Pastoral Letter -January 2010 (The Baptism of the Lord)

‘I offer my life to God’

My dear friends,  

I hope you had a blessed and happy Christmas, and I wish you grace and peace from God as the New Year gets under way. 

Christmas and the Epiphany celebrated God’s gift of his Son to the world he loves so much.  Like the Wise Men we remembered last Sunday, we come together now to worship our Lord, to do him homage, and to give him - not gold, frankincense and myrrh - but the gift of our lives, of all that we have and are and can become. 

Everything we have to offer comes from God in the first place.  We can only give to God what we have already been given by him; we can only ‘offer’ what we have first received.  Our life itself is God’s gift.  All is grace, especially the new life brought to us by Jesus Christ.  We give our lives to the God who has first given his own life for us and to us.

We come to Mass to lift up our hearts to God, to give him thanks and praise for the wonder of his gracious mercy and loving kindness.  Each of us comes to say with love: ‘I offer my life to God.’  We do this in a very personal way, from our hearts, and as members of the family of the Church, the priestly people of God.

This is our diocesan theme this year. We’ll explore what it means to be a priestly people who share together the life and loving sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest.  We’ll seek to understand more deeply our Catholic faith that every Mass is the making present for us here and now of that great sacrifice. And in this ‘Year of the Priest’, we celebrate the gift of ordained priesthood, and pray for more vocations to that priesthood for our diocese. 

Today’s feast of the Baptism of Our Lord is a good way to begin this year’s journey of faith. It recalls the importance of our own Baptism, however long ago that may have been. 

In my Pastoral Letter a few years ago, when our theme was ‘Baptism and Welcome’, I reminded us all that our Baptism was a key and crucial moment of our Christian lives. At our Baptism, we died with Christ and rose to new life in him. We were delivered from original sin, plunged and immersed into the life of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We were born anew as adopted sons and daughters of God, united together as his family.  We were made brothers and sisters of Jesus himself, and members of his Body, the Church. And we became living temples of the Holy Spirit, God’s Love in person who lives within us and among us. All of this means we received from God an extraordinary dignity at our Baptism, a dignity we still have today. 

Along with our God-given dignity comes a God-given responsibility. Each of us is called to be holy, to live a life worthy of a beloved daughter or son of God, someone who belongs to God’s royal, priestly and prophetic family. We are people anointed by the Holy Spirit and called to bear joyful witness - by our words, deeds and lives - to God’s loving gift of himself to the world in Jesus Christ.

At the Chrism Mass in our Cathedral each year, when I bless the oils we use across the diocese for Baptism, Confirmation, Anointing the Sick, and Ordination, the Eucharistic Preface reminds us that ‘Christ gives the dignity of a royal priesthood to the people he has made his own.’ 

United with other Christians by our Baptism, we are that people, and we share together that royal priesthood, the priesthood of all believers.

What have we to offer God in loving sacrifice?  Our lives can often seem so insignificant, of such little value. They are much like the fragile wafers of bread and the drops of wine we bring forward at the Presentation of Gifts, the ‘Offertory Procession’, as signs of all we have and are. 

And yet, united with Jesus himself, we become an ‘everlasting gift’ to God, able to offer our Father a ‘holy and living sacrifice’.  That above all is why we come to Mass.  Jesus unites us with himself by the power of his Spirit, so that we can enter into his giving of himself to the Father.  As Pope Benedict puts it, ‘Jesus draws us into himself.’  We come to Mass to offer ourselves to God, united with Jesus’ giving of his life for us upon the Cross.  Christ’s sacrifice is present in every Mass, so that we can be drawn into it, and be totally one with our Lord as he offers his life to the Father and is lovingly welcomed by him.

It is at Mass above all that we are a priestly people, united with Christ our Great High Priest.  It is at Mass that our life as the baptised and beloved sons and daughters of God is most fully realised.  But we’re also called to live our Baptism every day, by making our whole life a holy offering to God, a sacrifice of love.  Perhaps we can keep in mind throughout this year some words St Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus: ‘Try, then, to imitate God, as children of his that he loves, and follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up in our place as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.’ (5.1-2)

In days of old, we were encouraged to begin each day with a ‘Morning Offering’.  It would be good to start each day with such a prayer, offering God all that we are and have, all the day will bring, and the people who will share our lives. Begin the day by saying, ‘I offer my life to God’, and end it saying to the Father with Jesus, ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit.’ 

Jesus is the Beloved Son of God, the One so powerful that – like John the Baptist - we are ‘not fit to undo the straps of his sandals.’  He comes to baptise us with the Holy Spirit, the Fire of God’s transforming Love which makes all things new and which brings us truly alive.

Because we are united with Christ, especially through our Baptism and taking part in the Mass, we hear said to us by God our Father what Jesus heard at his Baptism: ‘You are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter.  My favour rests on you.’ 

On this great feast we hear those words afresh. As a priestly people, we renew together today our faith in God and our commitment truly to live together as his family, as people called ‘beloved’ by the Father because we are united with Jesus his Beloved Son.

May God bless us all this year, so that we can live our Baptism more fully and faithfully together.

+Michael

Bishop of East Anglia

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