Vince's journey with Baptism

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Whatever your feelings (or lack of feelings at all) around the Christian ritual of baptism, Vince has probably been in the same boat as you at some point over the last decade. What does it matter? What makes it beautiful and important? What makes it uncomfortable and problematic? Vince shares his journey of re-thinking, taking some space, and re-thinking again. (Photo by Luca Romano on Unsplash)

SPEAKER NOTES

Baptism, wk 1

Intro

Show of hands, how many people are familiar with baptism?

  • Who has familiarity with infant baptism specifically?
  • What about baptism by choice? (For adults or older children.)
  • What about immersion baptism?
  • Or flow of water baptism? (like over a basin)
  • Or sign of the cross with water?
  • Or sprinkling?

I’d be curious to hear how each of you would talk about your familiarity with baptism —

  • Do you have positive feelings? Maybe some beautiful memories?
  • Do you have mixed feelings? Maybe feelings that have changed over the years?
  • Do you have negative feelings? Maybe you witnessed or experienced baptism in ways that felt uncomfortable?
  • Do you have some curiosity but you’re not really sure you have any feelings, positive or negative?
  • Do you have no feelings one way or the other because you’ve never really needed to think about this, and, you’re like: honestly, how much does this random Christian ritual really have any bearing on everyday life?

No matter which of these describes you and your relationship to baptism, I have all of us in mind as I bring up baptism this morning, because I personally have been in every one of these places in the last decade.

  • I have been on a personal journey concerning baptism the last 10 years, re-thinking it, not thinking about it at all, and then re-thinking it again.
  • That’s right, even for pastors, uncertainty and re-thinking faith is a part of life!
  • As a result of my personal journey, perhaps you have noticed this if you’ve been with BLC for a while, our church hasn’t practiced baptism in many years.
  • That’s a bit weird for a Christian church, but, well, that’s been the story for us.

So I hope to address every one of our possible starting points as I bring up baptism right now, and we’re going to be talking about baptism all month, as the plan is to — on Sunday, July 27 — start a new annual ritual as a church around baptism.

  • If you have beautiful memories,
    • then I hope you feel so much gratitude for those memories stirred this month.
  • If you feel uncomfortable,
    • then I think this month talking about baptism will alleviate your fears, and present something really attractive to you.
  • If this feels important (and perhaps you are one of those people who has noticed we haven’t practiced baptism and you’ve been wondering “what gives?”),
    • then I hope you’ll feel that your good questions are thoughtfully responded to.
  • AND EVEN IF you are just politely nodding along to what I’m saying right now because you literally have never given any thought to baptism (you’re not against it by any means, but it just feels, frankly, inconsequential to life),
    • then I am actually excited to make the case for why baptism friggin’ rocks, why it can be an important and meaningful and beautiful part of our church’s annual rhythm and your personal annual rhythm.

My story with baptism

My story with baptism starts truly at the beginning of my life, because I was baptized as an infant in the Catholic church.

  • (This is not me — photos were not that high resolution when I was a baby.)
  • Obviously, this is not something I can share any memories about; what really matters is: how did that choice my parents made animate my life as I grew up?
  • And the answer is: not very much.
  • For the first 20 years of my life, my relationship to baptism was pretty neutral.
  • There's more to say about this though,
    • Because, those of us here who grew up Catholic might know, it can often be (not always, but often) that one of the most anxiety-provoking doctrines in all of religion is passed off to people in the context of Catholic infant baptism: what's called the doctrine of “Original Sin”
    • The anxiety is: when you’re born, you’re destined for eternity in hell, because, this claims, as a human you're born into humanity’s "original sin”), unless you’re baptized. So you better baptize your kids!
  • So here’s the good news about my neutral experience of Catholic baptism:
    • I didn’t have any of that kind of anxiety-provoking messaging in my experience of Catholicism.
    • I’ve learned later in life that the Catholic church my family attended when I was young is actually one of the more progressive Catholic churches in the country — Catholicism is more diverse than a lot of people think.
  • But all that said: I also didn’t have any messaging that attached me in any meaningful way to my parent’s choice to have me baptized as I grew older.
  • It just was something we did because my family was Catholic. It was neutral to me. visual off

