Twelfth Sunday of the Year, A

            In a few moments, I am going to baptize the newly born child of Joannie and Matthew Newsome.  The practice of infant baptism goes way back in the history of the Church.  In fact, St. Augustine, in the 4^th century after Christ, used this ancient custom as one of the keys to his argument against Pelagius, who was teaching the erroneous idea that all that is needed for human moral improvement is in us all naturally.  What we need is simply to have a good example to follow, an example that our Lord supplies in His life as recorded in the Gospels. 

            Out of this significant debate arose St. Augustine’s articulation of that doctrine of the Christian faith that the world finds so troublesome:  the doctrine of original sin.  Many find this doctrine troublesome because it is not very flattering:  the teaching that every human being born into the world is somehow marked by this terrible disability, so much so that even an infant is in need of divine assistance (the grace of God) in order to have repaired in him or her a dreadful spiritual deficiency.  Again, the world, so bent on self-salvation apart from any supernatural help, doesn’t find this idea very flattering.  And it is not.  But then God, who has revealed to us this condition of disorder into which we are conceived – God is not really interested in engaging in flattery.  He loves us way too much for that.  Yes, the painful truth about ourselves as we really are is what God speaks to us and reminds us of every time someone is baptized into the Church, the Body of Christ.

            But what, exactly, is this doctrine called original sin?  It refers first of all to what St. Paul mentioned in today’s second reading:  “Through one man sin entered into the world” – that first human sin, that rebellion of Adam.  Secondly, original sin refers to the condition we have all inherited from Adam and Eve of being deprived of what we need to attain to that for which we were made – eternal life with God.  Adam, in his sin against God, his refusal of right obedience to the will of God – Adam forfeited that ordering principle (the grace of God, the means by which a human being participates in the divine life) in his soul and mind that joyfully and with ease directed him toward his Creator and so plunged himself and the whole human race into that awful condition of self-directedness.  Man turned in upon himself, away from God, and finds within himself nothing that can save him and give him the happiness that can only be found in God.  The human mind has been darkened, and the human will is wayward, so that man, apart from God, searches in vain for lasting joy and peace. 

            Though we are born deprived of this essential means of our eternal well-being, God has not abandoned us.  In fact, the Old Testament is, in a sense, one long story of God’s actions to bring us back to Himself, culminating in the New Testament with God’s final and everlasting answer to this deepest need of ours:  Jesus Christ, who as the new Adam, chose to always submit Himself to the perfect will of God the Father.  We read our Savior’s words in the Gospels, where He faces His stark and horrible – and yet glorious – Passion, His suffering and death upon the Cross:  in the Garden of Gethsemane those tragic and triumphant words, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup of suffering from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours, be done.”  Adam’s “no” to God was answered by Christ’s “yes” to God (even as the Blessed Virgin Mary’s “yes” to the will of God at the Annunciation was the reversal of Eve’s “no” to God). 

            The first step in receiving God’s grace, His means of restoring us to His friendship and our everlasting happiness, is baptism.  At the baptismal font, the great victory of Christ over sin and death is planted, seed-like, in our souls to be nourished by all the other Sacraments of the Church, as well as by our continuing responses to God’s grace that involves us intimately in the life-long, personal struggle against sin and evil, which plague us through the lingering effects within us of original sin.  But it is in this fight we are made strong, if we avail ourselves of the only assistance that will save us and give us victory:  the grace of God, His means of drawing us ever more into a sharing in His own life.

            God’s sharing His life with us begins in baptism, the divine antidote to original sin, our heritage from Adam and Eve.  This Sacrament is the rebirth into what Adam lost – the beginning of the Christian’s friendship with and obedience to God.  It takes place in the womb of Holy Mother Church, she who nourishes us with all the sacramental life that first flowed from the wounded side of Christ and now flows into us as we receive the Sacraments of faith and life.