It often seems to me at this time of year that if we are fortunate enough to have a holiday we actually need three holidays in succession: one to prepare for the holiday, the holiday itself, and then further time off to recover from the holiday. This year I managed without the first, but have just come back from a period of recovery at the convent in Wales I often go to near Tintern Abbey and my favourite road sign, Badgers crossing for two miles’. I was also there for a meeting to plan our annual Associates day, the theme of which this year will be our baptismal vows.
If we ever think what it means to live a life under vows’ we think, I suppose, of monks and nuns and their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But truth be told we all live a life under vows’ the vows that were made at our Baptism and reiterated by us at Confirmation.
In the early centuries of the Church’s life a Christian’s spiritual life was expressed in the daily commitment to preserve baptismal grace by the daily practice of their baptismal vows. In other words they saw the promises they made at Baptism as the basis of their life in the world. As vows are made in marriage, so they believed vows were made to God in Christ at Baptism, demanding the same kind of faithfulness and commitment as is demanded by marriage. In Baptism, God promises to remain faithful to us, guiding us by his grace. So in return we can only realise such grace in our lives by remaining faithful to God. In the early church such faithfulness consisted primarily in the daily and consistent love of neighbour and a readiness to face martyrdom!
Today I suspect we rarely think about our baptismal vows. We hear these vows made whenever there is a Sunday morning Baptism and we repeat them for ourselves each Easter. But the vows in the modern liturgy are very far from what is said in the Book of Common Prayer (with which perhaps quite a few of us were baptised), with its reference to the vain pomp and glory of the world’, and different also to what we find in the ASB (1980). The words we use now are quite close to what was used in the third century. There is a threefold rejection of all that is contrary to God and a threefold turning to Christ, followed by an affirmation of the Creed. Turning away from and turning towards is the predominant idea of these vows. As the Bishop of London likes on occasion to remind his confirmation candidates, the former used to be symbolised by the candidate’s spitting towards the west as a sign of his rejection of the devil and all his works. For the early Christians Baptism meant turning away from one life and entering a new world.
For us that distinction between two worlds – the before and after of baptism is not nearly so distinct. For us the key thing about remembering our Baptism and trying to live a life under vows’ is the daily search for the signs of the Spirit working deep down in our daily experience calling us into deeper relationship with God and with our neighbour. But how are we to keep in touch with these depths? At the beginning of last year as we launched the Mission Action Plan I wrote in this magazine about the idea of a Rule of Life’. Preparing such a rule takes time; it needs to be practical and achievable; it needs us first to look at all the different aspects of our lives at church and in the home, in our relationships and our spending of time and money, in our reading and relaxing, in solitude and prayer and service to our neighbours and concern for our world. As we approach our dedication festival next month a time of personal re-dedication it might be worth our thinking as individuals and as a community about the implications of our living a vowed’ life and how we might be helped to keep that vow through a simple rule of life, which could support our daily commitment to remain faithful to God. As a result of the current plans for staffing and new staff accommodation, and for ways of improving and increasing the space available to us in the church, we shall be facing a considerable demand for increased financial support. It will be important to set that in the context of the ways in which our experience of life at St John’s nurtures (or perhaps fails to nurture) our faithfulness to God in prayer, study of the faith, and mutual support in being God’s people under vows in the world.
With my love and prayers,
Fr Stephen
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker