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40 Days of Baptism: 17

This is a series of accounts about baptism I'm posting through Lent. 

Today comes from Sara Miles and her memoir Take This Bread, which is described as 'the story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion.' Sara runs The Food Pantry in San Francisco. Below she describes her baptism.

I knew, in my heart, that baptism wasn’t about purity or the washing away of sins. It wasn’t going to protect me from anything. Like carrying a child, baptism would require going deeper into mystery and darkness, into eating and living, eating and suffering, eating and dying. It would mean being baptized into the crucifixion of the world, as Saint Paul wrote, “into Christ’s death ... into the tomb with him.”

Of course I was scared.

“Honey,” Lynn said. She was chuckling. “Just look at the baptismal vows in the Book of Common Prayer. See the first line? ‘Do you desire to be baptized?’ All you have to do is want it.”

I wanted it so much.

The prayer book called baptism the “sacrament of new birth” and promised that those sealed by anointing at baptism would be “marked as Christ’s own forever.”

I wanted new life, as fiercely as I’d wanted a child in the middle of a war. I also knew that I could slip into the same kind of romantic day dreams about baptism that I’d had during pregnancy. Sometimes I’d felt so uplifted by the thought of becoming special, “marked as Christ’s own” that I’d forget I was just one of millions of people making a promise to suffer and love.

…

So that Sunday morning, Donald Schell poured water over my head from a scallop shell, as I stood outside St. Gregory’s back door at the fountain, where sweet water gushed from a huge, split-open slab of rock. He made the sign of the cross, motioned Mark and the people around us to pray, and asked me to make some promises.

….

Nobody gets baptized alone. I walked out the doors to that rock in St. Gregory’s backyard because of the prophetic witness of a dead man, because of a cup of milk on a hot morning in a Salvadoran slum, because beloved friends and total strangers had carried faith for me in the war years when I was unable to feel it. I walked out because of my missionary grandparents and my atheist parents and Martha, who wasn’t afraid to be pray. I walked out because somebody had been tortured and murdered, and because Katie was alive and beautiful.

Sara Miles, Take This Bread (Canterbury, 2012 [2007]) pp.123-125

40 Days of Baptism: 16

Discovering Walter Brueggemann opened up the Old Testament in ways previously unforeseen. I have since tried to get my hands on as much of his work as possible. Alongside his work as a Old Testament scholar, he is also a preacher and writer of prayers. Below is a prayer written about the baptism of Jesus on reading John 1.29-34.

We celebrate that splashing moment at the Jordan,
    less muddy than the river is now.
John the Baptist, voice of demand and challenge,
    and Jesus submitting to him.
John recognizes him before the rest of us do.
He called him, “Lamb of God,
                   who takes away the sin of the world.”

And then he plunged him into the waters of the river.
     he is a lamb who suffers and saves;
     he loves the world;
     he addressed the skewed, distorted way of the world;
     he comes up out of the water and makes new.

We become aware, out of his baptism, of a new world,
    a world of grace and goodness,
    a world of freedom and opportunity,
    a world of justice and mercy and forgiveness,
all from that moment of water … and the dove and the name and the power.

And we remember our own baptism
     when we were named and claimed,
            and called to newness.
In our moment of water, like his,
       our world began again:
    we are grafted to God’s new governance;
    we are summoned into new obedience;
    we are rooted in fresh goodness and forgiveness.

We hear the splash of water and pause,
   and begin again …
       not burdened by what is old,
       not bewitched by what is failed,
       not cowed by what threatens us.
Now is our time for newness and hope
     and love and forgiveness, and we,
     after him, reenter your newness yet again.

Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People (Abingdon, 2008), pp.161-162.

40 Days of Baptism: 15

If you want to know what being Christian is about, a good place to start would be to read Rowan William's little book Being Christian, where he explores baptism, the Bible, the eucharist and prayer. Below is a (longish) section from a talk +Rowan gave in a visit to the Diocese of Gloucester in July 2012, but which follows quite closely part of the chapter on baptism in Being Christian.

I think one of the important things we often miss about baptism in its New Testament sense, in the sense it’s been given throughout the Christian centuries, is that baptism is meant to put you somewhere, to put you were Jesus is. Because being immersed in Jesus is, of course, to go where He goes.

