We are born in water, we are made of water, we will be washed with water when we die. Humans need water to drink and to keep clean. We come into the world in a rush of water, and we wash our dead in clear water. Water constitutes most of our bodies and our planet. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, water symbolizes death (in the danger of drowning) and rebirth. The oceans are a mystery whose depths we cannot fully explore or fathom, even with all our modern technology. In some creation myths, the gods formed the rivers and seas of the world with the sacred waters of their bodies. In others, gods created dry land in the midst of the waters, or did battle with the ocean and sea monsters to bring dry land to the surface. Water is necessary to our survival and one of the most destructive forces on earth. Like birth itself, and death, like the sustenance of life and the warmth of families, water is present in almost all human religions.
I was baptized soon after I was born. My parents attended a small Episcopal church where a man they liked and admired served as rector. My father’s parents were my godparents. I can imagine them standing in the sanctuary that smelled of oiled wood, repeating the Elizabethan language of the vows: “Dost thou, therefore, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?” I wore the woolen gown my mother’s father had been christened in, and in which my son was baptized this morning.
Those words, said on my behalf when I was only a few months old, changed my relationship to the Christian church forever. Because of those words, I may come to communion in Christian churches. Children cannot make religious commitments for themselves, and even the religious understandings they come to as young people cannot carry them through their adulthood. Many religious traditions ask parents to make one set of vows for their children soon after birth, and then ask those children to make their own commitments when they are adolescents. These then open the pathways teens follow into the religious development of their adulthoods.
By the time I was twelve and should have begun confirmation class, my family had moved away from that small church in Ohio and to a much bigger, more impersonal church in the suburbs of Detroit. When my parents said they wanted to try out a Unitarian Universalist church, I was at first dead set against it. Although I did not like the girls in my Sunday school class, I loved the music and liturgy of the worship service. Also, since we had just moved from Ohio, I was probably resistant to further change. When our Episcopal church sent a letter saying I would have to begin confirmation classes, and thereby spend more time with classmates whom I did not like, I thought maybe I would try Unitarian Universalism with my parents after all. We visited one or two churches, and finally made our way to Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church in Southfield, Michigan, which, as it turned out, was home to much nicer Sunday school kids. That church became our home. I went through that church’s coming of age program, parallel to the Episcopal church’s confirmation class. In high school, I joined the Religious Education committee, became an official member of the church, voted to call our new minister, and first felt the call to ministry myself.
During that same time, in the safe environs of my Unitarian Universalist church, I pushed and pulled, tangled and untangled the Christianity of my birth. I discovered the worship of the divine feminine. I discovered atheism. I struggled to define my beliefs. I continued to cherish the practices of our broadly tolerant Christian home. When I went off to college, I decided not to decide, to let my mind relax from this struggle to know and just see what came. When I was in divinity school I began the process again of naming what I believed, and I am still engaged in that process. I have discovered that belief requires practice as a prerequisite, and for me, that practice has been to engage with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in study and prayer.
So what has my baptism done for me? I do take communion from time to time, when I am in a congregation where I feel that my beliefs are included there, and where I feel that taking communion would not violate my beliefs or the covenant of the congregation. I believe that Jesus was a prophet and a teacher of God’s word, but not that he was divine or unique. I believe that he had the presence of God within him, and I believe he taught people to recognize that same presence with themselves, that divinity in all of us. To me, since I still orient my faith toward Jesus and his teachings, my journey is still within the Christian tradition, if a very liberal part of it. Many more orthodox Christians, who confess belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and who believe that Jesus is the Christ and the sole, or the most important, pathway to God, would disagree with me. I might be a heretic at best, or a heathen at worst. But as a Unitarian Universalist, affirming the necessity of spiritual growth and the responsible search for truth and meaning, I claim my right to stand within the tradition of Jesus and argue against aspects of it at the same time.
When John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the River Jordan on the border of Judea and Galilee, in or around the year 33 C.E., he was challenging the Judaism of his birth in a similar way. The Torah establishes several circumstances under which people must wash to cleanse themselves. Some of these ablutions require “living water”–that is, water from a river or spring–such as recovering from skin diseases, touching a dead body, or involvement with the genitals (Koester 168). Faithful Jews in the first century would have used water daily to remain physically and ritually clean. What John, and Jesus after him, offered was a single baptism that brought the faithful into a new relationship with the God of Abraham. Both John and Jesus stood firmly within their Jewish tradition and did not necessarily think they were creating a new religion. They lived and led in a time of upheaval in the Jewish tradition, when many different communities were exploring their Judaism against the backdrop and under the control of the Roman empire. They were exploring the possibilities present in using Jewish cleansing rituals in a new way.
