The Story of Us

Genesis 1:1-5    

Mark 1:4-11       

Years ago, I used to do a little bit of mental math, to sort of gauge the health of the church. I kept a tally in my head of two things: funerals and baptisms.

For a while, there was some parity between the two tallies, so I felt things were okay. I felt it was safe to say that we were keeping an even keel, as long as, for every member lost, there was a gain. With every baptism, there was newness of life; there was renewed hope.

I stopped doing that a while ago. And the truth is we haven’t had any baptisms at our font for a long time – none in the past year. And I cannot deny that the numbers tell us something – although I don’t think I can tell you exactly what that story is.

As I told you last year, my identity, my sense of purpose in pastoral ministry, is tied up in baptism. To handle the waters of baptism, on behalf of the church as a whole, is perhaps the greatest honor there is in ministry – from where I stand.

It is an act that has meaning that shoots back through time – all the way to the beginning, when the earth was a shapeless void, a mass of water, and God’s wind, God’s Spirit, swept over the face of the waters. The act of baptism, the sound and the sense of water as it moves, touches skin, takes us back to the beginning and what it means to be created by God – and recreated by love.

The act of baptism, which Jesus participated in – even though everyone said, and still says, that he didn’t need it. Jesus did not need to be recreated, renewed. But he did it anyway – maybe just to make an example for us. Or maybe just because it is so wonderful and he wanted it – even if he didn’t need it.

I never miss an opportunity to talk about baptism – on this Sunday when we remember the baptism of Jesus, or on any Sunday when we baptize a new Christian, a new member of our family. I love to talk about it and I feel the need to talk about it because I am afraid we think about it too little.

And maybe there is no reason to expect we should think about it more. After all, baptism is a sort of pre-verbal, pre-cognitive act. Any logical or rational arguments associated with it were tacked on after the fact. The act of baptism is an act as ancient as humankind. The act of baptism is stronger than any argument for its existence. The act of baptism is. It simply is.

We actually do ourselves a disservice, I think, when we make too much of the rules about baptism. Particularly about the prohibitions against re-baptism. We are adamant in the church that baptism – once done – is sufficient. Baptism, no matter how or where or at what age it was done, equips you for a life of faith and all kinds of ministry in the church. I have been among the most ardent guardians of this truth, being provoked to irritation by stories of people who have gotten themselves re-baptized at the Jordan River because it was such a cool thing to do, or re-baptized by immersion at the Baptist Church because it just feels more complete. I become sensitive to any suggestion that our baptism is merely a pathetic dribble of water; that it is inadequate, hardly enough to call a washing away of anything.

And yet, in my zeal to keep us all theologically in line, I might overlook the importance of the experience of baptism. Experience is what baptism is mostly about.

A baby swims for months through the amniotic fluid of the womb, and out through the birth canal, finally taking his first breath into new life. Every time this child is submerged in the baby bath, or has a soft wet cloth wiped across his face he is bodily remembering that primordial state. The baby doesn’t know the words to describe it, but the baby knows the touch of water.

The world before creation swam in watery chaos until God brushed over the surface with God’s Spirit and spoke – calling out the distinctiveness of creation and all that is in it. Bit by bit, creation articulated itself into species of plants and animals, free from the watery chaos yet never free from the water, which is, we know, life itself. All of life thirsts, leans toward water, which holds the mysterious power of life in it. The world does not have the words to describe it, to do it justice, but something within us is touched, a memory recalled of that primordial state, by thirst satisfied.

The touch, the feel, the smell, the sound, the taste of the water, is enough to recall all of it. Death, birth, beginnings, creation.

It is something that we might relive, re-experience, time and again. It tells us where we came from. It tells us what we are and who we are.

In Judaism, there is a history of baptism – John the Baptizer did not make this thing up. It has always been a ritual of purification that individuals would participate in from time to time, called the mikva. It was part of the temple priests’ purification requirement before they could serve their duties in the temple. But anymore the mikva is used only in a few circumstances, one of which is a monthly purification ritual of married orthodox women.

A woman of childbearing age has a monthly cycle which is marked by cleanliness, uncleanliness, and a return to cleanliness. After her monthly cycle, she goes to the mikva and undergoes a well prescribed and thorough ritual. Every inch of her body is combed, shaved, clipped, scoured to cleanliness. And then she enters the bath, the final stage, where she lowers herself completely under the water, then rises. She is declared clean by the bath attendant, and free to return home to her husband, no longer impure. Now, once again, pure.

There is much about this ritual and the set of beliefs that support it which I find meaningless – except for the single piece that defines the whole: the bath. The submerging into and the rising out of the water is laden with meaning – ancient and timeless.

It is the reason why I find my spirit calming and centering, my emotional temperature lowering, as I approach a babbling brook and sit down next to it. It is the reason why some need to reconnect with the ocean periodically in order to feel fully alive. It is the reason why every mother knows that the recipe for soothing a fussy baby is to insert her in warm water. Water is the source of life; water connects us with the source of life.

Yet most weeks our baptismal font is dry. It sits on the side as a dry symbol, almost forgotten, of who we are.

Well, I have told you a story now – about who we are, where we came from, what we are like. But now you need to tell a story, as well. It must be more than a story about the past. Our stories must retell the past as something that is alive and present, life-giving and surprising. We have no problem telling the story about who we were, once upon a time. But that story leaves us barren and cold. We must tell the story about who we are.

The water is here. Life is here. If you wish to live, if you want to tell a story about who we are, now, in this place, come and be revived by the waters of life.