Baptism: what’s the difference?
The record shows that the seed of my baptised life was planted on August 4, 1935. The priest was the saintly Stanley Hurd, the place St Andrew’s Cromwell.
I was 10 weeks old, a morsel of life with not a glimmer of understanding about the solemn three-way covenant being entered on my behalf. My parents and godparents were (even if driven largely by cultural conformity and blind obedience to the religious institution) vowing that I would know my entire life to be radically re-created, Christ-centred, Spirit-infused, a particle of holiness-enzyme for the loved world. The Church, by inference, was vowing to provide the nurture to ensure that this baptised life could grow for its duration in an integrity of body-mind-spirit in a community of living faith. The third party to the covenant – and, I believe, the only one unfailingly faithful – is the Creator of the universe, the lover of all life and each life, the implanter of the seed I imagine placed that day in my earthed being.
God and I are still working out the covenant – just as my wife Lesley and I have not ceased after more than half a century working out the covenant of marriage. Baptism is much more central than priesthood to my understanding of who and whose and why I am. There’s a lot more mystery than certainty. On the other hand, it’s feet-on-the-ground, of-this-world stuff for me. Superstition is nowhere near the centre of my working out of what it’s all about. .
Livestock may these days be implanted with microchips that instruct the computerized farm drafting gates to direct some to lush paddocks (interim blessings, then “heaven”) while others are remotely programmed for the meat works. I don’t see the meaning of my baptism as anything like that, or with an effect much like vaccination, dipping and drenching of animals. I believe the principal sacraments of the Church go much deeper and wider than the sacerdotal notion that a priest, in a few, isolated, long-ritualised minutes at a font or pool, unilaterally, magically, absolutely, changes either the identity or destiny of a life or renders it more loved by God. I’m on about living out the meaning of baptism in this life now rather than about whether, when and how one once was “done.” The sacrament (sign of grace in the world) that most matters is, I think, not in the ritual but in the life subsequently led. I don’t believe that Christians in traditions where the outward rite is not practised as it is in Anglicanism (Salvation Army, Quakers) are less my sisters and brothers in Christ.
This stream of inconclusive words is triggered by a recent conversation between two fellow-clerics:
Cleric A. “When parents come in from the cold to seek “christening” of a child I’m careful to acknowledge the universal, cultural need to give thanks for a new life, name that life in a way that affirms his or her uniqueness, and seek a blessing in whatever terms and from whatever source of life are apprehended in the family. I say that the local church can minister to that need with or without baptism, in or beyond the gathered life of the faith-community, and in the name of the One we worship as author and sustainer of all life. I then emphasise that baptism is not the same as “thanksgiving-naming-blessing.” I point to the 1990 guidelines of our church (The Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Pasifika) which insist, among other things, that the baptism rite is with rare exceptions to take place, after careful preparation, in the context of public worship, with parents and godparents undertaking that the child will grow within the life of the church and her faith. I’m likely to quote from our Prayer Book (HKMoA, p. 379; see also the Catechism, p.933): ‘When someone is baptised, that person is brought to Jesus Christ, and made a member of Christ’s Church. It is a new start to life in which the baptised person is accepted and sealed by God with the Holy Spirit to represent Christ to the world.’ After the catechumenal bases are covered, it’s the parents’ choice: I’ve never refused to baptise, but a significant proportion of families say thanksgiving-naming-blessing is what they really seek.”
Cleric B: “That’s all fine and good, but I’ll bet the vast majority of families, regardless of your distinction and their choice, subsequently continue to speak of their ‘christenings’ as cultural, catch-all rites of passage under the clouded eye of a benevolent, remote and unmoved mover beyond the bright blue sky, and with only a passing nod to God’s Church. Anyway, it seems to me that grace often sneaks into peoples’ lives independently of all this catechetical hair-splitting.”
