There is something wonderfully disruptive about a baptism in the middle of the Eucharist.

We gather with our hymns, our prayers, our familiar patterns. And then a child is brought to the font, water is poured, promises are made, and Christianity becomes suddenly very concrete. Because baptism asks a question neither of today’s readings allows us to avoid: what does it actually mean to belong to Jesus Christ?

Not simply to admire him. Not simply to believe certain things about him. But to belong to him.

For Saint Paul gives us an astonishing answer: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

And then comes that great downward movement. Christ does not cling to status. He does not grasp at power. He empties himself, takes the form of a servant and becomes obedient even to death.

That is the Christ into whom Arnie is being baptised today.

And that is why baptism can never simply be a ceremony simply for family and friends. Baptism is profoundly counter-cultural. We are baptising Arnie into a community whose deepest allegiance is not to nation, race, class, tribe or status, but to Jesus Christ.

And that is worth remembering in a time when Christians, like everyone else, are being encouraged to divide the world too quickly into those who belong and those who do not, those who are familiar and those who are strange, those we readily welcome and those we instinctively fear.

The stranger, the refugee, the immigrant, the disabled person. For the person who seems unlike us can all too easily become both the projection for, and focus of, anxieties which are much larger than they are.

But the movement of Christ, in our Gospel reading to the letter to the Philippians, is precisely the opposite. Christ crosses the boundary. Christ relinquishes privilege. Christ comes among us and refuses to remain safely apart.

The Incarnation is God choosing not to remain a stranger to us.

If the Church forgets this, then we may become skilled at defending a warped version of Christianity but we will be less recognisable as followers and disciples of Christ.

And that is exactly the danger Jesus exposes in today’s Gospel.

A father asks two sons to work in the vineyard. One says no but eventually goes. The other says all the right things but does nothing.

And Jesus asks: which one actually did the father’s will?

It is a devastating question for religious people.

Because we can say the right words, uphold Christian traditions, speak warmly about Christian values – and yet Jesus asks something much simpler: Do you actually live like me?

Do we welcome the stranger?

Do we remain with the person forced to the margins?

Do we acknowledge, and are we willing to loosen, our own grip on our own status and privilege?

Does our discipleship make the world more merciful?

The danger is not only somewhere else. It belongs to every generation of Christians. We are always tempted to make Christ bless the people, institutions and identities we already value and the scaffolding that keeps in place our status and our privilege.

Baptism does something far more unsettling. Baptism places every other identity beneath one astonishing declaration: you belong to Christ.

Arnie will grow up surrounded by competing voices within our culture telling him who matters, whom to trust, whom to fear, who is one of us and who is not.

Today the Church offers him and us another story.

We will pour water over him and proclaim that his deepest identity is not something he must defend against somebody else. It is gift. Grace. Belonging.

And because he belongs to Christ, every person he encounters belongs to Christ and bears a dignity he cannot simply dismiss.

But today is not chiefly a challenge to Arnie. He has plenty of time for that. It is a challenge to us.

Will we become the kind of Church in which Arnie learns that following Jesus means making room rather than guarding boundaries?

Will he see in us a generous welcome, a refusal to scapegoat those who are vulnerable, and a willingness to recognise Christ in people whose lives may be very different from our own?

For in a few moments Arnie will be marked with the cross. The cross is the sign of the Christ who emptied himself for the life of the world.

Arnie, may you spend your whole life discovering whose you are in Christ. And may we have the courage to rediscover it with you.

Amen.