Baptism Q&A

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In preparation for BLC’s first Baptism service in years, Vince responds to some questions about the practice, prompted by sharing his story with baptism the previous week. (Photo by Luca Romano on Unsplash)

SPEAKER NOTES

Baptism, wk 2

Intro

• We are preparing as a church this month for Baptism Sunday, next Sunday, July 27th — our first baptism service in years.
• If you were with us last week, or if you listen to our podcast from last week, you’ll know now that we haven’t practiced baptism in years because I myself have been on a journey thinking about and then not thinking about and then re-thinking baptism
  • I started with neutral feelings about it as a child who was baptized in a Catholic church — which was perfectly healthy (so that’s good!), but not exactly personally animating (so that’s meh).
  • I did develop positive feelings about baptism as a young adult. I chose to be baptized in a Protestant church, when they saved me from flailing in life after I lost my mom to cancer when I was a teenager.
  • But then my feelings about baptism began to sour, early on in my vocation as a pastor, hearing it talked about among other pastors in overly militaristic and marketing terms. I didn’t at all feel drawn to gaining territory or winning market share for Jesus; I became a minister to accompany people through the joys and sorrows of life, like Jesus did.
  • That began my avoidant season, where I needed some space from baptism for many years.
  • BUT NOW I have felt a renewed draw toward baptism 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.
• I shared last week two meanings we might bring to baptism that have been the reason for my renewed draw to the practice
  • First, to ritualize moving through the hardest things of life
    • The Biblical origins of the practice are about moving through the waters of death to something new on the other side.
    • We ritualize dying before we actually die (by moving through the baptismal waters of death), to make the bold claim that no suffering or regret or shame or sorrow has to have the final say over our stories. visual off
  • Second, to ritualize welcome into a family (the Body of Christ)
    • 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, because the default dominant ways of the world never offer such welcome or familial bonds or mutual aid — whether we’re talking about the brutality of Roman Imperialism in New Testament times, or the exploitation and burnout of today’s Produce-and-Consume Capitalism. visual off
    • Baptism signals being adopted into a better story, in which we are not merely producers and consumers for the global economy, but human beings made in the image of God, worthy of love and community and capable of justice and beauty. slide →
• Well, I left off last week promising to address several outstanding wonderings about baptism that may have come up with all I shared.
  • And then in some conversations after service I noted a few more wonderings among us. (Thank you for all the comments!)
  • So, as we continue to prepare for next Sunday when we begin our new annual rhythm of a baptism service every summer, let me speak to all these wonderings Q&A style…

Q&A

Isn’t baptism by choice supposed to be “a public expression of a personal commitment”?

• This is probably the meaning most of us were taught to bring to baptism by choice — especially if your context growing up was evangelicalism.
• This absolutely can bring meaning to the practice for many people.
• I want to say enthusiastically that it can definitely be a part of the meaning you bring to our baptism service next Sunday!
• AND I want to acknowledge transparently that I am aware of the fact that the way we’re setting up our practice of baptism at BLC emphasizes the communal more than the individual, and so does not insist on bringing this meaning to it.
  • That is intentional.
  • Our desire is to focus the attention of the practice of baptism on the welcome of the community, rather than on the expression of the individual.
  • In emphasizing the communal over the individual, we remind ourselves that Jesus is the one who said, “come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
  • Baptism, in this way, is a community giving narrative framework to my individual story for me.
  • The danger in an overly-individualistic practice of baptism is that it becomes just a Christian version of our wider culture’s demand to self-narrate my own story and make meaning for myself entirely on my own, curating my personal brand and achieving enough recognition to assure me I’m being my most authentic self — in this case an authentic Christian.
• It may come as a surprise to those of us who have had positive experiences of baptism as “a public expression of a personal commitment” that others have had negative or uncomfortable experiences of that same thing.
  • I encourage you to consider that that could be the case for others here.
  • It’s the sense that to be baptized would put a spotlight on you, and leave you with a weight on your shoulders.
  • Again, that’s the opposite of the point of the Body of Christ as an alternative to dominant ways of being — a story and a family that holds us up, rather than demands we hold it up.
• So, for these reasons, our practice of baptism at BLC will intentionally focus the attention on the welcome of the community, rather than on the expression of the individual.
  • But I don’t think that at all stops any of us from bringing for ourselves a meaning of “public expression of a personal commitment” if that works for us!

Isn’t baptism in the Bible a lot about sin and repentance and forgiveness?

