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“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” –Mark 1:9

I was baptized on Sunday, February 10, 1985 at Minnetonka Lutheran Church in Minnetonka, Minnesota.  From what I’ve been told, I know that the winter of ’84-’85 was a mild one; when I was born just one month and 24 days earlier, my parents have told me they needed only light jackets to make their way to the hospital.  My godparents are two of my aunts, Carol and Sandy, my mother’s two sisters, and I wore the same baptismal dress that my oldest cousin, Shelly, and middle cousin, Ryan, wore; which is the same thing that my youngest cousin, Amanda, would also wear 12 years later.  But the day was not completely free from human bickering and politics: in a play on tradition that is typical among American Lutherans, my mother is quick to point out that I was baptized using the liturgy from the “green hymnal,” the Lutheran Book of Worship which was the predominant resource used in the old American Lutheran Church (ALC) at the time.  (In her eyes, it was inferior to the “old red hymnal.”)

According to traditional Lutheran doctrine – the faith tradition given to me by my parents who decided to maintain my mother’s family’s Lutheran heritage over my father’s combination of Southern Baptist and Presbyterian background – baptism is an essential moment in the salvation of the baptized.  Luther’s writing in the Small Catechism calls baptism the act which “gives eternal salvation.”   But in the Augsburg Confession, drawing upon texts from Romans 3 and 4, Lutherans believe that people cannot be justified because of one’s own “strength, merits or works.”   This was a stumbling block for me in Confirmation.  Is baptism not a work – an action, in effect bound together with the force of law?  Like Barbara Brown Taylor recounts of her own baptismal experience, I couldn’t connect the notion that on what was an exciting day for my family and the day I was sealed in an external affirmation of God’s covenant through Jesus Christ, its theological understanding within the tradition which I then claimed was rooted in such negativity and darkness.

Acts 2:27-42 discusses the institution of baptism in the early Christian communities.  When asked about what one needed to do to attain salvation, Peter told the people to repent and be baptized and they would receive the promise of God’s eternal kingdom.  The author notes that Peter says “the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to [him/her].”   My family on my dad’s side, who were baptized later in life after making a statement of faith, will point to Biblical examples like those a few verses later, to support their process as the divinely-ordered form of baptism.

So what, then, is the answer?  I believe – and support here – that the answer is, “either.”  The crucial element is not the institutional method, but rather the symbolism itself, the covenantal connection between God and humanity in the person, life and teachings of Jesus Christ.  The meaning of baptism is not attached to its ritual as a “once and for all” event, it is something that must daily convict the believer into a common witness of a universal community of justice and equality, of standing against oppression and manipulation, and through which immeasurable blessings, grace, and a posture of thanksgiving and joy are received.

The members of the World Council of Churches, in the document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, mutually define baptism as the rite of commitment to the Lord.  Its meaning is incorporated as the human response to a gift freely given.   In my tradition, the United Church of Christ, baptism is understood to be the time at which a person joins the church universal, the body of Christ.   So if a person is raised in the church, whose parents or guardians see their membership in the church beginning at birth, it is entirely appropriate and understandable that they would be baptized as an infant.  On the other hand, if the understanding is that their membership begins at the moment they make a conscious, calculated, intelligent decision to claim the Christian identity as their own – or if they were not raised in the church – the appropriate form would be later on in life after they have attained an age of reason.  Both methods are practiced and entirely appropriate within the UCC – even often within the same congregation.

Baptism is the great unifier, in spite of the divisions we attempt to establish that could destroy it.  Paul says in his letter to the Galatians that our human divisions cease as a result of our union with Jesus Christ in baptism.   The ethical implications of this institution are astounding, and should – speaking from a Western, mainstream context – in some ways insult our very comprehension of what it means to be in a larger group or society.  In an article by Lamin Sanneh, Paul’s words are already being lived out in a way that challenges and breaks the traditional understanding of Christianity as an exclusively Western religion, only shaped and molded and characterized by imperial colonialism on its forward trek.  The divisions that have traditionally been upheld between that which is refined and that which is subordinate in music and art, worship and prayer, in all forms of expressing the dynamic faith in Jesus, are increasingly unimportant as the new global order in Christianity is established.   Through the waters of baptism, we make a combined declaration of our common witness for a day when those things which divide us – either the old world order or the new paradigms which may come in the future – as human creations which maintain power structures are irrelevant in the sight of the one who came so that all might have life abundantly.

One of the most vivid conversation memories from our small group discussion during the class period about the changing landscape of global Christianity – and one that I have found myself coming back to many times since that day – is that those of us who live in Western, or “global north,” contexts, who possess basic and advanced education, who are seeking to provide commentary and define or redefine basic Christian understandings are falling into the same trap of division and are creating those new paradigms which maintain separation between “us” and “them.”  Someone said that it was easy or more convenient for us who have the time and ability to be occupied with more than finding food, shelter and water on a daily basis to start to define these barriers, to try to explain our way through a changing dynamic, to try to relegate people in the “global south” to holding more conservative, narrow views of Christian practice than our own, inferred better and more developed ways of belief.  How disheartening that we might be taking this wonderful opportunity to experience the beautiful diversity that God calls us into through Christ and the Spirit!  Yet, it another way, it remains an example of our brokenness and need for continual repentance and ongoing dependence on God’s grace.

Taylor discusses her varied upbringing in the church, and spends time describing an experience one evening with two classmates in college who paid a visit to her dorm room to have her pray for her individual salvation.  This story stands in contrast to what follows, that Taylor was a religion major not because of a particular conviction of belief, but a sojourn toward the openness of dialogue and conversation of the issues that faced that particular era.   How fitting that we as Christians have allowed our denominational differences in baptism – its form, its meaning, its proper administration – to get in the way of the big picture that baptism calls us to be about: in the words I have posted to the top of my computer screen, “Depending on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, I promise to love the Lord my God with all of my heart, with all of my soul, with all of my strength, with all of my might, and I promise to love my neighbor as myself.”

Through our conversations in my small group, I find that I am not alone.  Unlike those Wednesday evenings in confirmation, sitting in the youth room of our church with the pastor drilling us for our memorization of the Small Catechism, worrying about my own “gut belief” (or theological position, as I might call it now) and its place within (or outside of) the Lutheran confessions, when I thought I was the only one who believed the way I do, I find now that I am in good company.  Our conversations and dialogue have both challenged and strengthened my baptismal views.  On the one hand, I am strengthened in our unity in diversity; I am no more or less Christian than any of those in my small group, and not all of us hold the same convictions or outlook on baptism.  On the other hand, those who possess stronger, more structured views of baptism and its institutional role challenge me to stay vigilant that I do not discount baptism’s importance to the point of forgetting it.