When St Paul in 1 Corinthians uses, a bit surprisingly, the language of the Israelites being “baptised into Moses” when they came out of Egypt, what he seems to be saying is that the Israelites go where Moses goes. They are immersed in Moses’ destiny, and so where he goes they are carried with him.

And so it is that when we are immersed in Jesus, we go where He goes.

Now where exactly does that take us? I'm going to suggest that there are three kinds of neighbourhood into which baptism takes us. And I begin with the picture that’s presented to us in the Eastern Orthodox tradition of the baptism of Jesus, where He’s shown not only immersed in the water of the River Jordan, but also standing over chaos. At his feet, in some of the Eastern icons of the baptism, you will see a rather shadowy figure who is supposed to be the river god, the power of chaotic nature, underneath it all.

Jesus’ baptism is a descent into the depths out of which new creation comes, the depths of watery chaos, because this baptism is like the very beginning of all things.  Just as the Spirit comes down upon the chaos in Genesis 1, and brings out of it a world, so Jesus descends into the chaos of this world. And the Spirit comes down upon Him, to equip Him to begin the new creation.

So our baptismal place is with Jesus as He goes down into that human chaos, with the Spirit (as it were) pouring down after Him, so that up from that watery chaos comes new creation, just as the world emerges from the Spirit hovering over chaos at the beginning of Genesis.

So if we ask where baptism takes us – into what neighbourhood – I'm afraid the first answer to the question is: into the neighbourhood of chaos. Baptism brings us near to chaos in the sense that to be baptised, to go where Jesus goes, is to go into the depths of the human condition.  To be in touch with our own inner chaotic need of God’s Spirit for re-creation, to be in touch with the chaos around us, the muddle, the suffering, the neediness of human experience.  The one thing baptism doesn’t do for us is to put us in charge of our circumstances. Instead we’re asked to plunge down, with God, into the depths of ourselves, and the depths of God’s world, to understand the rawness, the muddle, into which the Spirit of God has to come, bringing absolution and renewal.

And the baptised life, therefore, is a life lived in constant awareness of our own inner need, our own inner chaos, our constant hunger for the Spirit. It’s a life lived in awareness of the nothingness out of which God creates. So we begin by being taken into the neighbourhood of chaos, so that the Spirit pours down into it, to bring new creation.

And of course, having said that, at once we see the second element emerging: to be brought into the neighbourhood of chaos is to be brought into the neighbourhood of our human neighbours – their need, their confusion, their chaos. To be brought into solidarity.

Because when Jesus descends into the chaos of this world, and the need of this world, He accepts solidarity with human beings, in all their diversity. And to be baptised is to be taken into solidarity.

How much more comfortable our lives would be if that were not so. Sometimes it’s easy, and it’s tempting, to say that the ‘fellowship of the baptised’ is the gathering of those who are holy, and finished, and polished, and like us. Whereas in fact the fellowship of the baptised is the neighbourhood of a huge variety of people we would not really like to be found in the company of.

But if Jesus is not ashamed to be in the company of the human beings to whom He comes, and with whom He stands; if Jesus is not ashamed to be called our God, God with us; then our baptised condition is one in which we accept the solidarity involved in being in the neighbourhood of all those to whom God’s love is reaching out.

It’s a matter of accepting – to put it very starkly – the contamination of solidarity. We’d like to be pure. We’d like to be different. We’d like to have clear blue water around us, to separate us off from those compromising and annoying people into whose company God has brought us. Of course those compromising and annoying other people are not just the unbelieving world of humanity in general – they're much more often the other Christians that we are so embarrassed by. And when I think of the angst and struggle of the Anglican Communion over these last few years, to which the Bishop has referred, I think again and again of how tough solidarity is, and how much, at times, we want to be somewhere else with other people.

I've often gone back to the old Scots story of the aristocratic lady who founds her own church. And the parish minister comes to call one day and gives her a bit of a talking to, and says, “Are you seriously trying to tell me that only you and your coachman are saved?” And the old lady thinks for a bit, shakes her head, and says “Well, no. I'm not so sure about John.” That’s the kind of church we probably, most of us, would really rather like to belong in. And one of the great graces of the Anglican Communion worldwide, and the Church of England locally, is that we are not going to get that sort of Church if we stay with that sort of fellowship.