People in the Christian tradition are not the only people who practice baptism today. There is still extant today an ancient sect called Mandaeism, whose adherents follow the teachings of John the Baptist. This group, which was once primarily located in Baghdad, but has now fled to Jordan and Syria because of the war, can trace its history back to the first century, and remained unconverted by the sweep of Christianity and Islam. It is a tiny community, thought to number no more than 60,000 worldwide. Mandaeists are Gnostics for whom baptism of adults is the central practice of their religion. They baptize in the name of God, and not (since they do not revere Jesus) in the name of the Son or the Holy Spirit.
Every time I, as a baptized Christian, take communion, I must evaluate what that ritual means to me. I am sometimes with friends or family in their churches when communion is served. I have been to communion ceremonies where the priest said that taking communion meant standing up on the side of the poor. I have been invited by ministers who called all people who wished to share that sacred meal together. In those times and places, I have taken communion. On the other hand, I have worshiped in congregations where the minister invited forward all who accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, and in those times and places, I have respectfully remained seated. The invitation was heart-felt, and it did not offend me, but I could not include myself within it.
In all our religious rituals, we face the question of how well we fit within the traditions the rituals come from. Almost all Christians would agree that baptism and communion are the two fundamental sacraments initiated by Jesus’ ministry, but they vary widely in how they practice them. Here, in this congregation, where we are part of a movement which has its roots in liberal Christianity but has spread its branches into the liberal practice of many religious traditions, and of none, I am open to calling the blessing of a new baby in God’s name “baptism.” If this word reflects the tradition of the family, as is the case for my family, then it can be a legitimate part of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. If it is not part of a family’s practice, I use the words “blessing and dedication.” The ritual of welcoming a new child with water is universal enough, and durable enough, to allow our struggles with what it means.
In some traditions, baptism is a ritual undertaken by an adult or an older child to symbolize their mature acceptance of the Christian faith. This is the case with Baptist churches, which trace their heritage to the Protestant reformation and disagreement with the Catholic church over the validity of infant baptism. Jesus, after all, was baptized as an adult and shared baptism with other adults. This is one more example of people of faith struggling and wrestling with their inherited traditions, seeing if they can remain within them while trying to move beyond some aspects of them.
The religious traditions we grew up in and participate in now are the same way. They have been with humanity for hundreds of years. Think of those Mandaeists, clinging to their faith even as they have been exiled from Iraq by violence and war. Their faith will change and withstand change, live with them and through them, as they learn to worship in a new place. Our traditions are strong enough for us to wrestle with them, and love them, and continue them and change them over time. This is, after all, what John the Baptist and Jesus were doing when they instituted baptism, and it is what Baptists were doing when they insisted on full immersion baptism fifteen hundred years later. It is what all of us do, as we grow up, and grow in our faith as adults. We may leave behind the faith of our childhood, or we may embrace it even more fully, yet we continue the journey of faith always. We trust the larger embrace of the Spirit as we grow and live together in fellowship.
Please join me in prayer.
Spirit of Life, which moves within us as water flows through the earth in streams, bring us energy and vision this morning. Keep us on the path of our spiritual journeys. Help us find the meaning and depth in each moment of that journey, being fully present in it.
Give us the comfort of our childhood faiths. Remind us of the smells of our sanctuaries, the melodies of our hymns, the ringing silences, the repeated prayer. Give us permission to love what we have loved, even if that tradition is no longer ours.
Give us the courage of our convictions. Help us claim what we believe even in the face of disagreement or censure. Help us stand up not only for our beliefs, but for the right of everyone the world over to worship in her own way. Help us build up an ethic of tolerance and right relations among people of different beliefs.
Give us the restlessness to look forward on our journeys, to hear the call of your Spirit out of our comforting homes and into new vistas of being and faith. Help us know that our own Spirits will not fail us as we journey together by faith. Bind us together in this congregation in love and fellowship, even as our journeys blaze many different paths up the holy mountain.
Amen.
Sources
Koester, Craig R. Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel: Meaning, Mystery, Community. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
Tags: Sermons, Spiritual growth