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The Sacraments of Hospitality ˜ 221
grow up in the Open Door Community, all of our plans to have him support us
in our old age are hopelessly doomed. We also sense that we are not very well
equipped to teach him all the things he will need to learn. We know that he will
need to work with others of his kind—those who have made the transition from
sin and death to life in Christ—to build economic relationships around sharing,
gratitude, and dependence on God, rather than exploitation and self-interest;
but we know that we are often not very good models or teachers for him in this
regard. We know that as a disciple of Jesus he will sometimes have to struggle
against his own family, even Brenda and myself, because we have been raised in
this world and are too often consumed by the insecurities and addictions of the
American middle class. That will cause us pain. Most important, we will have to
learn how to love him without possessing him, or seeking to make him in our
image, or making him a slave to our own needs, for he will no longer belong to
us. We worry about how we can teach him to discern and trust in a God who
promises to love and take care of us, when we so often struggle to trust God ourselves.
How can we give him up to death, when we fear our own deaths so powerfully
Of course we wouldn’t be here doing this today if it were not for our own
baptisms and the hope that God has nourished in us through the years for a new
creation. And we wouldn’t be here today were it not for the hope that we see at
work in you all at the Open Door Community. Just as surely as we know that
this baptism today marks the death of Carson Paul Smith-Saunders, we also
trust that it marks the beginning of a new life, the life of Carson Paul, disciple
of the crucified and raised Messiah of Israel and friend of the Open Door Community.
New and different ways of looking at and being in the world can only be
sustained in the midst of other people who have also died to this world and
whose stories and practices reflect—individually and corporately—their new reality.
Carson will receive today a new identity in God, but that new being will
only come into its fullness in the midst of a community that also lives in Christ.
I believe that baptism is the doorway into a new social order. Specifically,
baptism entails the formation of a new people whose newness and togetherness
render all “prior stratifications and classifications” and divisions, all prior stories
and social arrangements, null and void. Paul talks about this most clearly in
Galatians 3, where he says that as many of us as have been baptized into Christ
have clothed ourselves with Christ. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no
longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of us are one in
Christ Jesus.” Now, the unfortunate fact is that it’s not very easy to learn this
baptismal reality in most churches today.
And that’s where the Open Door Community comes into the picture.
Today Carson joins the church universal, but he also joins the church particular—in
this case the family that is the Open Door Community. We could have