When
I was in my early thirties, I decided to get baptized. I’d been thinking about it for a few years,
ever since I’d discovered that I couldn’t become a Zen Buddhist priest because
I was actually a Christian. And for a
time I considered organizing a baptism for myself. I could ask my father, an ordained minister
in the United Church of Christ, to perform the rite, and invite a few family
members and friends to the shore of the Pacific Ocean, or the banks of the irrigation
pond on the farm where I was working.
But the more I thought about it, and the more I learned about this
strange thing called Christianity, the clearer it became that baptism wasn’t
just something for me. And it wasn’t
about becoming a Christian in some general sense, or undergoing some kind of
metaphysical change. It was about becoming part of something made
of flesh and blood. It was about joining
a community.
So
it was only later, after attending Episcopal churches for a few years, and finding
one in San Francisco where I felt I could belong, that I decided it was
time. So I signed up for a class, which
involved going with a few other folks over to the Rector’s house for dinner and
a conversation. The only thing I
remember well about that evening, besides the delicious catered meal, was that,
along with a couple of us candidates who were adults, there was a young mother,
who came on behalf of her infant daughter.
We were going around the table explaining why we were considering
baptism at this time, and what we thought it might mean for us, and when it was
the mother’s turn, she spoke about the importance of family tradition, and her
desire to give her child a religious foundation for life.
But
then her voice rose and she got really quite passionate, as she began to lodge
a strenuous objection to the doctrine of original sin. She was outraged at the thought that her beautiful,
perfect little child was somehow deep-dyed wicked at the core, and needed to have
this congenital taint washed out of her, and to be born anew. And the rest of us around the table,
including the priest, had to agree, because, after all, when you put it like
that, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Now
I have some doubts about whether that young woman was reacting against real classical
Christian doctrine, or a one-sided misinterpretation of it, but that’s not
really the issue. Because she had a
point—if baptism is about the difference it makes to live our lives with God,
but the accent is all on a heightened sense of worthlessness and guilt, then
why bother? Shouldn’t it be more about
love and grace? And if it is about a
life lived in communion, of membership in a body, why focus such a harsh light
of interrogation on the individual person? It’s a distortion of perspective, and it
yields a grotesque image, which is plain to see when the person in question is
a child.
This
is a good example of why it's good to come to church, because in church we get
to balance out our theological ideas about things like baptism with the actual practice. We get to look into the face of a stranger, a
newcomer to the community, and recognize ourselves. The words we say and the actions we take
when we baptize are about acknowledging what we all have in common. They are about our shared humanity in God. Baptism illuminates what it truly means to
be human, but what it reveals is not a philosophical paradigm or a collective
entity or a universal archetype, but the life and death of a person.
When
we baptize someone we call her by name, because the relationship of the
baptized to the baptized is a relationship of persons, each one of whom is
utterly unique, unprecedented, with a face and a path and a story unlike anyone’s
who’s ever lived before. But we also
baptize everyone in the name of Jesus, the only Son, the human person whose
life and death and resurrection shows us how each one of our stories, and all
our stories together, are the story of God.
Now people are always looking for
new and different ways to get that point across, ways that they think will be
more direct, approachable, or user-friendly.
But the best way, I think, certainly the time-tested way, is to come
together to listen to the story of Jesus.
There
are different versions, and some of the versions have prologues. For the last three weeks or so we’ve been
listening to bits and pieces of those.
But all the versions agree that the main story begins with baptism. A man named John appeared in the wilderness
by the Jordan River, telling people that God was about to make a new start with
everyone, so they’d better get ready.
And apparently a lot of them agreed that a new start was necessary. I gather things weren’t going all that well
in Judea and Jerusalem, because the inhabitants of those places out in droves
to meet John, and they confessed all the things they had done to participate in
the violence and injustice, the callous self-righteousness and self-promotion, the
self-indulgence and escapism that plagued society at large.
And
as a sign of their desire to put all that behind them and make a new start with
God, they waded out into the river, and John put them under with loving ferocity,
pushed them down into the dark, cold, turbid water and held them there until
they started to feel fear, started to really know just how close they were to
nothingness, and how much they would give for just one breath of air. And then the force of John’s strong hands
reversed direction and lifted their faces up out of the water into light and
breath and freedom.
And
one of those, the story says, who came to be baptized, was Jesus from Nazareth
in Galilee. He heard John’s call to
repent, a word that in our minds is linked with guilt. But Jesus had nothing to confess. His repentance must have been driven by
something else: compassion, maybe, for his people; a sense of responsibility; a
desire to be part of the movement of renewal; a longing for God. In any case, Jesus gave himself over into the
hands of John and went down into the river.
And when he came up everything changed.
It
wasn’t that he had changed—nothing
had been added to him or taken away. It
was more like God changed. God who had
been hidden, far away in heaven, threw back the curtains. God who had been silent, spoke. God’s elusive Spirit, the maker of justice,
the wisdom of creation, the vision of truth, came over him with wings of
peace. In that moment Jesus knew who he
really was, and what he had to do.
Because this God of grace and love was not for him, but in him.
The immortal, invisible God had a visible, mortal face, and it was his
face.
In
this story of the beginning we can already glimpse the pattern of the whole: a
life of repentance (or maybe we should call it “atonement”) for the sickness
and suffering of the world, that is not preoccupied with sin and guilt, but abounding
in solidarity, compassion, and joy; a personal revelation of God’s grace and
intimate love; a movement of the Spirit, pouring out active, creative, healing,
and liberating communication. This is
the pattern of the whole story of Jesus, and the fact that we can see the
pattern right at the beginning is no mistake, because baptism is where his
story converges with our own.
Baptism
is where our lives are incorporated into Jesus’ pattern, and that is why it
matters, even if it happened to you as an infant, and you can’t remember a
thing about it. If there was even one
person present that day that looked at you in your little white gown, kicking
your legs and crying, and saw a recipient of God’s grace and love, it had its
intended effect. Because the choice that
matters in our baptism is not our choice, just as it is not we who created the
heavens and earth, or who gave us birth, or we who redeems our lives from
death. But though baptism is the
revelation to the world of God’s life in us, conscious cooperation with that life
is something we do choose day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment.
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