• How does that fit in?
• For example, John the Baptist encouraging people to be baptized after repenting, or Peter saying, “Repent and be baptized… for the forgiveness of your sins”
• Yes! As we talked about last week, among the hardest things of life that baptism invites us to ritualize moving through are regret and shame — the consequences of choices we’ve made that we would regard as sinful or unjust or hurtful or neglectful — humbly facing this is inevitably part of “the hardest things of life” for any of us, right?
• So, we might say that John the Baptist and Peter had this part of “the hardest things of life” especially in view.
• It is good to remember, though, that the Biblical world was a way more collectivist world than our individualist Modern Western world, so another interpretation is that these may be broader references than we realize.
• When we read references to sin, repentance, and forgiveness from our individualist perspective, we knee-jerk want to apply these to one individual’s guilt.
• But if we’re talking about a collective’s sin, repentance, and forgiveness (a society’s, a people’s), then a broader, more diverse set of experiences could be in view — that includes within it not just the sinner’s experience but also the sinned against’s experience. A collective contains multitudes, so these references to sin, repentance, and forgiveness can contain multitudes, as a shorthand way to talk about the ills of their world AND their unfair consequences — to talk about, as Marvin Gaye put it, “what’s going on."
• All to say, individual reckoning with one’s sin, repentance, and forgiveness is one part of baptism (as we talked about last week), but it’s not the whole meaning of baptism.

Wouldn’t I lack integrity participating if I don’t feel “all the way in” on Christianity?

• My short answer is:
  • No, I think you can meaningfully participate in our Baptism Sunday even if you feel some uncertainty or incompleteness in your belief.
  • Don’t worry, your integrity is not on the line.
• Because the spiritual life isn’t about certainty defeating uncertainty;
  • It’s about acknowledging life is unavoidably full of risk, and choosing to get on the field of life in spite of that, instead of sitting in the bleachers.
  • If spirituality is relationship with God, then we need to think with relational categories not knowledge categories (like certainty). You DON’T build relationship with someone by trying to get more distance from them so you can see them from every angle and feel certain about who they are first; that’s called stalking!
  • NO! You build relationship by risking getting close, leaning in to the relationship.
  • And, when it comes to God, guess what — I actually really believe what I preach that God is loving and gracious and forgiving. So even if you’re whole heart is not in it, what do you have to lose? If there is a God like Vince says, God won’t see you as a poser; God will honor your risking getting close.
• Or think about this
  • In the dominant way of capitalism, we click “agree” to terms and conditions all the time without fully thinking through whether we’re totally on board.
    • Capitalism gets away with this because it’s dominant, and we all have to make our way through its world.
    • The Body of Christ is not a dominant force, it is strength through weakness, so there is no pressure to do anything here!
      • (You are 100% allowed to stay in your seat next week when we invite people to line up to be baptized or re-affirm their baptism! You will not be judged!)
      • But just to say: I’m being way more transparent than a terms and conditions agreement written in legal-ease.
    • So maybe choosing to participate in our baptism service even while still feeling questions and uncertainty doesn’t have to feel so scary!
      • Perhaps it can be an avenue to an experience of a gracious God you wouldn’t have expected?
• Many of us here would regard ourselves as agnostic (unable to say whether or not we believe there is a God)
  • If that’s you, my recommendation to participate in Baptism Sunday is NOT to defeat your agnosticism and choose belief instead; it is to explore whether being a Christian agnostic might be more life-giving than being an untethered agnostic.
  • So you can be attached to a better story than the default, dominant produce-and-consume story.

Are kids left out of this? Is this just for adults and babies?

• Not at all! Kids, let me talk to you all for a minute.
• If you’re older than 2 or 3, this is not something your parents can choose for you anymore. It’s something you now have the opportunity to choose for yourself.
• And you can do that!
  • You kids know just as well as adults that life can sometimes be hard or scary.
    • Baptism is a special way to pray for God’s help in what’s hard or scary.
  • And you kids know just as well as adults that you need a family beyond your literal family — other grown-ups and trusted people.
    • Baptism is a way to call this church part of your family.
  • And you kids know the difference between a good story and a bad story, between a story like Jesus’ and a story like Herod’s or Caesar’s.
    • Baptism is a way to accept God's invitation into Jesus’ story.
• There is no pressure at all to make any choice right now.
  • Because, going forward, every summer we will have a Baptism Sunday, and you will have the opportunity again.
  • So, if you want to think about it some more, you’ll get another chance next year!
• Grown-ups with kids
  • We encourage you to tell your kids what to expect about next Sunday being different than usual,
  • And ask them in that no pressure way,
    • what they know about baptism,
    • and if they’d like to be baptized.