Okay, next in my story with baptism — as a young adult, I chose to be baptized again in a Protestant church

  • This Protestant church practiced immersion baptism, and often did baptisms at the beach (like Loyola beach, where I was baptized, pictured here)
    • Of note: it was November when I chose to be baptized… at the beach… in Chicago
    • And for some reason that felt like a cool thing at the time — Yeah! I’m getting baptized in freezing cold water — Hard core! Awesome!
    • Oh the exuberance of youth!
  • Anyway, clearly, this must have meant I had positive feelings about baptism. I did!
    • The church community I had become a part of had saved me from loneliness and grief after my mom died of cancer when I was a teenager.
    • This church community facilitated my first ever spiritual experiences with a God of Love.
    • They helped me take my first steps into personal growth work and therapy.
    • They sparked my passion for caring for others pastorally like Jesus did.
  • I remember first hearing “baptism as choice” brought up in my time at this church, during a small group class they were offering
    • There was no “holier than thou” message toward someone like me who’d grown up Catholic and been baptized as an infant — they communicated: “if that feels important to you, that’s good enough for us.”
    • But, remember, in my case, my infant baptism didn’t feel all that important.
    • So I found that I eventually did want to learn more about this “baptism by choice” thing in this Protestant church: why might baptism feel important? What's the point?
  • This church gave me several responses. Some less compelling. But some very compelling!
    • I chose to be baptized because it felt like being welcomed into a found family, grounded in the person and teachings of Jesus, that had saved me when I was flailing.
    • I now had two families — my given family, which I love. And my found family, which I love as well —
    • Dear friends from that found family were the ones who went out into the freezing cold Loyola beach water with me that November day to baptize me. visual off

But now, let me get to the conflict in my story. Several years on from my beach baptism, I’ve now entered ministry as a vocation, this church is in its early years, and I’m a part of some regular clergy gatherings with other Christian ministers.

  • And it is in these gatherings where my feelings about baptism actually began to sour.
  • Because it was talked about there in ways that didn’t sit well with me.
    • For one thing, I couldn’t stomach the “winning territory for Jesus” militaristic talk about baptism I’d sometimes hear —
      • “We gained some real ground for the Kingdom last Sunday!” Someone would say, “Baptized a dozen people!” They’d sound like a beleaguered general in a war.
      • I just could not get behind the vibe that the world is a religious battlefield and Christians have to win. I could not square that with my read of Jesus, the one who shows that to lose is to gain, to die is to live, and who takes sides with the powerless rather than the powerful.
    • What I heard in these ministers’ gatherings FAR MORE than militaristic talk about baptism, though, was marketing talk about baptism.
      • (This is Business Jesus — possibly the saddest and funniest image on the entire Internet at the same time)
      • But seriously, in these gatherings with other ministers, baptism was talked about like salesmen bragging about the quotas they hit.
      • And what’s more, there wasn’t a lack of self-awareness about this; it seemed to me to be viewed as a badge of honor and supposed maturity in these gatherings when a minister was “world-wise” enough to not be “too precious” about ministry and recognize that what ministry really comes down to is a cold, hard numbers game.
      • How many baptisms did you have this last year? How many conversions?
      • It’s interesting the history of that word “conversion” over the last few decades
        • It’s mostly used to talk about religious conversion.
        • But how is it used so often today? To talk about marketing conversions! — when a visitor to your website is converted into a regular customer!
        • That term jumped a dam from religion to marketing to take on a new meaning, but now the new marketing definition is washing back into the religious definition!
        • You need to convert nominal Christians into serious Christians because they will be more faithful attendees who do the work of church growth for you inviting more people into your fold, and the growth will be exponential.
        • The instrument for this conversion is baptism, explained NOT as finding a family (like I felt), BUT as expressing one’s individual consumer commitment to Jesus in the religious marketplace. People don’t recruit others to a family. But they do recruit others to their favorite products! Everything comes back to market share and growth.
      • The sociologist Max Weber, when he was trying to describe the shifts he saw in the late 1800s and early 1900s toward a more secular society, wrote about how what is measurable and calculable and what can be instrumentalized for growth begins to rule all.
        • It’s kind of crazy to say, but these conversations about baptism with ministers are maybe the most secular conversations I've ever been in. visual off

Thus begins my avoidant season in my story with baptism.

