Baptism: The Burial

Subtitle: Drowning in order to Live

(Craig Terlson Jan. 11/15)

I wanted to let you know this morning, that I might be just a bit controversial… but I know that you love me as much as I love all of you – so we should be okay.

Today, one week after Epiphany, is the time in the church year we celebrate and honour the baptism of Jesus. 5 years ago, I gave a series of talks on this – notably what did this event mean? John was preaching a baptism that required repentance – so the question that often comes up is: why did Jesus want to be baptized by John? My talk in 2010, based much on the work of Markus Barth, New Testament scholar and son of Karl Barth, was about how Jesus’s baptism was different… but I am not talking about that today. If you are interested, I can send you those talks. For today, 5 years later, I am going to give part two of this talk. Our baptism.

Someone new to Grain of Wheat a few years back asked me a question that went something like this: If Baptism is so important to Grain of Wheat, right in there with membership requirements, and at the time, part of our Communion Liturgy, that you needed to be baptized to take Communion – so if Baptism is so important… why don’t we talk about it? What does Grain of Wheat believe about it? Now, there have been some conversations in the past, I’ve taken part in a few– but I have to agree, this is something we don’t talk about. And now that we have an open Communion table, not requiring baptism, does this mean that baptism means even less… or does it mean more?

A colleague and professor at CMU, Irma Fast Dueck, has written articles on the changing nature of Baptism in our churches – she is in the process of a research grant further into her project.

Quoting from one of her articles:

“Simply put, the argument goes something like this: “Why do I need to be baptized to be a Christian?  I can participate in most all aspects of the life of the church (including communion). Baptism doesn’t make me more or less Christian.  Why is it necessary?”  The response is disheartening but perhaps not surprising. I call this simply a lack of ritual sensibility, a lack of sensibility that lies as much within the baby boomer generation and previous generations, than with the current and upcoming generations.” *

End quote.

Along with this lack of ritual sensibility, there is a school of thought that has connected Baptism with church membership, an initiation right of sorts, into a group, a community, a tribe.

I want to come clean on my thoughts, based on the people I read, and probably my own personality – I disagree, quite strongly, with this notion that baptism is about being initiated into some sort of membership, group, community or tribe. Baptised into the body of Christ… yes. Into your local church denomination… no. Thankfully, I have some good friends and thinkers who have helped me understand how, like most things, baptism is not an either or, but a “both and” – I’ll return to that in my closing.

So, referencing theologians like Markus Barth, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, and my colleague, Irma Fast Dueck, – I’d like to present a more expansive view of the why of Baptism. The very deep why.

But to begin with, a fiction writer. Flannery O’Connor’s most famous story is A Good Man is Hard to Find. In it, a family in the south goes on a Sunday drive, the family matriarch, an elderly grandmother, is a narrow minded, passive aggressive, and quite racist person. The story ends in violence. The family comes upon a serial killer called the Misfit, who cold-heartedly kills each member of the family. The grandmother is the last. Just before she is killed, the grandmother has a vision that this killer is her son, and moreover, is just like her – by this, she means, human, frail, full of pain and grace. In this moment, so brief, her life changes. She reaches out to touch him. And then she is killed. After she is killed, and pushed into a ditch, the Misfit says to his partner, "She would of been a good woman, if somebody had been there to shoot her every minute of her life."

This is a hard story. This story, like all of her work, is ripe with Christian symbolism. Shortly before her death, O’Connor said: I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.  Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. 

I will come back to this… promise.

I tell that story, to tell this story.

Many of your might know that Christians were not the first, or the only to baptize – other religions, contemporaries of Christianity, referred to as the mystery religions, also had forms of baptism. At the alter of Isis or Osiris, candidates were initiated into the religion with a baptism. One of these groups worshipped Mithras, symbolized by a large black bull. In their ritual, the bull was placed on the alter, standing above a wooden box, with numerous holes… the baptismal candidate was hidden underneath the box. The bull’s throat was cut, the blood flowed down and over the candidate – some were almost drowned in the blood. Later the candidate was dressed in pure white robe and presented as newly baptized.

