Today's story comes from Barbara Brown Taylor and her book Leaving Church, in which she tells a great story of baptism. Its an account of infant baptism, of which others in this 40 days will also be. I am a Baptist and committed to the practice of believer's baptism, but I find myself drawn to some of the theological arguments for infant baptism (e.g. the comment from Martin Luther on Day 8). I would follow John Colwell, Curtis Freeman and others in wanting Baptists to receive those who have been baptised as infants without requiring re-baptism and to acknowledge the brokenness of our own practice of believer's baptism in terms of disciple-making.
On what turned out to be the noisiest morning of my tenure at Grace-Calvary, I had decide to baptize a whole crowd of babies at the same service. I did this both because I wanted the parents and godparents to know one another and because I wanted the infants to have company. The decision was not popular. Most of the families would have preferred being the only honorees, which is understandable . Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children.
By baptizing a crowd, I hoped to give these only children some metaphysical brothers and sisters. Even if they did not remember one thing about the day, maybe they could grow up with a mystical link to one another. Even if they entirely lost track of one another, maybe one day they would gaze at a picture taken of them at their baptisms and wonder who all those other babies had turned out to be. At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
While my logic may have been good, the logistics were awful. Grace-Calvary is a small church. Divide the square footage by five crying babies, and you get one crying baby per sixteen seats, not counting the anxious parents who only made things worse by trying to make the babies hush. The babies cried through the first hymn, picked up steam through the second, and were going so strong during the reading of the gospel that I decided to ditch my sermon altogether. I folded my manuscript in half and tucked it inside the lectern. I walked to the altar rail, where I said something funny about the crying and something straightforward about the baptism. Then I poured the water into the font, led the congregation through prayers, and called the first family forward.
Because remembering is so better than being there, I can no longer say for sure when the howling turned to whimpering and the whimpering turned to snuffling, but by the time I had the last baby in my arms, the whole place was quiet. The Holy Spirit had spread her wings, and all the babies had settled down underneath them. The child I was about to baptize looked up at me with wet, clear eyes. When I poured water on his head, he beat his fists together and kept looking at me without so much as a hiccup. As the water dripped from his fragrant head back into the font, the ripples of silence spread from there over the heads of the other babies cooing in their parents’ arms to the visitors sitting in the last pew. As the silence bounced off the back wall of the church and headed back toward the altar again, a collective sigh went up from close to a hundred people. Some of us still talk about what happened that day.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (Canterbury, 2011 [2006]), pp.95-96.
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