Baptism Homily-Another verse in an ancient song

State Baptism of a Child of Noble Blood, Anonymous, c1612, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A homily given on the baptism of [N] by The Reverend Phillip Dawson at St Olave Hart Street in the City of London on Saturday 19th September 2026.

Today we baptise [N], the daughter of two talented poets and writers.

Four hundred and forty one years ago another little girl was brought here to be baptised. Her name was Elizabeth Sidney. Her father was Sir Philip Sidney, one of the most famous poets of the Elizabethan age, author of “The Defence of Poesy” (or poetry). Her mother, Frances, was the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster who lived just across the road in Seething Lane. Queen Elizabeth herself was her godmother. Her godfather was Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's great favourite.

This is a place full of stories of people who have used words creatively to help us see and understand the world differently.

Lady Ann Fanshawe was baptised here in 1625 and later wrote a remarkable memoir and receipt (or recipe) book, containing some of the earliest English recipes for ice cream and hot chocolate.

Samuel Pepys, the most famous diarist in the English language, called this his “own church”.

John Letts, who is also buried here, pioneered the commercially printed diary, helping ordinary people to record their own daily lives.

This church and the streets around it were closely connected with the world of Tudor diplomacy and espionage: words written in cipher and carried covertly.

Poetry, recipes, diaries, codes. Different ways of writing about the world — and different ways of trying to read it.

Poetry can place ideas beside one another and reveal connections we had not noticed before. Something familiar begins to be seen differently — perhaps seen more truthfully.

Something similar will happen when [N] is baptised.

In baptism we are joined to Christ. We stand with him in the waters of the Jordan and, through the Spirit, are drawn into the very life of God. We are made children of God.

From within this new life in Christ - this amazing new relationship - we begin the lifelong task of learning to see as Jesus sees. Not just seeing differently but seeing it more clearly as it really is. As God intended.

We begin to see how deeply connected we are.

[N] is uniquely herself. But she is not independent. She already belongs within a web of relationships and stories: family and friends; Norway and London; language and poetry; people and places which were here long before she was born.

Baptism draws her into something deeper still: into the life of Christ, and therefore into relationship with all of us.

Perhaps children understand something about our need for one another which grown-ups rather easily forget.

In our Gospel reading, when children are brought to Jesus, the disciples try to send them away. But Jesus says:

“Let the little children come to me.”

And goes on to explain that it is not the children who need to become more like the grown-ups. The grown-ups need to learn a thing or two from them:

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Perhaps we all need to learn or re-learn how to receive.

Just as she hears poetry before she can fully understand it or love before she can fully explain it, today [N] receives the sacrament of baptism.

[N] is welcomed as an individual - fearfully and wonderfully made - into a community she does not yet understand - and perhaps most of us are still working it out.

At the heart of our faith is the extraordinary claim that God has spoken a Word into the world — and that Word became flesh and lived among us.

The Word is a person: Jesus Christ.

Baptism draws us into the life of that living Word.

Each word is distinct. With its own sound and shape and meaning. But words are not meant to exist alone. Place one beside another and new meanings emerge; unexpected connections are made; a poem begins.

So it is with us.

We are individuals, but we are not independent. We were created for relationship: with those who have gone before us, with those around us, with those who will come after us — and ultimately with God.

As the extraordinary layers of the past, present and future surrounding us attest. Sidney, Fanshawe, Pepys; Norway and London; the church is a place where lives meet and meaning quietly emerges.

And today another life, another verse is added to that ancient story. The skalds of [N]’s Norwegian inheritance knew something about that: receiving stories, remembering them, and handing them on.

[N], we do not know what words you will write or what story you will tell. But today, before you can speak for yourself, the living Word calls you by name and draws you into his life.

And into all of ours.

Amen.

Image: State Baptism of a Child of Noble Blood, Anonymous, c1612,The Metropolitan Museum of Art.