Well let us begin with Mabel, the candidate for baptism today, who turns one this week. And not just with Mabel but with any child brought to this Font for baptism. And it is nice to report that we baptized 20 children last year by far the most candidates for many a year. Why is it that in the long tradition of the church (a tradition only broken by the extreme Anabaptists of Reformation times in the 16th century of whom modern Baptists would see themselves as spiritual heirs) there has been consistent belief and practice that Baptism could take place from infancy onwards.

Underlying the practice of Infant baptism were several fundamental theological assumptions. One was that God’s grace is not limited to adulthood. Jesus makes the point over and over again that the trusting love of a child is a model for all of us to follow. Jesus said “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”(Mark 10: 15)

The second underlying assumption to infant baptism is the priority of God’s grace and love. “In this is love, not what we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” says the first Letter of John (1 John 4: 10). As Paul argued in the Letter to the Romans our justification before God comes by Grace not through Works. We cannot earn our way to God. It is always an Act of Grace initiated by God through his Christ.

And the third underlying assumption to infant baptism is that this is the way we have experienced God’s saving activity. After all we have just come through the Christmas/Epiphany season where we have heard once again from the Infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke of the Baby Jesus, born in a Manger and all the rest of it. God as it were joins us and our humanity with all its vulnerability, all its dependence, all its fragility. He takes what we are and uses it for his glory. And even more fundamental to infant baptism is our central belief that God is the Creator of all things and especially of this child. What we are doing in Baptism is not making this child someone that she is not already: we are not making Mabel a child of God as if she is not that now. But what we are doing which is central to our celebration today is acknowledging and affirming that Mabel is with us a child of God and responding to that affirmation with faith and hope and love.

For me the most important dimension of baptism is the recognition of our identity as belonging to God; as being part of God’s human family of which the church is a sacramental sign.

But what about Gideon, Paul and Peter? What have they in common with Baptism? Just that when you think about it God takes the least of all and uses them for his glory. Gideon was the youngest member of the most insignificant tribe of Israel. He was faced with the massive oppression of the Midianites so much so that life was fearful and fraught with danger. Yet at that precise moment, that low point in the history of Israel, God called Gideon to act. Like Moses before him and Isaiah and Jeremiah and later again Mary and Peter and Paul, Gideon reacted negatively to this call. “How can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least of my family.” Remember Isaiah at his calling in the Temple: “Woe is me for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips.” Remember Mary at the Annunciation: “How can this be?” And there is Paul in the second reading: “For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” And finally Peter: “Go away from me Lord for I am a sinful man.”

Their reactions underlie the fact that God uses the most unlikely, the least prepared, the most insignificant, in other words the likes of you and me, to call to be his agents, his “hands” in the world. But for all their misgivings each of these people chosen and called by God responded to God’s initiative. Gideon recognized God’s presence as did Isaiah and Mary and Peter and Paul and responded affirmatively. Mary said “Be it unto me according to your word”; Peter we are told “left everything and followed Jesus”; and Paul said “By the grace of God I am what I am and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” Over 45 years ago I responded to what seemed a crazy idea to me that I should become a priest. The truth of the matter is that our God has always acted thus and so: taking the most unlikely people: old Sarah way past childbirth; the underdog Gideon; the unmarried virgin Mary; the simple fisherman of Galilee; the Pharisee who persecuted the church; this little girl Mabel who we baptize today; and you and me brothers and sisters; God chooses us and calls us today to be agents of his love and peace and joy to the world: to be participants in his great plan of salvation for the whole cosmos.

And the miraculous catch of fish which opens today’s gospel, a miracle of abundance akin to the feeding of the 5000 and the changing of water into wine at Cana, is itself a metaphor for God’s abundant love and abundant grace. Gideon through God’s abundant gifts led his people to victory; Paul and Peter became leaders of the church leading the mission through which God’s abundant grace worked the seemingly miraculous, the spread of the gospel of Jesus through the then known world.