Sunday: The 4th Sunday of Easter
Reading: Earth Day / Baptism / Rogation Texts
Preacher: Mike Hogue

On this 4th Sunday of Easter, this watery, vernal, baptismal season of the church, this Earth Day Sunday, I would like to reflect with you on three things: first, upon Easter as the heart of our Christian faith; second, on Baptism as one of its great arteries; and, third, on the ethical transpositions that Easter and Baptism call us to enact, especially in relation to our Christian responsibilities toward the renewing of God's creation.

I would like to start with a lament, and then a story of healing and hope.

Many of you know the lament.

*loss of crop / grazing land due to desertification, erosion, land-use conversion

*depletion of tropical forests, producing loss of forest resources, watershed damage

*mass extinction of species and rapid loss of biodiversity

*mismanagement of freshwater resources

*acidification, over-fishing, habitat destruction and pollution of marine environment

*threats to human health through mismanagement of pesticides and organic pollutants

*increasing numbers of ecological refugees, human and otherwise...

*and, of course, climate change...whereby we humans have become not only the bi-pedal, laughing, symbolizing species, but also the species that makes the weather...weather that is fueled by the wasteful expenditure of millions of years of organic retirement funds...

At the root of these ecological challenges, I believe, are the congenitally defective heart-shaping liturgies by which most of us live most of the time...to explain this, I want to tell you a story of hope and healing.
Many of you know something about my family through the story of my daughter Mikaela's heart. Midway through my wife Sara's pregnancy, we were told that our baby was going to be borne with a rare congenital heart defect called Transposition of the Great Arteries (TGA).

TGA is a reversal and inversion of the functioning of the pulmonary artery and the aorta. It means that the artery that is supposed to send oxygenated blood back out to the body is unable to do this the way it should.
Instead, the oxygenated blood circulates primarily between the heart and lungs. We were told that our baby was otherwise developing well and that as long as she was in utero, she would remain safe and healthy. The problem, however, is that TGA is not "compatible with life" after birth.

Almost exactly one year ago, very early in the morning on April 16, our baby Mikaela was born. Within moments, after a quick embrace from us, she was taken breathing her shallow breaths to the neonatal intensive care unit. Within minutes, she was connected to a web of tubes and machines. Within hours, she was flown by helicopter to a neighboring hospital with a gifted cardiac interventionist team. Within days after this first surgery, Mikaela underwent a major open-heart surgery. And then, after a couple weeks of post-operative recovery and many months of wading through the mixed emotions of joy and concern, we finally brought our Mikaela home.

When I first began to think about this sermon, I had no idea how I would connect the topics of Easter, Earth Day, and Mikaela's baptism. But through much prayer and reflection, I've come to see that the story of Mikaela's heart is the story of all of our hearts and that the heart of the story and practice of our Christian faith, ritualized through Baptism, is the Easter call to participate together and with God in the renewing of Creation.

Like all Creation, Mikaela was born into this world through the suffering and groaning of labor pains; and like all Creation, as Paul reminds us in Romans, this suffering and groaning contain the seeds of hope and of freedom, the first fruits of the Spirit.

What I take this to mean is that at the heart of Christian faith is the Easter promise that the hope of redemption and the fruits of liberation always already exist in natal form in all that is, mortally crossed though it all and we may be...

The Christian promise, at heart, is the paradoxical Easter transposition of natality and mortality, of new forms of life within and through a world of many deaths, of the presence of renewing divine creativity amidst the groaning and suffering of decay.

Easter signifies this transposition within the heart of our faith, and Baptism is one of the great arteries through which its meanings circulate. As the Cross of Friday and the Tomb of Saturday turn out to be the Womb of Sunday resurrection, so too does Baptism ritually enact the Trinitarian creativity that oxygenates our Christian lives.

How does this work?

In thinking about all of this, I have found it helpful to return to the wisdom of the great 4th century theologian, Augustine. For Augustine, human individual and communal identities are heart-shaped...who we are as persons and as groups are formed by what we love. We are less defined by our thoughts and beliefs than by the orientations of our desires and our loves. Deepest down, we are all lovers.

And yet, for Augustine, all of us, and not just Mikaela, are born with a congenital heart defect, something very much like Transposition of the Great Arteries. Each of us is born into the world with transposed loves and desires. Our loves and desires tend to be inwardly curved, turned restlessly in on our own self-interests. Augustine describes this in the Latin as cupiditas-self-love-and this, I believe, is what drives our ecological crisis.

According to Augustine, our hearts will remain restless until cupiditas is transposed into caritas, until our self-regarding, centripetal love becomes other-regarding and centrifugal, resting ultimately in divine love. The catch, however, is that we cannot by our own power or moral exertions perform the corrective transposition of the great arteries of our hearts upon which the turn from love for self to love for God depends.

