love and grace, generosity and welcome, as Christ's was. Yet where we perceive there to be wrong or injustice, we are to challenge, just as Christ did. There is plenty of room in this building for lots more people to share these times of worship and prayer together – let's do our bit at getting them in.
At our baptism, each one of us was called to be a disciple of Christ, in exactly the same way that Isaiah was called, if a little less dramatic, and in exactly the same way that these four fishermen were called to drop everything and follow Christ. The call has not changed, despite the years that have followed our baptism.
As members of the congregation here, we have been present at many baptisms – we have watched the children grow up and move on, and others have come in their place. The promises we take at every single baptism here hold good for all of our worshipping lives, and affect what we do in terms of Junior Church, welcoming at the door, administering the finances, doing the flowers, or the readings, or the coffee, sorting out the publicity, getting people involved in the everyday life of the parish.
And above all, we are called to prayer, that over-arching activity which links us in to our heavenly Father, that keeps us close to him, and enables the Holy Spirit to spur us to a full engagement in the Kingdom of God. As we watch, as we make promises, as we pray, as we coo over these children, may we still hold fast to our baptism, and hold true to the promises we make, so that these children may be fully supported throughout their worshipping life, and that we may fully live out our discipleship, to the glory of God the Father.
We have a new baby in the family – hooray! And she is the sweetest little thing, quite the loveliest baby there has ever been, apart from her big sister, and her mother when she was born, and our other daughter, who is, of course, pushing for parental affection and before you can say "Jack Robinson" you are in a King Lear situation and the world falls apart around you. And that is just within the immediate family.
What happens, asks the writer James, if you do that in church? You betray the God who loved you in Christ Jesus, who showed no favouritism, and redeemed us all through his death and resurrection.
And what is more, James adds, if you favour the rich, you are toadying up to the very people who are making life difficult for the Church and especially for the poor.
Aha, you say, in the Gospel passage today, Jesus does appear to be favouring the Jews over the Gentile woman who comes beseeching him to heal her daughter. Correct, but Jesus does heal the woman's daughter because she is not prepared to give up, because she is prepared to accept crumbs from the God of love – and those crumbs are sufficient to restore her daughter to fullness of life. Would that we had that much faith – the things we could achieve for God would be astonishing.
And then there is the sign language healing of the profoundly deaf man – an astonishingly gracious act of personalised healing, designed so that he would be involved in the process, understand what Jesus was proposing, and with his faith, bring about the healing that was required and desired.
Plenty to talk about, but it doesn't really join up. The children this morning are concentrating on the healing of the blind man – they can play seeing and remembering games, blind man's buff and all sorts, and learn just how precious sight is. But what was wrong with the Gentile woman's daughter? All we know is that she had an "unclean spirit", which could mean anything from bipolar to epilepsy, and everything in between. Whatever she was suffering with, it limited her life, and needed to be sorted out. In Jesus, her mother knew she had found the person who could do just that, but race and culture and religion seemed to block the way. Jesus's first answer is not an outright "no", just a re-affirmation that his mission is to the Jews first. The mother's cracking response, spat back at Jesus more in frustration than in anger, demonstrates a parent's visceral campaign for a child's wellbeing, as well as playing the game of cross-cultural insult and counter-thrust.
But in the healing of her daughter, the mother gets more than crumbs. Her daughter is healed immediately, at a distance – no need for touch or words, not even for actions to explain what is going on – Jesus simply says that her daughter is better, sends her on her way and returns to the recalcitrant people of Israel – who, for their healing, will need every part of it explained, as Jesus has to for the profoundly deaf man. The Gentile daughter receives the full grace of God in complete healing, everything that the profoundly deaf Jewish man receives – this is radical stuff.
We are not in the business of receiving or handing out children's crumbs. We worship together in the full grace of God, each one of us a complete recipient of all of God's incalculable love and generosity. In this feast of bread and wine, God gives us himself, to share with one another, openly and fully. We cannot withhold that from anyone.
As a consequence, we cannot be satisfied with doling out crumbs, but of freely offering the totality of the love of God. This covers everything, from welcome to coffee, from teaching to prayer, to the Peace and to our care for each other through the week. We will not do theology lite: rather, we will dig deep into the Word and stretch our minds and hearts. We will pray with a fervour which goes beyond formulae and into the mind of God. Our welcome will be second to none, gently bringing people across the threshold with love and grace. The Peace will be sincere, the children included in all our endeavours as a unit with their families – there won't be something for the children, and something for the adults: it will be a sizeable chunk of the presence of God for everyone. Conversation, music, silence, embrace – all will be of the best and the deepest.