We can be embarrassed, angry, and frustrated by that, and we probably will be anyway.  But we ought at least to be working at some fundamental theological recognition that what we are doing in remaining in fellowship with the people we find questionable, and who question us, is expressing the solidarity of the baptised identity – our neighbourhood, with suffering, sinful, needy, and confused humanity, in and out of the Church.  That means that in baptism the gift of the Spirit is not only drawing us up into new creation, the gift of the Spirit is always holding open the door of communion. Holding open the possibility of solidarity, of fellowship, with the strange, the threatening, the embarrassing.

This is a bit of a parenthesis, but I have to say that one of the things that strikes me most about visiting parish churches in certain parts of the country, is quite simply that you see there the neighbourhood of people who would not be visibly neighbours anywhere else.  Visiting a parish some years ago in the East End of London, I remember so vividly looking around and seeing the diversity of race and age and class in that rather remarkable church, and thinking, “Where else?”  And that remains one of the great gifts and glories of the church of God in general and, dare I say it, the Church of England at its best.

The neighbourhood of chaos and the neighbourhood of others, accepting and recognising our need, understanding our solidarity – often a solidarity that we find quite hard to come to terms with – but neither of those would make any sense unless we took seriously the third dimension here, which is of course the neighbourhood of God the Father.  Where are we taken by baptism? We’re taken into the neighbourhood of God the Father. That’s what the Spirit does. When St Paul tells us that the Spirit is poured into our hearts so that we cry “Abba, Father”, St Paul is telling us that baptism takes us into the heart of the Father.

In the first chapter of St John’s gospel, when we read in the prologue that “the Word was with God” (John 1.1), and the “only begotten” was, literally, “in the bosom of God” (John 1.18), surely what we’re meant to understand is that the word of God is, as it’s sometimes been translated, “next to the Father’s heart.”  And in that same fourth gospel Jesus says to his disciples, “Where I am, there will my servant be also.” (John 12.26) And if the eternal word of God, made flesh in Jesus, is “next to the Father’s heart”, and if we are going where Jesus goes, in baptism, then that’s where we’re going: to the Father’s heart.

That is both a deeply consoling and a deeply challenging vision. The Jesus who is next to the Father’s heart, and prays “Abba, Father” Himself in Gethsemane, is the Jesus who, because He is so close to the Father, has no defences against what the Father asks of Him and so goes to the Father’s heart through the cross. And that’s where we’re going too: the very centre of our Christian identity, our Christian location; the very energy and heart of the new creation – to be taken into the cross and the resurrection.

Where baptism takes us is a dangerous place, a risky place. The cost of facing our chaos, the cost of solidarity with others, is all part of the ultimate cost of being defenceless before the will of God the Father.  And so to grow into Christ, and to go where He goes, is to grow in intimacy with the Father; an intimacy which constantly reconnects us with our neediness and our frailty, and connects us with the need of our neighbour. Our solidarity with the neighbour is part of our solidarity with Christ, next to the Father’s heart.

Three kinds of neighbourhood, three dimensions into which baptism takes us.  All of them both exciting and consoling, and challenging and worrying.  All of them reminding us that one thing baptism is not is simply ticking a box or simply signing a statement, let alone joining a club. Baptism is going where Jesus goes. The baptised life is life lived in those three neighbourhoods of our own chaos, the neighbour’s need, and the will and love of the Father.

Rowan Williams, Study Session on Baptism for Clery and Readers, 20 July 2012. See also the chapter on baptism in Being Christian (SPCK, 2014).

40 Days of Baptism: 14

Chris Russell writes a letter to Sammy, a child he baptises at St. Laurence in Reading. This letter is one of ten which make up his book Ten Letters: To be delivered in the event of my death. He hopes one day that the 2yr-old Sammy will one day read this letter and come to understand what happened on his baptism day. Below is some of the letter's edited highlights.