This conversation was alongside a church where a baptism was to be celebrated that day in a family visiting briefly from a distant parish. Neither cleric seemed to be thinking of a term longer than a few weeks between a family’s initial approach and the ministering of the sacrament. Why such rush? There were good old days in church history when nearly all baptisms were celebrated just once a year, in the Great Easter Vigil. The candidates and their families had much of the preceding year for reflection, with intensive preparation through Lent. Perhaps more important than the learning of scripture and doctrine was gradual incorporation into a community of people who turned out to be, if anything, more vulnerably human than the un-baptised: the baptised experienced their shared life as fuel for the journey of ordinary life rather than as a terminal reward; they stumbled, had fallings-out, uncertainties, but yet shared trust in something palpably real; something experienced as grace, energy from an infinite aquifer of love and reconciliation, ultimate hope and joy, at the deep centre of each life and the life of the community of faith. There’s humble acceptance that the only way that goes the distance may be via what look to the uninitiated to be a narrow gate on a goat track. There’s more costly seeking and compassion than gloating.
Alongside the plummeted number of families who believe Christ’s Church relevant in any way let alone my way, the pitiful proportion honouring whatever vows they choose to utter, and the number of local churches entirely of folk long past child-bearing and holding no hope of nurturing upcoming generations, all this raises critical questions.
The old chestnut of “adult believers only’ baptism is not, for me, among the most critical issues. I’ve learned to trust God’s faithfulness to covenant relationships regardless of what seems on the surface to be going on (or not going on) in responsive awareness in God’s human partners to those covenants. I’ve been richly blessed through small children as wonderful bearers of undoubted divine grace.
Meanwhile, I’m stubbornly growing in excitement about what baptism means in my life, and as sign of what I see as the below-grassroots, trickle-up wellspring of all authentic Christian ministry. I’m frustrated at signs that large sections of the church no longer experience much excitement or confidence of any sort. Baptism, it seems to me, is about new, exciting, God-drenched life, not old; covenant, community, and much else. It’s time, I think, to frame fresh questions, not regurgitate old answers.
Theodore of Mopsuestia (c.350-428), whose gynaecology was perhaps less developed than his cloudy theology, groped, too, for a handle upon mystery: “Just as in human birth the mother’s womb receives a seed, but the hand of God fashions it, so in baptism the water becomes a womb for the one who is being born but the grace of the Spirit fashions the baptised in a second birth.[1]”
Our church, earlier in my lifetime, effectively seeded and nurtured revival of understanding and excitement about baptism, not only among the committed door-darkeners but also out where most families live and wonder and ask good questions. Perhaps in my current detachment I’m ignorant of much good ministry going on today. I hope so. I also hope that baptism is never prostituted as a tool aimed mainly at bringing more bodies and wallets in to help prop up tottering institutional structures. Whatever ancient veins of baptism’s meaning are recovered, and fresh meanings discovered, they’ll be deeper, broader, more enduring and more life-giving than that.
A vacuum-packed, hard-coated seed may remain fully viable for at least a human lifetime without showing any outward sign of life. A growing, fruiting, lovely and life-giving plant cannot ensue until that seed is released to die to its seed-ness in the depths of the amazingly diverse, mysterious life of the earth. The Church, I think, is called and equipped to affirm the viability of every seed of baptised life including those at and beyond the fringe of the nominal. We are called to acknowledge that little of the living land necessary to germination and growth is under direct religious influence but is all in the domain of Love Himself. And, of course, each faith-community is called to abandon any shell of lifeless security protecting its own inner life; to first and foremost celebrate, proclaim, baptise and nurture where life is at in this real world outside the stained glass.
As for this baptised life: after 84 years it is still reaching in root depth, in top growth and in integrated harmony within the symphony of all life. Mine is a “slow-growth-in-spurts” life. The growing includes not only contemplative quietness but also spurts of delightful surprise. It helps to be detached from the treadmill of constant, institutional busy-ness. My inability to put a defining, controlling handle on baptism rests alongside my inability to put a defining, controlling handle on love, hope, faith – and God.
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[1] Catechetical Homilies, tr. Tonneau-Devreese, cited by Olivier Clement in The Roots of Christian Mysticism, New City Press, 1994.
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