Note: Preceding this liturgy, we had baptized three people.
Oops!
There’s a haunting question at the heart of human existence: What determines a person’s worth?
In the ancient city of Patara, three young girls were about to learn the world’s brutal answer to that question. Their father had fallen into poverty, and in that time and place, poverty didn’t just mean hunger—it meant erasure. Without dowries, these girls had no future. No marriage prospects. No security. No hope. The world had already calculated their value, and the sum was zero.
We might think we’re more enlightened now. But haven’t we simply become more sophisticated in how we measure human worth? We calculate it in achievement and productivity, in social media metrics and bank balances, in whether someone contributes to society in ways we can quantify. We look at infants and we project onto them our hopes, our expectations, our conditions for acceptance.
Ugh!
The father in Patara faced an impossible situation. The economic and social systems of his world offered him one terrible option: sell his daughters into slavery or prostitution. This wasn’t presented as cruelty … it was simply reality. The way things work. The natural order of a fallen world.
And this is where we must be honest: those same systems are still at work. We live in a world that constantly tells us that human worth is conditional. That dignity must be earned. That we must prove ourselves valuable before we can be valued. Even in the Church, we can slip into this thinking, measuring discipleship by what people produce, contribute, or achieve for the Kingdom.
Think about how we introduce ourselves to strangers. We lead with what we do, not who we are. We’ve internalized the world’s accounting system so deeply that we’ve forgotten there might be another way to see.
Aha!
But on three different nights, something extraordinary happened in Patara. Under cover of darkness, a young bishop named Nicholas threw bags of gold through the window of that desperate home. Three nights. Three gifts. Three daughters saved.
Now here’s what’s crucial: Nicholas didn’t investigate whether these girls deserved help. He didn’t audit their father’s financial decisions or require a repayment plan. He didn’t make them prove their worth or promise future gratitude. He simply saw their humanity, and he acted to preserve their dignity.
Nicholas had learned to see the way God sees. And this brings us to the heart of today’s [baptismal] reading: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”
Whee!
This is not self-improvement. This is not moral renovation. This is not God helping us become valuable enough to love. This is something far more radical: God declaring that in Christ, the old accounting system is abolished. The worth of a human being is no longer up for negotiation.
For those who were baptized today, we are not making them valuable to God. We are proclaiming what has always been true: that God has already seen their infinite worth, already claimed them, already poured out love upon them … not because of anything they will do or achieve, but because they made in the image of God.
Just as Nicholas saw those three daughters not as economic liabilities but as beloved children of God, so God sees each person—each of these newly illumined—as a new creation. Not potential creations, waiting to prove themselves. New creations now. Beloved now. Worthy now.
The water of baptism doesn’t add value to these folks. It reveals the value that was already there. It washes away the world’s false calculations and shows us what God has seen all along: bearers of the divine image, temples of the Holy Spirit, now members of Christ’s body.
Yeah!
So what does this mean for us as we leave here today?
It means we are called to be like Nicholas—people who have learned to see with God’s eyes. People who recognize the inherent dignity in every person we meet, especially those the world has written off as worthless.
It means for these three newly baptized, we commit ourselves to reminding them throughout their lives that their worth is not in their achievements but in whose they are. When the world tells them they must earn love, we will point them back to this font and say, “Remember: you are a new creation. You have always been beloved.”
And it means for each of us—whether we were baptized yesterday or eighty years ago—that we must daily resist the world’s accounting system. When we’re tempted to measure our worth by our productivity, our appearance, our success, or our failures, we must remember: in Christ, we are new creations. The old has passed away. Everything has become new.
St. Nicholas threw gold through a window in the darkness. But today, we proclaim an even greater gift: that God has thrown open the doors of heaven and declared that every human being—especially the vulnerable, the forgotten, the ones deemed worthless by the world—is precious beyond measure.
May we, like St. Nicholas, become people who see this truth and act on it with reckless generosity. May we protect the dignity of the vulnerable. May we value what God values. May we recognize in every person we meet—whether newly baptized or weathered by years—the image of God and the promise of new creation.
Amen.