We have had a baptism today and it is extraordinary that we should have this particular reading. So, I would like to look at this passage from the Gospel to see what this has to say to us on this particular occasion.

This is a particularly interesting time for me because I became a grandfather last Monday; and so, I find that sitting and holding a newborn baby in my arms is an extraordinary experience, especially a baby that is connected to me. And, I found that it gives rise to abnormally long thoughts about life, about myself, and about this new life that is so fragile. So that is, as you will see, feeding very much into what I thought about this text.

The text is interesting in that it expresses a regular New Testament theme: that every time family relationships are mentioned, they are warned against and radically relativized. It is extraordinary. The only comparable matter is when Jesus talks about authority. There too, it is always conditioned with a warning against its abuse. And here we have today, and this is not atypical, this almost violent language from Luke about hating the closest relationships we have: father, mother, spouse, children, brothers and sisters. What is going on there? I mean, even given lots of allowance for oriental hyperbole and overstatement, there is still something extraordinarily significant here. For Jesus, the family is an essentially ambiguous institution. And in Jesus' own time, of course, the family had a more central reality in the lives of people than it does for us. The family was the place where you were introduced to your tribe - - where you established where you firmly belonged. So why does Jesus, in that context as well as our own, relativize these relationships. Well, I think that everybody can reflect on her/his own family to see that, yes, the family is the place where I was nourished, where I got the source of my life. But also, the family is the place where I learned to be afraid, to be ashamed of myself, to distrust, and perhaps most significantly, I think that the family is the place where my possibility to connect to the world at large is circumscribed. The family, which ought to be, under the best of circumstances (which of course never obtaines - - ever), is the school wherein I learn to see the world whole and round. Instead, it happens to some extent, (and I am not talking in absolute terms) but to some extent the family is always the place where some other people are discountable because of their language, colour, dress, income, social class, or the fact that they are just not in my family. And that is exactly, I suspect, why Jesus warns against the family. The genius of Jesus was precisely the capacity to transcend all of those things in order precisely to let the whole world come into his purview. Again, the ambiguity of the family is that it certainly teaches me to see some things but also blinds me and incapacitates me for seeing other things. And I should not say things, I should say people. How can we withstand that? How can we protect ourselves against that? Certainly not by making will acts.

And now I go back to those little meditations that I had while holding this baby in my hands. Everybody talks about the birth of a child being a miracle. After the birth of his first child, even an atheist friend of mine who used to teach at this institution came to me and said: "If I were ever to believe in God it would be because I was present at the birth of my child". What is miraculous about the birth of the child? Just new life? Perhaps, but it seems to me that one of the things that struck me most was the enormous disproportion, the disproportion between the appearance of this new human being on this planet and all of the activity that surrounded the production of this new human being. It does not fit! To move from sexual intercourse and nine months later to find a human being...I mean, it seems to me that there are very few disproportions as notable as that in the world! But looking at this little kid, and knowing how the little kid got here, I said: "My God, how do you move from there to here?". I want to propose then, that the miraculous quality of the birth of a child is precisely that wild disproportion. Which suggests what? I really did not originate this reality that now lies in my arms, in the most radical sense. Certainly I am an agent in the reality of this child. But this child's reality far transcends anything I could have to do with it.

This, of course, opens up the great question: Where does this child come from? Whose child is this really? And that is where my atheist friend, whose remark was made to me about twenty years ago, has never left me. We would-be Christians answer: Fundamentally, this is God's child. And I propose that that conviction is the absolute and essential first step to moving beyond all the constriction that happens within a family.

But another thing struck me as I sat in the hospital and watched nurses troop through and relatives come in and out. I was amazed and somewhat stunned by the certainty that everybody had about this little kid: "Oh, she is not feeding for this reason or she is crying for this reason or of course we have to have a presentation blanket, of course she has to have a nice pink and frilly dress to leave the hospital with". And it does not take much effort of imagination to extrapolate all those certainties which then circumscribe and truncate the reality of that child's life. Everybody knows too much! Everybody knows too much about who this child is and what this child needs and how this child is to become! The cultural things ...you can make an enormously long list: gender identification; social class; cast; colouration; this child is going to be a mixed race child...is a mixed race child, at least my grandchild is. But this simply brings more into the mix and everybody knows. And yet what struck me as I looked at this little pulsating, eight-pounds, thirteen-ounce new human being is that I do not know anything; that this child ultimately lies in my arms as a mystery. And this of course is allied to the notion that the child is basically God's child.

You see I can do that because I do not have to wake up at two in the morning; I do not have to tolerate endless crying; I do not have to change diapers. But I propose to you, to every parent in this room, that to the extent that we lose that double awareness that this child is fundamentally Gods', and therefore, personal reality of that child is also as Scripture says: "Hidden with Christ in God". These are the only cautions we can have and they must operate as such in our lives, precisely to keep us from the raising of that child being an exercise in narrowing their vision, incapacitating them, not freeing them but enslaving them to the standards of my social class, educational group, economic class, colouration, or linguistic group.

The presence of a baby does remarkable things, and the trick, of course, is how to not be so worn out by lack of sleep, by constant demands, by constant attentiveness, so that all of these things get obscured.

So finally, and before we baptize this new baby,  I would like to suggest something that had not occurred to me for years. When I was ordained thirty-six years ago, the ordination to the priesthood at that time was surrounded by all kinds of sick mythology: You were a special person, you were set apart, superior - -  our class we had to have a class motto, a class song, we had to singularize this event in every way. I, being swept away in so much of this, came up with a personal motto for my own Ministry. And it occurred to me, however inadequate it is, it might be useful for parents too. I said to myself, in the weeks before ordination and after and many times since: "Let me, God, lay my impure hands purely on the world". This has nothing to do with sex, of course. The motto has to do with my own sinfulness, inadequacies, and narrownesses. I pray to somehow reach the world, touch it, in a way that my own constrictions are not going to furthered, abetted. But I prayed to operate in such a way that the world can become bigger, more capacious with room for everybody. It is very presumptuous of me, but I would like to suggest that as you look at your baby that you be very aware of the smallness of your vision, the smallness of your capacity to love, which you share of course with all of us, and pray to God that you can transcend that.