The second half of the sermon preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at High Mass, Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2009, Pusey House Chapel, Oxford University.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ Sermon at High Mass, Trinity Sunday, 7 June 2009, Pusey House Chapel, Oxford University. Herewith, the first half; I’ll post the second tomorrow.

The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on infant baptism.

“I have a cousin in Vancouver. He and his wife sat me down for dinner one evening just before their child was born, and they said, ‘We’ve got a question for you?’ They were a bit shy about it because they weren’t explicit, deeply confessing Christians, but they wanted to kind of find their way in. They said ‘We want to know how old does a child have to be before the child can actually know anything about God?’ And I think they were expecting me to say ‘About six or eight or ten’ or something like that. I said ‘O, about three minutes.’ And they stared at me.
I said, ‘Well you’ll find if the child is born even reasonably healthy, that you will be able to establish a very intimate relationship with that child from those very, very early moments. The natural focal point of a newborn child’s eyes is the distance between the breast and the mother’s eyes, so that the natural thing that the child does is to establish eye contact with mom while feeding at the breast. And I remember establishing eye contact with my children very very early on in their first minutes. And there’s this extraordinary sense of knowing which passes between parent and child.’
And I say to myself, and I said to my cousin, ‘If that is so between the human parent and the child, are you really going to tell me that the living God who created heaven and earth and made whales and waterfalls and little penguins and all the rest of it, cannot establish contact with a lovely little creature who bears his image, but has to wait until that lovely little creature becomes five or six or seven or ten? Forget it! God has ways of making himself known intimately to children from their earliest days. And perhaps one of the dare I say sacramental ways by which God does that is precisely by the loving welcome of the Christian community.
Now of course children can’t articulate it. The five-minute old baby can’t put her hand up and say, ‘Okay, I believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ But I actually suspect—and I’m being very serious here—I suspect that some of those little children, to the God who knows the hearts of all, have a deeper and fuller faith than a lot of people who say those words every Sunday but have long since allowed them to drift off into the distance somewhere.”

This is a wonderful talk, every bit of it.

The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism, continued. Referring to St. Paul (in Romans 6) appealing for faith on the basis of baptism, he speaks of doing the logical sums of baptism and λογιζεσθε, the need for the baptized to reckon themselves, to figure it out—it being baptism. He says, “Of course God welcomes us as we are, but God’s welcome never leaves us as we are. God’s inclusiveness is always a transforming inclusiveness…. Baptism is about dying, and then rising again, not somehow evading the challenge and getting in without any dying and rising to be done. As C. S. Lewis was always fond of emphasizing, there is nothing in this world which cannot die and be raised into God’s new world; but there is nothing in this world which will make it into the new world if it does not die and be raised.” 

Tomorrow, Wright on infant baptism.

The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism.