I’ve got my passport out - here it is - and we're getting the children to look at where I’ve been: Guyana, Lebanon, Brasil, Barbados,
Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and so on and what an awful picture!
Did you know the earliest reference to a passport is in the
Bible? It’s in the book of Nehemiah Chapter 2 and is from around about 450 B.C.
Nehemiah, an official serving King Artaxerxes of ancient Persia, asked
permission to travel to Judah. The King agreed and gave Nehemiah a letter
"to the governors of the province beyond the river" requesting safe
passage for him as he travelled through their lands.
Today's passports still carry such a letter of request.
Inside the front cover is a letter issued in the name of Her Majesty the Queen.
Like Nehemiah's letter, it also asks for safe passage and protection for the
holder of the passport.
In the Middle Ages passports were letters saying which cities
and city gates a person might travel through, pass porte is a French term which
means, pass through the gate.
So what’s all this to do with the Feast of the Baptism of the
Lord?
When God’s people passed from one country to another they
went through the river.
They passed through a river into the Promised Land, where
they could start a new life as God s people.
When John the Baptist came to tell people that Jesus was
coming he took them to the river as well. He baptised them because they
were saying that they wanted to start again with God, and live his new
life.
Jesus came to give us new life. If we have been
baptised it is as if we have been given a passport, which allows us to pass
from living for ourselves to living for God.
At his baptism Jesus was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as Christ so that we might share in his anointing and be given a
passport to abundant living!
We live as Christians with dual citizenship.
We’re citizens of this world (UK passport) with all its privileges and we’re
citizens of God’s kingdom through baptism with additional privileges, what I’ve
just called ‘abundant living’.
I asked
folk last week to think about sharing this morning something of what they see
as the privileges of living in God’s kingdom, the benefits of church membership,
of being a Christian, of abundant life as I’ve called it. One of our members
sent me this e mail in consequence:
I had simply never thought about it, so it’s been
intriguing me! She says, then lists four items:
To receive
Communion, which reminds me that I am loved by God.
To learn
from other individual Christians, who give me a good example to follow.
To be part
of a fellowship which has nothing necessarily to do with my social life, or my
family, or my work, which connects me to the family of God and encourages me.
To know
that we are stronger together than when we try to work alone.
Maybe that’s got you thinking yourself of the
blessings that are yours!
A Christian is one very aware of their privileges
in sharing the anointing of the Anointed One.
We can only live to the full if we welcome and own that anointing in the
Holy Spirit which is our own through baptism.
Maybe the church in this land has not failed so
much as shrunk back from its task and that we need to get back to basics. That
is why we need what Jesus received and offered at his baptism – we need the
Holy Spirit to come in power upon us.
Almost his last words to his first disciples at
the hour of his ascension were a promise that takes up these first words about
him at the start of his ministry: You
will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my
witnesses he said, as recorded in Acts 1.8
We hear regularly on the news of people from
abroad seeking passports or the equivalent to Britain so they can live with
greater abundance materially. That should make us proud to have British
passports!
How proud are we of the spiritual abundance that
is ours through our Christian faith and the passport of baptism?
How’s your enthusiasm for your Christianity and
for sharing it? As one who shares in the Spirit’s anointing could today’s eucharist
be for you a rekindling of passion through a fresh anointing in that Spirit on
the Feast of Jesus’ own anointing?
So be it! God grant us a right pride in both our
nationality and our Christianity!
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