  • We practiced baptism for a few years when we began this church, but eventually I couldn’t separate what we were doing from the marketing talk and the militaristic talk I heard at those clergy gatherings I used to be a part of.
  • I do NOT see my call as a minister to be a salesman for Jesus, or to be a general for Jesus.
  • So I just couldn’t in good faith bring up baptism here for many years.
  • Therefore, our church hasn’t practiced it. visual off

But let’s get to the resolution of my story with baptism — I have found a renewed pull toward practicing baptism here in the last two years,

  • Leading to this month, July 2025, when we will begin a new annual rhythm of having a baptism service every summer — where we will offer the chance for everyone in attendance to:
    • be baptized, or
    • re-affirm your baptism
    • adults or children, we’re not prescribing one way or the other on that.
  • So what has changed for me?
  • Let me offer some of what is speaking to me now about baptism. I think it will speak to many of you too.
  • The way I’ll frame this is:
    • Why get baptized this month? (if you never have), or
    • Why re-affirm your baptism this month? (if you already have)

Why get baptized or reaffirm your baptism?

To ritualize moving through the hardest things of life

  • If we trace the Biblical origins of the ritual of baptism to the early Christian movement,

    • The intended meaning of the practice actually has little to do with the meaning most commonly taught to evangelicals: publicly expressing a personal commitment.

  • The Biblical origins of the ritual of baptism are about: moving through the waters of death to something new on the other side

    • In Exodus chapter 2, Moses as a baby is delivered through the waters of death along the Nile, and then in Exodus chapter 14, Moses as an adult delivers his people through the waters of death across the Red Sea.
    • In Joshua chapter 3, taking over after Moses, Joshua leads his people through the waters of death crossing the Jordan River to the Promised Land.
    • Jumping ahead to New Testament times, John the Baptist invites people to re-enact these “through the waters of death” Hebrew stories ritualistically by baptizing people in the Jordan; Jesus is among those whom John baptizes.
    • The early Jesus movement then attaches Jesus’ death and resurrection to this re-enactment practice.
    • When we read of mass baptisms in the New Testament (like Pentecost in Acts 2), or of individual baptisms (like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8), or of references to the meaning of baptism in St. Paul’s letters, what people would have had in mind as they are baptized is:
      • the adversity and regrets and deaths of their lives
      • the hardest, scariest, most shameful things they and their families and their people have had to face… visual off

  • And baptism says: those hard, scary, shameful things (the waters of death) don’t have to have the final say — you can move through them like moving through a flow of water, a wave that crashes but then recedes…

    • You can move through suffering and regret and death’s claims to define you, and be raised to a new identity in which, to quote St. Paul in Romans...

      “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

  • The flip side of Paul’s poetry here is that no amount of modern progress or societal privilege or personal excellence can save any of us from the great leveling fact that all people inevitably face suffering and regret and death.

  • But that’s what makes Paul’s claim so captivating. Maybe there is nothing that God can’t overcome to bring us love, goodness, hope.

  • Not failure, not cancer, not white supremacy, not patriarchy, not a hurricane, not the loss of a child, not a betrayal, not the heaviness of regret after our own sins or mistakes.

  • So we ritualize dying before we actually die (by moving through the baptismal waters of death), to make the bold claim that we need not be so afraid of suffering and regret and death.

  • They do not have to define our lives. With God’s help, our lives can still be marked by love, by goodness, by hope.

