In my last parish I occasionally stood in for the Chaplain at the local hospital, which meant I carried a bleeper around in case anyone asked for a priest.  The first time it bleeped was the middle of the night. The hospital needed an emergency baptism in the maternity unit.

When I got there, two nurses and a man and a woman were peering into the big plastic bubble of an incubator. Inside was a tiny pink baby, Lisa. She was Kwame and Maria's first, born fifteen weeks too soon. There were all kinds of tubes helping her to breathe, and as the machine clicked and whirred her lungs were working at a furious rate as she fought for life.

Without my saying anything the nurses and Lisa's parents knelt down around the incubator and started to pray. We said the Lord's Prayer together, I dipped my finger in a drop of water, put my hand inside the incubator, and very, very carefully made the sign of the cross on Lisa's head: "Lisa, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". We said more prayers, had a cup of tea, and I went home to bed.

Two days later Maria phoned me to say Lisa had died. She might have said, and I wouldn't have blamed her, "Why did God let Lisa die?” But instead she said, "Thank you for the baptism. Now I know Lisa is with Jesus, and I'll see her again”.

When I was a student I once wrote an essay arguing that baptizing babies didn’t make sense because it can’t make a difference to the way God feels about them.  But when you are faced with a very sick baby, and when you meet someone like Maria, you know exactly why it's right.

Jesus wants us to know that his victory over death embraces everybody, including tiny babies. Of course baptism doesn't change the way God feels, nor does it mean babies who aren't baptized don't go to heaven. The point is, baptism shows that we are all, young or old, included in the death and resurrection of Christ, so that whenever we face death, we can say, "I know my wife, my husband, my friend, my baby is with Jesus and I'll see them again". As one of the earliest Christian creeds (2 Tim 2.11-12) puts it:

If we have died with him we shall also live with him;
If we endure with him, we will also reign with him.

Amen. Happy Easter.