Isn’t this just too divorced from ordinary life to matter all that much?

• Why spend time on this? Perhaps you’re thinking: shouldn’t we just get down to the work of Jesus’ good news for the poor and exploited and exhausted? Especially given the news every week, every morning, in 21st century America! Isn’t that too pressing to use up our limited resources on ancient ritual?

• To respond to this, it’s time for another brief episode of Sociology Corner with Vince.

  • Today’s guest: The Korean-German social theorist Byung Chul-Han, one of my most read authors of the last 2 years. In The Disappearance of Rituals he writes why our modern produce-and-consume achievement society needs to recover ritual:

  We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it.

  • This is why moments marked as sacred, apart from the ordinary, are NOT distractions from life’s most pressing matters;
  • They are the home furnishings around which ordinary life happens — the pictures we put on the wall, the kitchens where we prepare our home culture’s food, the bedrooms we sleep in to rest and recover for the next day.

• Baptism Sunday, and the practice of baptism is indeed about getting outside of the ordinary,

  • But NOT to suggest that the material and social plight of our world doesn’t matter (as though saying: we’re baptized and we’re going to heaven, so who cares about the world!)
  • RATHER to courageously mark out a home in the midst of the material and social plight of our world.
  • Rituals like baptism say: we are making a home here. We won’t give up on this place!

What’s the point of re-affirming a baptism? Isn’t being baptized enough?

• Re-affirmation of baptism is a regular practice in many Christian church traditions, but to many of us, this may be a totally new idea. We may never have experienced that in any church we’ve ever attended.
  • Perhaps you’re wondering if re-affirmation might lessen the significance of your baptism
    • Like watering it down
    • (Get it?! C’mon that’s a quality dad joke!)
  • Perhaps you’re wondering if re-affirmation might be based in a kind of anxiety, like being baptized once wasn’t good enough for God, and so you have to do it again.
    • And you, very rightly, are like: I’m not interested in an anxious faith.
    • I couldn’t agree more!
    • I promise anxiety is not behind why we want re-affirmation to be a part of our annual baptism service!
• Here’s the reason why:
  • In the same way communion is a weekly ritualizing of our belonging in community and remembrance of Jesus showing us what God is like, re-affirmation of baptism is an annual ritualizing of our belonging and remembrance of Jesus showing us what God is like.
  • And then it goes back to our desire to focus the attention of our practice of baptism on the welcome of the community rather than the expression of the individual.
  • When there is an active way for those already baptized to participate in a community’s practice of baptism, it makes the experience something everyone is doing together, rather than something one or a few people are doing and the rest of the community is just passively watching.
  • This helps communicate the welcome to those being baptized for the first time.
  • I wonder if thinking about it that way increases the draw for you — you re-affirm your baptism not just as something you do for yourself, but as something you do to show welcome to those being baptized for the first time. slide →

Context

Let me close by painting a picture again of what next week will look like.

• After our usual time of music and worship and a welcome next Sunday, I’ll come up, and lead us in a call and response liturgy for Baptism Sunday.
• Then our band will come back and play some more music as everyone is invited to, if they’d like, line up to come forward one at a time to be baptized or re-affirm their baptism.
• Couples or families are welcome to come forward together.
• We’ll have a basin of water up here and towels.
• And, as each person comes forward to me at the basin,
  • You’ll indicate to me whether you are being baptized or re-affirming a baptism,
  • If you would like me to use gender-neutral (rather than traditional “Father, Son, Holy Spirit”) language for the prayer, you can tell me then.
  • Those being baptized will respond, “I do” to a few questions,
  • And then I’ll ask you to lean over a second basin for
    • either a flow of water over your head or a sign of the cross on your forehead;
    • those being baptized can choose,
    • those reaffirming will all receive the sign of the cross.

If anyone will be baptizing their 2-and-under children

• You will respond “we do” or “I do” to the rite of baptism for them, and then you’ll hold their head over the basin.

If anyone is coming forward with children who will be with you but they’re not being baptized,

• That’s great!
• A short blessing will be prayed over them.

Lastly, for anyone joining us online that day,

• If you’re with someone else, you can perform the flow of water or sign of the cross 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, shoot me a message and we can talk about how you can participate.

Prayer