Loading...There is no such thing as a dry baptism.
While the Church might debate whether or not a baptism requires dunking or sprinkling, outdoor river or indoor font, baptismal dress or birthday suit, adult believer or an infant of promise, the one thing that the Church can agree on when it comes to baptism is that somebody needs to get wet.
That’s where the water comes in.
We understand water to be a gift from God. In the story of creation, everything starts out wet, very wet. And in so many stories that follow where God and humanity interact, water plays a role, whether in destructive flood or parted sea, or in this morning’s account of John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan.
Without water, we would not be. Without water, God would have to find another way to sustain life and to love the life God has created.
In baptism, when the one to be baptized is soaked or submerged or sprinkled, the water does both a real thing and also expresses a holy mystery.
The real thing, the obvious sign made visible, is what water does to dry skin, to antique lace, to bowed head. Someone is now wet and has been made clean by the water, though most people show up to baptisms already quite presentable and polished. Yet, the water cleans us all the same.
The getting clean part of baptisms isn’t all that controversial. It’s nice to be clean, to shine and sparkle because of what God does in expressing the love of the Christ through water.
In baptisms, however, we also recognize a kind of drowning in God’s life, a process of being taken into the life, death and resurrection of the Christ. That is the kind of language that wakes us up, that startles or surprises or scandalizes.
Baptisms take us from the land of the non-committed and ask us to follow Jesus. In baptisms, the water breaks open the Way, the deep reservoir into God’s life. And no matter how much water is involved in your baptism, you come out the other side, not only now clean but having died and been reborn. With that action, the real thing of getting wet gives way to the holy mystery of entering and exiting the water the same and yet wholly changed and made new.
In baptisms, the Christ takes hold of us and promises not to let go. In baptisms, we promise to cling to the Christ and follow. In leading us from the waters, the Christ goes with us all the way to the end. Holding and clinging, leading and following, the newly baptized Christian is invited to remember her baptism by living ever deeper on the reconciled side of the Jordan.
On the other side, you are no longer wet, but still baptized. On the other side, you have been made clean yet placed back again in the here and now world of dust and dirt. On the other side, the person made fully alive in baptism also proclaims the Christ Crucified and Raised and Ascended.
Now by this point, you might think, “Can water do all that?” Can water take us that far? Is this a special kind of water, found only at religious stores or at sacred springs?
This is where it is helpful to read the rubrics in the Prayer Book, the italicized instructions that do their best to guide us as we make our way through the prayers and rituals of the Church. On page 298, in the Book of Common Prayer, concerning the service of baptism, we are instructed that “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the Church.”
So, the water is not the only thing we encounter in baptism. In Christian baptism, you need to get wet but you also need the Spirit to show up.
When St. Paul is traveling through Ephesus he encounters disciples who have been baptized, baptized by John. He asks them about the Holy Spirit. They give Paul a blank look. “We were baptized, we all got wet. No one told us about the Spirit.”
This encounter gives St. Paul a chance to teach, to teach the faith to the almost faithful. As John baptized, he told everyone about the One to come, Jesus, to believe in Him, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
When John baptized these disciples who are unaware of the Holy Spirit, maybe he dunked them and held them under the water while he spoke about Jesus and the Spirit that would be present with all those baptized in the name of the Messiah. As they rose up from the baptizing waters, gasping for air, maybe all they remembered was how much water was there and how wet they were and how baptized they must be by now. But John had pointed them beyond himself and his own baptism to Jesus and the Spirit’s baptism. But they did not hear this.
In St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan we see a beautiful convergence of all things necessary for Christian baptism. The water is there and John knows how to baptize with water. Jesus is there and chooses to begin his earthly ministry where all ministries begin, from the center of the baptized life. And the Spirit comes down and descends on Jesus. Water and Spirit and the Body of Christ all find each other in the moment of baptism. That is what we remember today in renewing our baptisms and in baptizing anew.
In Jesus’ baptism, we see John, the Forerunner, fully human yet open to God’s new thing. In Jesus’ baptism, we see the Spirit, which had first moved over the waters in the creation story, moving again to usher in the world made new through Christ Jesus. Human witness and Holy Spirit both show up to be present as the Christ holds them and all things together.
In baptism, we are introduced to the waters and the Spirit and the way of Jesus and the Body of Christ. The one to be baptized is attached to the One who is the Christ. The one to be baptized is also attached to the many, the Church.
There is a book, entitled A Silent Action: Encounters with Thomas Merton, that includes several essays reflecting on the late Catholic monk and mystic written by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The book includes a preface by another writer, Jim Forest, who mentions a debt that both Merton and Williams owe to Vladimir Lossky, the late Russian Orthodox theologian.
Such is the Church. In baptism, the Spirit unites us to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic community that is peopled with pilgrims in our own time and across the ages. Your life in faith is never simply about you and Jesus. It is always intended to be about you and all the fellow pilgrims along the Way who encourage our desire to follow the Christ.
Lossky, the Orthodox theologian, influenced both Merton and Williams in his writings on distinguishing between the “individual” and the “person.” In baptism, a solitary individual enters the waters and meets the Christ and begins a journey into personhood, into knowing that our true selves are not found in isolation but in the life of a community held together by the Christ, led by the Spirit, renewed by the ministry of all the baptized.
In the baptized life, we are not made to be cut off, either from each other or God. As the Anglican poet-theologian Charles Williams has written, we are “dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.” In taking on Christ, the individual is not abolished but enhanced by being knit together within a community held together by the Christ.
In baptism, we use language that suggests a turning, a turning away from one kind of life in order to embrace the life we find in Christ Jesus. One of the greatest temptations of our age is the temptation to believe we are alone, that we all live isolated lives. Even as we amass more ways to communicate and to share information, so often what we communicate and share is the sense that there is no one out there listening to us or anyone.
In baptism, we reject that belief and instead take on the full personhood intended for us in the Christ. You are not alone. We are not alone. In renewing our baptisms, remember that the first question we are asked in the covenant after the creedal questions relates to our willingness to continue in both the teachings and the fellowship of the apostles. The fellowship is to be a source of feeding your life, not obligating your soul.
Today, we will be invited to renew our baptismal vows. We will be asked to remember rightly into what we have been baptized. We have been baptized into Christ Jesus.