Dear Sammy,

I am writing this to you on your baptism day. You’ll be pleased to know, for the record, that you didn’t cry, you didn’t have to wear a dress and the whole of the front row were soaked, including your grandmother. As I am sure your parents will show you photos and the cards, this letter isn’t about telling you what happened; this letter is a foretelling of what I hope might be.

That might sound a bit weird, like an attempt at fortune telling. But that’s not my intention in writing it down. My strong conviction is that baptism states things, claims things and enacts things in categorical ways.

Today, 11 October 2009, is your baptism day …

Today you were baptized into Jesus Christ. You become a participant in him, because in this baptism event of his, he became a participant in your life. He participated for you, he lived for you, suffered for you, died for you, rose again for you. Your identity is his. His identity is yours. This is the kind of stuff I mean when I say, baptism states, claims, and enacts. Because today we stated, claimed, enacted that you never stand alone. That you stand in him.

It is not that you bring anything to this to make it a possibility, or to make it happen. You simply come to the waters … For you, Samuel, are on equal ground with the young orphan girl who was baptized today in Rwanda, with the illiterate grandmother who was baptized today in Argentina, with the teenage Afghan refugee who has found a true home while fleeing, with the child of the royal birth in St. Peter’s Basilica … Baptism declares you are one with Jesus of Nazareth, and so you too can hear the voice of the Father through his ears: ‘You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’

Chris Russell, Ten Letters: To Be Delivered in the Event of My Death (DLT, 2012), pp.159-173.

40 Days of Baptism: 13

A shorter word about baptism today comes from John Colwell and his wonderful little book The Rhythm of Doctrine, which sets out what Christians believe around the Christian year and its major seasons. Colwell discusses baptism in his chapter on 'The One Who Journeys to the Cross', which he likes with not surprisingly with Lent. (Colwell's more developed understanding of baptism can be found in his book Promise and Presence).

To be baptised is to abandon an inauthentic humanity with all its vain attempts to dominate, to exploit, to transcend; it is to be re-born into this authentic humanity identified in Christ; it is to accept the way of the Cross, the way of service, the way of suffering, the way of dependence, the way of trust. Lent, therefore, is not simply a season of self-denial or of token abstinence it is a seasonal reiteration of the invitation and the promise which is baptism to be authentically human, to live as servants, to live in dependence, to live in trust. In Lent we journey again with Christ from baptism through the wilderness, through temptation, through rejection, through suffering, and even through death, trusting that the way of the Cross is the way to resurrection and authentic eternal life.

John E, Colwell, The Rhythm of Doctrine: A Liturgical Sketch how Christian Faith and Faithfulness (Paternoster, 2007), p.70.

40 Days of Baptism: 12

The account of baptism below comes from Will Campbell's novel The Glad River. Will Campbell was a Baptist pastor in North America. The Glad River tells the story of Doops, who spends most of the novel refusing his mother's wishes that he gets baptised. The novel ends with the scene below. 

Kingston and Mr. Corbitt stood at the foot of the bunk, saying nothing Three prisoners sat on the edge of the bunk, all of them handcuffed together. There had been four but one had been released that morning. The prisoners knew no more what to make of what was taking place than the judge and the prosecutor.

"Wonder why his mamma didn't come," one of them whispered.

"I don't know," the one in the middle answered.

"I heard she wanted it done in church," the third one said.

"I heard she don't think's a baptising," the first prisoner said.

Doops and Model T moved to face each other squarely. The others moved closer together, leaving them as much room as they could.

“You have shown me the truth, my friend,” Doops began. “Now I am asking you for the sign.” He spoke in a clear, eloquent, and oratorical fashion.

“Are you asking to be baptized?” Model T said with equal fluency.

“Yes,” Doops replied. “I am asking for the sign.”

“Are you heartily sorry for all your sins?

“Yes.”

“Do you desire the baptism?”

“Yes.”

“Who will forbid me, that I should baptize him?” Model T said, looking around the room.

“No one,” Kingston, Mr. Corbitt, and the nurse said in unison.

“No one,” the three prisoners mumbled in hushed tones after them.

“Humble yourself before God and His Church and kneel down,” Model T said. Doops, wearing seersucker trousers and a new white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and the cuffs turned up, knelt as close to the washbasin, already filled with water when they came in, as he could get. Model T cupped both of his hands together and dipped into the water.