This was baptism as a kind of death. Here, the death of the bull, the very life force draining out of the animal, and flowing over the person, almost drowning them – until they rose, into what can only be called a newness of life. An inscription from the time, wrote that the person baptized in blood had received a new birth in eternity.

Interestingly, some there are accounts of early Christian baptisms approaching drowning – not in blood, but in water.

The apostle Paul writes about baptism throughout his letters. Corinthians contains the most talk, especially in regards to unifying the church. Many of these mentions are implicit, regarding something else, as in church unity, or even methodology.  When Paul talks explicitly, giving detailed instruction about Baptism, he talks of death, of drowning, burial… death, rising. Not of membership.

Romans 6:3 and 4

3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Baptism is a death. It is a burial. It is a dying with Christ. What do we die to? We die to self – we die to all we thought we were, we are no longer Jew, nor Greek, nor Lutheran, Anglican, Wolseyite, Canadian, whatever your category – we die to this, and we are buried.

1 Corinthians 12:13, Paul states, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

So okay now, why the O’Connor story?

The question is… how many times are you baptized? Is it a once and done deal? In those other mystery religions that I mentioned, there were those who practiced daily baptism. By the way, I don’t tell the story of the mystery religion promoting them – just that we need to step out of our way of seeing things, to disorient ourselves, so that we can see fresh again. Baptism happens once – yet, it is not the end. It is the beginning.

The end is when we are no longer on this plane. There are times when we need see anew again, and again, and again. The word “repent” that John the Baptist cries out in the wilderness, is best described as turning around and moving in a completely different direction. Seeing anew.

What is that gets us to that place of seeing anew? Is it at the end of the most awesome joyful day ever, where everything is love, and we do great things, and maybe win the lottery or something – no. When we die to ourselves, when we touch the true self that dwells within, the Christ Child within, the holy indwelling. We need to die to who we are. And we need to do it a lot. I am sorry if this is confusing, and messes with self-esteem or other hurts – this is a deeper dying, that I admit needs to be experienced rather than articulated. But I think each of us, in our own way, knows what that death to self looks like. And to die, perhaps we need someone to shoot us. Maybe every day of our life.

I apologize for the violence of that image. But there it is. I hope it makes you feel uncomfortable. It certainly does for me.

So after we are buried with Christ – then what?

Again from Romans  - 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

And in 2Corinthians Paul writes:

(2 Corinthians 5:17)

17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

In closing, I’d like to return to what I had mentioned about baptism happening within a community. And then a personal note.

Irma Fast Dueck’s work in this area has helped me understand the need for the ritual of Baptism to happen within a community. From one of her articles:

 “At minimum we should be listening to anthropologists who have long emphasized the importance of rituals as central to the unity and sustenance of communal identity and experience. Anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued convincingly that when members of religious groups distance themselves from their religious rituals through losing sight of ritual’s origins and questioning their relevance, they create the conditions for the possible demise of the group.” *

And later -

“Separating baptism from church empties both of the fullness of their meaning. Without the connection to the church, the act of baptism diminishes to an individualized action focusing primarily on a person’s decision of faith without marking that person’s corresponding entry into the community of faith, Christ’s body, a community committed to following in the way of Christ.” *

End quote.

My own faith experience can be best described as a series of doors opening – behind each door I found answers, and invariably more questions. As I reflect on my baptism, I think it was my first door. A door to seeing things new, seeing them in a way I’ve never seen before – it’s hard to articulate – at best poetic, at worst, mushy. So to end - a quote from Thomas Merton says it best – and I think it a beautiful expression of baptism.

“A door opens in the centre of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite – are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.” **

* Irma Fast Dueck’s quotes are from: “Re-Learning to Swim in Baptismal Waters:  Contemporary Challenges in the Believers Church Tradition,” in New Perspective in Believers Church Ecclesiology, Abe Dueck, Helmut Harder, & Karl Koop, editors (Winnipeg, MB:  CMU Press, 2010).

** Thomas Merton quote from: New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1962) – quoted in Richard Rohr’s, Immortal Diamond.