Today, baptism is on my mind.
Actually it has been on my mind for a couple of years, ever since a faithful participant in my congregation declined membership because baptism wasn’t something she believed she could say yes to with integrity.
Maybe it was actually on my mind before that, since 3 years ago I attended a workshop in one of my congregation’s denominations and got into a conversation about baptism and how it may be off-putting to folks, an artificial barrier to the grace that church has to offer.
Or maybe it has been on my mind longer than that, since 5 or so years ago, a previous worshipper actually did experience (succumb to? undergo?) baptism, not because she believed in baptism — or Jesus — per se, but because she valued the mission of the congregation and wanted to be among the leadership. Baptism was a way to get where she believed she needed to be.
Heck, maybe it has been on my mind much longer than all that.
I know I think of my own baptism every year, August 28, coincidentally also the day (but not the year) Dr. King delivered the “I have a dream” speech, and coincidentally the day Emmett Till was murdered. Other stuff, too; each year I learn deeper significance to August 28.
And each year I wonder what my baptism has to do with all that, if it has anything to do whatsoever.
But this week it is on my mind because of my Thursday book group.
We’ve been reading Walter Brueggemann’s Tenacious Solidarity: biblical provocations on race, religion, climate and the economy, (Fortress Press, 2018), a collection of essays and lectures originally delivered or published from 2015-2018, or so, and gathered under a theme of covenantal fidelity, hesed in Hebrew, often translated steadfast love, or what Brueggemann calls “tenacious solidarity.” The collection is a compelling invitation to rethink faith in a damaged world.
In chapter 19, late in the book, he begins to tie it all together with a call for “recovery of baptism as a world-changing sacrament.”
World changing. World changing! World changing?
Have I ever once imagined that baptism is world-changing? Can I imagine that my own baptism was even my-world-changing?
So, why do we baptize? It’s a good question.
We talked about it this week in this group comprising old Catholics, a Mormon, a couple of Lutherans, some Free Methodists, a Nazarene and probably some other folks. Such is the Woodside demographic. Unsurprisingly, after we got past the funny stories about immersion baptism and waders that leaked, folks all had their own understandings, or confessed their utter lack of understanding. Why do we baptize?
Some just don’t know, except that it is expected and traditional.
Some say it is a means of some kind of salvation, an indelible mark that seals you for heaven. I used to think that, faithful as I was to the catechism of my youth. I’m not much of a “heaven” person anymore, so some sort of eternal life “over there” depending on our having been “washed in the waters of regeneration” or whatever just doesn’t move me.
Others say it is a membership ritual, an initiation. That’s the one I most often settle on. But membership into what? Churches are often communities of worship and socializing and potlucks and good deeds. Is that all it is about? If that’s it, “world-changing” hardly seems to fit.
All of those reasons seem rooted in religion to me, not really concerned with making a better world.
But what if, instead, we see baptism as initiation into a worldview?
Based on Torah, Brueggemann goes on to describe the “alternative practices of social relationships that correspond to the social practices of a covenantal God” — forgiveness, including debt forgiveness and the refusal to keep score; hospitality that welcomes even the most inconvenient folks; and generosity that moves beyond the power imbalance and condescension of charity.
“It is unnecessary…” he writes, “…to speak about the great theoretical codes of capitalism, socialism, and so forth” because an examination of scripture will take us where we need to be — to a world of enough.
I disagree with Brueggemann that it is unnecessary to speak of those theoretical codes. We name them, just as we name the powers — to understand how biblical truths relate to our own lives, and how biblical truths contradict the “wisdom” of our world. We name them to challenge the vilification of one and the idolization of the other.The more I read scripture, the more convinced I am that socialism is the way of Jesus, that capitalism is beyond redemption. I know this, I believe this because, however poorly they may get lived out, socialism has at its heart ensuring that everyone has what they need; while capitalism is at its core a system of extraction and hoarding, exactly the thing God railed about during the slave years in Egypt.
We are baptized, then, into an alternative community, one that pokes its thumb in the eye of the powers and refuses to see the world in terms of profits and commodities. Counter to the “values of the predatory economy of sex and money,” he writes, “the baptismal alternative is to refuse to participate in that dominant value system … in order to practice an alternative of covenantal neighborliness…”
Baptism, then, was an overtly political act. Can it be again?
For Christians in this country, then, it would mean to reject American exceptionalism; for Christians elsewhere, it would surely mean a similar thing, though with a more or less disordered national ego with which to contend.
It sounds remarkably like the early communities of Jesus, doesn’t it? Like that verse from Acts 2: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
Imagine such a thing on a national scale. We don’t need to be a theocracy to live this way. We just need a lot more neighborliness built into the highest levels of social organization. If every baptized person in the country (including the ones in Congress and on the courts) began to live as if baptism was in fact an initiation into a community of enough — a political event more than a religious one — and began to insist that our political life reflect our desire for a world of enough, well, the world would change in every way imaginable.
So Brueggemann calls for “recovery of baptism as a world-changing sacrament,” and suddenly it all seems quite possible. And not necessarily religious at all.
Lent is coming. Maybe just for a season, instead of baptizing more people, we who are already baptized might spend some time re-imagining our own baptism and pondering again what salvation might mean, what community might look like. Maybe it will be a lot less religious, and a lot more Jesus-like.
It’s worth a try.