We have invited back to church next Sunday all those families who had a child or children baptised over the past 12 months – that's the start of a season of invitation – everything we do will be suitable to invite anyone along for the first time. Harvest Festival, St Luke's Patronal Festival, All Saints, Remembrance, Advent, Christmas – it's all lined up for us. Let's seize the opportunity, bring people in, and include them from the start in God's amazing love. This will be fun!
Three is the hardest number. I have two sisters, one older, one younger. When the little one was born, my big sister and I first ignored her, then ran away from her, because she was hopeless at playing (she was 6 years younger than us, it must be said). I'm sure we loved her dearly, but she just couldn't run fast enough, play tracking properly in the woods, or teach snails how to dance the maypole. My big sister and I were fine, just the two of us. Things are different now. My little sister developed the ability to organise tea parties for worms and a desire to make rose petal perfume, and could make a half-decent sandcastle by the time I stopped going on holiday with my parents and her.
Maintaining a good relationship between three people, at home, at work, as friends, is much harder than between two or four. There is always one on the edge, waiting to break in on what is going on between the other two. Ancient Rome was governed on several occasions by a triumvirate of politicians – they never ended well, as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar aptly demonstrates. I look around at the way I work now – trinities surround me – area dean, assistant area dean & lay co chair – me and two Readers – me and two parish administrators – hmmmmm, I need to beware the Ides of March.
Fancy says that God is Trinity to show us the way that relationships can work, that God chooses the hardest combination to reveal to humanity that love can flow from one to the other to the third, equally and powerfully, for the good of the world. Jurgen Moltmann in his book, Creating a Just Future, talks of the creative power of the Trinity of love, which would be absent from a single individual or from a couple – the sparks fly between Father, Son & Holy Spirit, Moltmann states, and so creation abounds in multiplicity and seemingly infinite variety – bees with short tongues feed from plants with small flowers, bees with long tongues leave those plants for other bees and head for the depths of bluebells and foxgloves. A third type of bee has a short tongue but a serrated jaw, so takes a short cut to the nectar by biting through the side of the flower, straight to the source of sweetness. Such is the wildness of the Trinity's imagination, and we are the beneficiaries of that creativity and love. What in human terms can appear hard work, the relationship between three individuals, becomes lovingly creative and outward-looking in the divine Trinity.
The person who tried to teach me New Testament at theological college, Stephen Barton by name, (the most Anglican Methodist I have ever encountered) always insisted on treating the Trinity as a story, a way of talking about God, which is why the word "Trinity" does not exist in the Bible – its writers are always coming up with other ways of talking about God. So, combining this view with Moltmann's loving creativity, we get a God who reveals himself first as one, in a world of multiple deities, who then reveals himself as human, in a world where the human had lost track of its worth in the sight of a loving God, and who then fills his people with his very self, forever, so that we, the glorious results of the Trinity's extraordinary creativity, may live to worship and to care, to share and to heal, as Christ did when he was here, showing us God, as God did, when he was the one true God, as the Spirit always has, from the beginning of created time. Our existence as the Church, the family of God, the newborn Israel, is evidence of the Trinity, of the loving creativity from which this and all worlds spring – God in us, God before us, God with us.
Now all that is fine and dandy, but does it get us anywhere other than a description of God? Is it of any help to us in our daily lives, other than a bedrock of reassurance? The answer, naturally, is yes, but it is to be found in the idea of the creative love of the Trinity. Creative love goes outward, beyond itself, to a wider orbit of operation. Love that looks outward finds reasons to love practically, reasons to demonstrate love in real ways that make a difference, that make whole, that bring healing and reconciliation. Creative love lays on hostels for the homeless, foodbanks for those whose entitled money has not come through. Creative love welcomes all, as each visitor is a reflection of the creative love of God, each neighbour, each stranger is no stranger within the creative love of God. Difference becomes an indicator of divine love in creativity, not a reason for separation. Compassion reflects this creative love by fostering inclusivity. There must be a place for everyone within God's love and worship, because he created them, so who are we to try to keep them out? We can only love, welcome, include, celebrate everyone and anyone. Not to do so is to deny the love of God, to deny the Trinity of creative love.
So, as good Trinitarian Anglicans, we will love, we will welcome, we will include everyone and anyone who comes our way. Some will be more problematic than others, but that is just the way things are. We all have our rough edges, and those were God-given and are God-proving. And as good Trinitarian Anglicans, we need to make sure that everybody is invited, everybody knows that they are welcome, at home with the God who loves them and has provided everything they will ever need, which, gloriously, includes us.