We cannot be our own heart surgeons. The great heart surgeon for Augustine is the mysteriously re-creative grace of Go...the scalpel, the life and teachings of Jesus Christ...and the operating room, the Civitas Dei (City of God), a new polis animated by the Holy Spirit and governed by the rule of rightly ordered love.

This view of the centrality of love helps us to understand Christianity as a particular formation of desire...it is also critical to understanding the great arterial nature of Baptism and the transpositional Easter invitation to the renewing of Creation as the heart of the practice of our faith.

We are what, and how, we love...and what, and how, we love is shaped most fundamentally by practices, disciplines, rituals.
Love is desire that has been tutored.
And ultimate loves, those loves that oxygenate our religious lives, are liturgically formed.
Liturgy is the school of our ultimate desires.
Through ritually embodied practices...by standing and kneeling and crossing our hearts...by singing songs of praise and lament and praying prayers of petition, contrition and thanks...through the Great Arteries of the Eucharist and Baptism, our hearts are trained and oriented toward loving engagement with a God whose transcendence is so immanently manifest in and through the world that it cannot be asphyxiated by either Cross or Tomb.
Liturgies are the schools of our ultimate desires. But not all liturgies are the same and so our desires can be oriented toward different ultimacies. Christian and especially Anglican liturgies are profoundly embodied, sacramental and deeply earthy.

As James K. A. Smith has put this: "To engage in worship requires a body-with lungs to sing, knees to kneel, legs to stand, arms to raise, eyes to weep, noses to smell, tongues to taste, ears to hear, hands to hold and raise.... The rhythms and rituals of Christian worship invoke and feed off of our embodiment and traffic in the stuff of a material world: water, bread, and wine, each of which point us to their earthy emergence: the curvature of the riverbed, the shimmering fields that gave forth grains... It does not take much imagination for these in turn to evoke an entire environment...."

Further, as Smith goes on to say: "[B]ehind and under and in [baptism and the whole of Christian liturgy] is a core conviction, an implicit understanding that God inhabits all this earthy stuff.... That God would meet us in the mundane and earthy is a performance of God's affirmation of creation and materiality as a good to be enjoyed and a gift to be received...."

This helps us to understand the sacramental character of Baptism, the view that God is lovingly manifest in the materiality of the Baptismal water, font and fire, as in the materiality of the whole of Creation. The materiality of Baptism serves as a Great Artery through which the Cross and the Tomb and the Womb of Easter, the heart of our faith, is joined to the heart of our work to be in service to the renewing of creation. We can interpret this through Baptisms' separative, locative and liberative ritual functions. Consider the placement of the Baptismal font at the entrance of our space of worship. This signifies both the separative and locative functions of baptism. The font is a doorway, separating the life of the church from other forms of life, the liturgy of Christian faith from other liturgies. But Baptism does not leave the baptized dis-located. The separative function of Baptism is simultaneously locative. The font in this particular church is not only locally but also globally and even ecologically situated. Baptism is an inclusive rather than an exclusive ritual.

As liturgical theologian Gordon Lathrop puts this: "Baptism introduces us into an assembly, but this assembly is not simply local.... The place where we stand...matters immensely, yet it is connected to all places.... [B]aptism constitutes a strong local community, yet it also identifies us with outsiders and with places away from here."

The separative function of baptism ritually locates the baptized in a new life in a new enlarged assembly...an ek-klesia, a people who are "called out" and "called together" to enact the Easter work of renewing God's Creation through the seeds of hope and the fruits of the spirit. This ekklesia, or church, serves as the location through which we are to enact a liberative separatism-a way of living and of loving through which the culturally dominant liturgies of self-interest, of wealth and power and the regnant disregard for the goodness of God's creation...with God's help...are transposed into love for neighbor, God and service to the renewing of Creation.
Through these separative, locative, and liberative functions the Great Artery of Baptism ritually transposes love of self into love of God, and this mirrors the liberative Easter transposition of Cross and Tomb into the formative Womb of Christian faith and practice.
Death is not all. Decay is not all. Suffering and groaning are not all. They are part, but they are not all. There is also life and resurrected life, hope, freedom, and the fruits of the Spirit.
The life-blood of Easter, channeled through the Great Artery of Baptism, is liberation from bondage to the inward curvature of desire, liberation from the deadening liturgies of irresponsible power, ecologically short-sighted policies, and soul- and earth-ravaging over-consumption...and liberation into an emancipatory, solidary love for neighbor and God, expressed most ultimately in the renewing of Creation.