Invocation
“Wade in the Water”
Blind Boys of Alabama
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For those who track the annual lectionary journey, yesterday’s focus was the “Baptism of the Lord.” It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, since I hold that the recovery of baptismal integrity is one way to address the profound renewal needed among communities on the way of Jesus.
Ken Sehested
Early in 2001, as three of us were busy making plans for a new congregation, I wrote to pastors of congregations dually affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Alliance of Baptists (as was our intent). One of the questions I asked was how each approached the practice of baptism: given the UCC’s history is in the Reformed tradition, commonly practicing infant baptism; and the Alliances’s history is in credobaptist (from the Latin credo, “I believe’) tradition.
One response I got summed up the general sentiment of those who responded: “Actually, we don’t talk much about baptism.”
Part of me resonated with that conclusion. There has been much persecution dispensed, not to mention actual shedding of blood, in the history of the church’s internal dispute over this matter (at least since the Reformation).
Another part of me was just sad. Grieved and regretful. Wondering if this practice was part of the furniture needing to be tossed as part of the continuing process of reformation of the little flock of Jesus.
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Hymn of supplication
“Take Me to the Water (to Be Baptized)”
Darrell Adams
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In a few days we will mark the 500th anniversary of the first adult “re-baptism” by leaders of what their detractors called the “anabaptist” movement. Followers of the Reformation leader Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich broke with their mentor over the matter of infant baptism; and on Jan. 21, 1525, a small group of these dissenters, who referred themselves as Swiss Brethren, gathered for worship and prayers. One of them, Conrad Grebel, baptized George Blaurock, a Catholic priest-turned-protester, by immersion, who then baptized the others. It was considered illegal by the semi-sovereign canton of Zurich, then one of three regions of the Swiss Confederation.
The following year, on March 7, 1526, the Zurich council passed an edict that made adult re-baptism punishable by drowning. Felix Manz, the first casualty of that ruling, had his hands bound from behind to his feet, through which a wooden pole was placed, then thrown in the middle of the Limmat River. Thus began a long period of violent repression by leaders of the Magisterial Reformation (led by the likes of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli) and the Catholic Church against the multiple fledgling Anabaptist (“rebaptizer”) groups collectively referred to as the Radical Reformation.
In 2004, the Evangelical-Reformed Church of Zurich had a six-month commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), Zwingli’s successor as pastor of the city’s historic Grossmünster Church (formerly a Catholic cathedral). On June 26, that church confessed its sins of the 16th century and asked for forgiveness by the descendants of those first Anabaptists. That evening, a historical marker was unveiled on the bank of the river where Manz was drowned
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Hymn of thanks
“Baptism”
Randy Travis
“The summer breeze, made ripples on the pond
Rattled through the rings and the willow trees beyond
Daddy in his good hat, mama in her Sunday dress
Watched in pride, as I stood there in the water up to my chest
And the preacher spoke about the cleansing blood
I sank my toes into that East Texas mud …
This road is long and dusty, sometimes the soul must be cleansed
And I long to feel that water, rushing over me again”
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After intensive research and much self-interrogation on the question of baptism, my conviction crystalized, was underscored and printed in all-caps, punctuated in no small measure by horror of the 9/11 terrorist attack here in the US. Here is an except of what I wrote:
Every discipline of spiritual formation is reckoned by some form of relinquishment, is oriented to some kind of “dying.” Which makes sense, because every dominant system will claim that what is possible is limited to what is available. People of faith believe otherwise; but in order to move forward a kind of retraction is needed.
For many Christians, the inaugural act of this retraction exercise is signified by baptism, which involves the ritualized activity of dying (to the current ordering of values), being buried (severance from the illusion of self-centered life) and being resurrected (to a renewed configuration of safety, security, salvation). “Those who find their life will lose it,” Jesus said, “and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). … Thus, people on the Way, those immersed in the Jesus narrative — which, like most narratives, is porous and resistant to philosophical precision — are bound for trouble.
I like the way this aphorism states it, paraphrasing a text from John’s Gospel: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd” (author unknown, although often attributed to Flannery O’Connor).
We are God’s odd ones. And according to the Jesus story, God is more taken with the agony of the earth than with the ecstasy of heaven. Connecting the purpose of Jesus with the drama of Creation is the heart of Christian confession. Everything else is footnote.