  • This is something I will be holding to when I re-affirm my baptism this month: the pain of losing my mom when I was only a teenager does not have to define my life. I can move through the waters of death to something new on the other side.

Alright, that’s one meaning to bring to baptism that I find compelling. Here’s another.

To ritualize welcome into a family (the Body of Christ)

  • This is not to be exclusivist
    • To be welcomed into the Christian family doesn’t have to mean passing judgment on any other family.
    • As we say every week here we can be rooted AND open at the same time.
  • Rather, we do this because the default dominant ways of the world never offer such welcome or familial bonds.
  • In 1st century Palestine,
    • The default dominant way of the world was the Roman Imperial way.
    • Roman brutality and exploitation is why the ministries of John the Baptist, Jesus, and St. Paul and the other Apostles felt so moving to so many.
    • This is a family, a community, a story that promises to hold me up, not demand that I hold it up. Wow!
  • Today,
    • The dominant default way of the world is Produce-and-Consume Capitalism.
    • Most of our cultural rituals and routines and rites of passage are about turning us into producers and consumers for the global economy.
    • School prepares us for this.
    • Graduations usher us into it.
    • Careers reinforce it.
    • The paradigmatic adult life event is, seemingly, a purchase — buying a home.
    • The climax of life, we’re told, is a retirement of lavish consumption after a lifetime of hustle.
  • We need rituals and routines and rites of passage that welcome and invite us further into a story in which we are
    • NOT merely exhausted and exploited producers and consumers trying to get to retirement,
    • BUT we are human beings made in the image of God, loved and honored, with the ability to contribute to God’s vision for goodness and beauty and justice and love in the world.
  • The Body of Christ is what the early Jesus movement baptized people into.
    • in which “when one member suffers all suffer together with it” (1 Corinthians 12)
    • and in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3)
    • and in which “they shared everything in common an no one was left in need” (Acts 2) visual off
  • Especially if you are drawn to the idea of baptizing your young children, this is the meaning I personally would bring to that.
    • It is not based in bad doctrine that whips up anxiety about how a child might go to hell if they’re not baptized.
    • It is based in the humility to see and accept that every human life needs a family, a community, a bigger story — and default dominant ways of being won’t ever provide such welcome and familial bonds and higher values. slide off

Context

Okay… maybe you’re like “amen!” to all I’m saying, BUT you’ve still got lots of questions and uncertainty and you just can’t see yourself giving yourself to a practice like baptism, because you feel like you would lack integrity if you’re not “all the way there”. I promise I’ll address excellent questions like that next week.

Also, if this still feels a bit irrelevant because ordinary everyday life feels so divorced from what I’m talking about here (big stories and existential fears about suffering or death). You’re not wrong. Rituals like baptism do take us out of the ordinary. I also want to address next week why that’s a feature not a bug. There’s power in getting outside of the ordinary for a moment!

But for now, I’ll close by again pointing us toward July 27, which will be Baptism Sunday — a new annual rhythm for BLC.

We’ll have a basin of water up here and towels, and, during some of our music that morning, everyone will be invited to line up to come forward one at a time to be baptized or re-affirm their baptism.

For anyone re-affirming a baptism,

  • You’ll receive a sign of the cross on your forehead with water.

For anyone being baptized,

  • We’ll be able to offer a form of flow of water baptism that resembles immersion baptism, by having you lean over the basin.

If anyone would like to baptize their young children or if anyone would like to talk with their older children about baptism by choice,

  • I’ll give some more instruction on this next week,
  • And you can also shoot me a message or email and we can talk more that way.

Finally, for anyone joining us online that day,

  • If you’re with someone else, you can perform the embodied part of the practice for one another baptizing or re-affirming the baptism of each other with a bowl of water.
  • If you’re alone, you also shoot me a message and we can talk about how you can participate.

Prayer

1 Corinthians, Acts, Galatians, Exodus, Joshua, RomansVincent BrackettBaptism 2025Comment