Living out our Baptism: The Gospel makes us One

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself?'

I must confess that this baptismal promise hinges on one of my favourite pieces of Good News in the Gospel. I think it is the best news in the world that all of us are created in the image and likeness of God. When we were created, God called us very good. But the Gospel also teaches us that Christ continues to dwell in each of us. Christ is found in me (even in the moments when I am most frustrated with myself) and I can encounter Christ in every other person that I meet. Every encounter with another person is an encounter with Christ.

All of God's promises to us as a beloved part of creation, are reflected in this promise. We seek and serve Christ, that is the incarnate God, in each person because we believe that God is to be found in us, in them, in all of humanity. Certainly this is not to say that we are God, or that we are all the same or even that we are all equal because Christ dwells in each of us. As Bill Cliff put it in our Biblical Studies course this morning at Ask & Imagine: "The Gospel doesn't make us equal; the Gospel makes us One."

When your neighbour is in pain or lonely or hungry or sick or in prison, we respond to their need not because we are trying to make them equal to us in material possessions or happiness, but because their pain is our pain - we are one. The words of this promise are "loving your neighbour as yourself" that is to say loving your neighour as though your neighbour were a part of yourself because in our baptism into the body of Christ, they are. As St Paul says in his first letter to the Church in Corinth "The eye cannot say to the hand 'I have no need of you.'" We need to be in relationship with the other members of the Body of Christ because we are one with them. God in Christ dwells in each of them and in all people.

It is an affront to our sense of fairness to think that God dwells in all people, regardless of their knowledge of God or how they treat one another. That an encounter with our most upsetting, oppressive, annoying neighbours is also an encounter with God. But the Gospel of Christ isn't fair - it is about grace and mercy. Grace is when you get what you don't deserve and mercy is when you don't get what you do deserve. When we struggle to serve others with grace and mercy as we have promised our confidence and perseverance come from the God's promise to dwell in each of us. When we strain to see the grace and mercy of Christ in the other, we are drawn to continue that search because God has promised that Christ is in there and that through our baptism and God's grace we are already made one in the body of Christ.

Next post we will look at our promise to "...strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?"