Remember Your Baptism

Of all the rituals we enact in church, none seems wackier than baptism.  Here in the midst of a large gathering replete with formal music and people in their “Sunday best” comes a tactile, potentially embarrassing initiation of being dunked in a tub of warm water.

To add to baptism’s wackiness are the hodge-podge of meanings we place on this act: it is a symbol of dying (“buried with him in baptism” my pastor intoned as he lowered me, stiff and corpse-like in the watery grave); it’s also a symbol of being born; it represents cleansing; it is supposed to harken a memory of the primal waters of creation, while also being symbolic of the waters of judgment in the flood coupled with God’s deliverance of Noah; and let’s not forget Jesus’ self-claim that he is “living water.”

Clear as the muddy waters of the Jordan River?

The baptistry water would get room temperature if the preacher tried to patch all those images together into an understandable whole.

And that’s the beauty of baptism-- it’s not about explanations, or logic.  It is an act of faith in Something more beautiful and whole than we can express with words.  It is a vulnerable ritual of trust that there is Something eternal and true in old, old acts.  It is a joining in the fellowship of the loved in order to publicly and bravely take on the work of Love.

“Remember your baptism” we suggest to those who witness the ritual, as if to say “go back to that place in your journey where you jumped head-first into the way of Love, where you were immersed in the joy, hope, possibilities of living both deep within and beyond yourself.

Talk about wacky.