Baptism was on my mind before, but more and different since I have kept vigil following a terrible accident that left us waiting for my Mother to die. I actually wrote about baptism shortly before the terribleness (you can read that here).
Our Thursday book group at church had just finished 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, essays 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.”
Have I ever once imagined that baptism is world-changing? I wondered. Can I imagine that my own baptism was even my-world-changing? And why do we baptize?
We talked about it in our book group, folks from a bunch of traditions, folks with our own understandings, or our self-professed lack of understanding. Why do we baptize?
Tradition? Membership ritual? Guarantee of afterlife?
When we talked, I tried, as I always do, to keep us rooted in this world, this place of calling and need. We are people of Jesus, after all, invited to see something else and make a better world.
But what if we can see baptism as initiation into a worldview? I asked in that prior essay. Baptism back then was an overtly political act. Can it be again?
This week, I'm leaning into baptism as more than one thing.
Fifteen years ago, my Mother had a brain tumor, which, though benign, left her with substantial recovery work to do. In the before-surgery and the rehab post-surgery, she said exactly what she'd said so many times in my life — "it's in God's hands."
In the immediate aftermath of that earlier event, as various folks were working very hard to remove the last stubborn staples from her head prior to discharge, I sat with her, holding her hand and fighting back the tears for the pain I knew she was experiencing. She asked me to sing. I asked what I should sing and she chose a familiar song my young niece had sung recently with the children's choir at their church:
Our God is an awesome god
who reigns from heaven above
with wisdom, power and love;
our God is an awesome god.
I sang, but you know my voice cracked and it was hard to get through it. For my Mother, though, it was a sure statement of her uncomplicated faith. She had been baptized in her Baptist church when she was 12, and had never wavered in her belief that she was in God's hands.
February 21, then, last month, just four days after a fall, as my family faced the excruciating task of instructing that her breathing tube be removed, I thought of that conviction, that song, that moment — and all the moments of her life of uncomplicated faith.
That night, among the songs and psalms and favorite scriptures I knew she loved, I read aloud to my unconscious Mother part of Jan Richardson's blessing for winter solstice:
This blessing
does not mean
to take the night away
but it knows
its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots
along the path,
knows what it means
to travel
in the company
of a friend.
So when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.
This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.
As the next three days passed and Mother continued to breathe despite expectations, we reminded her of what she already knew, even if she wasn't conscious to know anything at all: that she could, with the same certainty she'd known all her life, fall into the arms of a loving God.
I don't know what all baptism means. But I know it is more than one thing.
I still believe it is a commitment to a particular kind of resistance to the powers of this world. I believe it is a call to a task of creating the world Jesus imagined. But, for my Mother and her grieving family, it was also the grace to face the worst moment with just a little less despair.
I'm not saying baptism is a requirement for God's mercy; that's not how I know God. I'm not saying it is about saving a seat in some far-away heaven; I'm still not sure what I believe about that, and, as you've heard me say before, the ending of the television show The Good Place makes as much sense to me as anything else. My faith isn't nearly as uncomplicated as my Mother's.
But for a few days in the worst time of our life, there was, for us who would remain, the comfort of knowing that a baptized faith in the hesed of God was making my Mother's journey a little less disorienting for her.
God's tenacious solidarity. A gift in the hardest of times.
(see: Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: a book of blessings for times of grief. Orlando: Wanton Gospeller Press. 2016, 2020.)