The church’s “political” task is only distantly related to electoral politics and completely foreign to partisan wrangling among elected leaders, particularly in our addled age, with the Oval Office soon to become a romper room, a Congress directed by a clown car coterie, and a Supreme Court majority adrift in injudicious rulings based on spurious reasoning and rampant venality.
The root meaning of politics, broadly stated, has to do with the complex patterns and structures of relations in the created order. God’s purpose was for a flourishing community, human and humus alike, just governance of who gets what, when and how — virtually opposite of what now exists.
From the earliest chapters in Genesis, spiritual corruption and violent conflict are mirror images of each other. “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). As Luke’s Gospel confirms, when “glory to God” is rightly rendered, “peace” will be its earthly correspondence (2:14).
As the ancient Roman historian Tacitus wrote, quoting a Caledonian chieftain subdued by the Roman empire, “They create a wasteland and call it peace.” This is Pax Romana, the “peace” of Rome wrought by violent repression, and it stands in sharp, unequivocal contrast to Pax Christi, the peace of Christ, of which John the Revelator lyrically spoke, the time when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”
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Hymn of petition
“Down to the River to Pray”
Allison Krauss
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In its variant practices with regards to baptism — and in its best moments — the church always has attempted to say two important things about God’s redemptive work in the world.
First, that the initiative of grace is God’s, not our own. We are not self-sufficient, nor are we self-generated. Those who argue for infant baptism have (in their best moments) emphasized this reality, along with the insistence that faith is communally formed, that the spiritual formation of individuals involves being nurtured and cultivated in a community.
In this tradition of baptism — at its best — the responsibility of the entire believing community is emphasized.
Second, for a relationship to thrive it must be mutual. The Radical Reformers’ “believer’s” baptism tradition began not as an argument over how much water was necessary. The argument centered in this controversial assertion: Membership in the state and membership in the church are not coterminous. Being a citizen is not the same as being a Christian. They argued that, in the New Testament, the decision to “follow” Jesus very often involved a rupture of social life, potentially a conflict with ruling authorities.
Notably, for most in the Anabaptist tradition, the refusal to wield the sword in defense of the state was a theological affirmation, not simply a moral conviction, meaning nonviolence says something about God, reflected back into the covenantal terms of godliness.
This tradition of baptism — at its best — sought to emphasize the personal investment (and risk) in the decision to follow Jesus. Such decisions, they argued, could not be made until one reached an appropriate age of accountability, until one could intentionally and conscientiously make the decision.
As it happens, those congregations that practice believer’s baptism often observe blessing rituals for infants; and those that practice infant baptism typically have catechesis or confirmation classes for youth.
The pastoral difficulty is that we have these two crucial rites of passage but only one historic ritual.
Pious adoration of the baptistry (and the Communion table) always has been an effective means of exempting participants from enlistment in the real-life struggles to which this vision-shaping ritual directs. We parse the syntax of the delivery mechanism and forget all about the payload.
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Hymn of commitment
“Good Trouble”
Leigh Nash with Ruby Amanfu
“But I’ll never give up even when it hurts
Because love is still turning over tables
And love still makes the blinded eyes see
And there’s a healing that’s waiting in the water
That’s still making saints out of rebels
My God is still making good trouble”
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Paul Ricouer wrote: “If you want to change people’s obedience, then you must change their imagination.”
My overriding passion is to insist that recovery of baptismal integrity is the Christian community’s most urgent reimagining act. By implication, this suggests the most urgent revival is to drink more deeply from the wells that nourish world-transforming faith.
The church’s invitation to the water is not a tribal identity marker. It is the call to live in contradiction to the present world’s prevailing values and aligning order: a call that leads to reading history from the underside, to God’s preferential option for those for whom the world considers dispensable and of little value.
Dare to wade in such waters. Where the Spirit guides faithfully amid parched landscape and drowning seas. To the land where milk and honey are neither hoarded for profit nor rationed in demand for tribute. Here, milk strengthens brittle bones and honey’s sweet delight feeds joy’s outbreak in dancing, praise and adoration.
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Benediction
“Wade in the Water”
adaptation of the traditional spiritual by Ken Medema to mark the anniversary of the George Floyd murder
For more on this topic:
- “Water of life: A baptismal prayer”
- “My soul thirsts for You: Selected texts about water for use as a litany for worship”
- “Getting soaked: A meditation on the recovery of baptismal integrity”
- “Shall we gather at the river? A reflection on baptismal integrity”