“I baptize you I the name of God the Father,” he said, letting the water trickle over the tips of his fingers and onto Doops’s bowed head. “God the Son,” pouring another handful of water. “And God the Holy Spirit,” the water running off Doops’s cowlicked head, down his back, and onto his shirtfront.

Doops stood up, making no effort to dry the water from his face and clothing. The judge and prosecutor edged their way towards the open cell door. All the others formed a circle around Doops, embracing him, the prisoners joining in the embrace as best they could with their hands cuffed. The judge and district attorney moved back in and shook Doops’s hand.

Will Campbell, The Glad River (Smyth & Helwys, 2005 [1982]), p.322-323.

40 Days of Baptism: 11

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.

40 Days of Baptism: 10

Today I share a baptismal hymn written by Chris Ellis. Baptists need to write more baptismal hymns/songs. Looking in Baptist Praise and Worship (Oxford, 1991), the last time the Baptist Union of Great Britain published a hymn book, I found very few hymns satisfying hymns in the baptism section, and almost none that speak of baptism in sacramental terms. We're singing Chris's baptism hymn tomorrow to the tune of Before the throne of God Above (arranged by Vicki Cook © 1997 Sovereign Grace /Intergrity's Hosanna! music).

Here at the water we confess

The word of God has been made flesh,
For when he in the waters bathed

He shared the fate of those he’d save.

As Jesus to the Jordan came

So we have come to do the same:
Then let us all from evil turn

And ways of love from Jesus learn.

The water buries like a tomb

Yet there new life springs from the womb.
We stand and sing what we believe –
That all in Christ new life receive.

We share one life and own one name:
‘Jesus is Lord’ we all proclaim;
Called to be one, his body we,

A sign of hope for all to see.

We set our feet upon the Way,

To speak for Christ in all we say;
Through Spirit’s power in fire and dove,
To do his work and live his love.

© Christopher J. Ellis

40 Days of Baptism: 9

Following on from yesterday, comes a story of baptism from Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran minister and pastor of the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. Her most recent book is Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People.  

Some of us in this congregation were baptized as infants, some as children some as teenagers, some as adults and some of you – and I’m not naming names, but some of you were baptized more than once. As for me, I was 12 when I was baptized and I remember so much of it…I remember wearing white sandals, and how the little golf pencil felt in my hand as I sat up front at church, so many eyes on me as I filled out the little card that said “I desire to be baptized”. I remember the walk up the stairs to the little room where the women would change into baptismal robes. I remember the strong hands of the man who was baptizing me and how the water wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be.

It would be just 4 or 5 years later that I would break with the church of my upbringing – and forget about my baptism entirely, since it took place in a church I no longer felt comfortable in or even agreed with in any way.

My sojourn away from Christianity lasted 10 years until I discovered Lutheranism and this beautiful grace-based theology and our gorgeous liturgy and it felt like I was choosing to be a part of a Christian path that just felt right to me and with great excitement I told Pastor Ross Merkle at St Paul Lutheran in Oakland that I wanted to be baptized. I was crestfallen when he said that he couldn’t do that since I was already baptized. “Nadia” he said to me, “Baptism is always God’s action upon us, no matter the circumstances. Which means that baptism is for you, it’s just not about you so it doesn’t matter that yours happened in a church you ended up leaving. Baptism is about God.”

Nadia Bolz-Weber, “In The Beginning”: A Sermon on the Occasion Of Paula’s Baptism, Jan 14, 2015.

40 Days of Baptism: 8

Something short for today from Martin Luther via Rodney Clapp, reminding us, especially us who are Baptists, that baptism is not just a testimony of faith.

We are not to base baptism on a ground as slippery, brittle, and often confused as our own faith. Martin Luther is clear. “If I am baptized on God’s bidding I know for certain that I am baptized. Were I to be baptized merely on my own faith, I might tomorrow find myself unbaptized, if faith failed me, or I became worried that I might not yesterday have had the faith rightly.”

Rodney Clapp, Tortured Wonders: Christianity Spirituality for People, Not Angels (Brazos, 2004), p.108.