Baptism

I don’t want to lose the thread of exclusivity, but I have to get this out there. Pedro and I were hashing some things out yesterday, talking about the difficulty of really working with and from the poor—the way it grates on you, wears you out, aggravates you, tears at your relationships with the people who help in the work, etc. We’re conscious of this great need for those of us doing some hard-core work to simply just decide to love each other. Anyway, we discussed some joys and some validation. A particular family we are working with has started coming to the church, and after the first visit asked if we would baptize their babies.

It’s a powerful thing, infant baptism. The congregation is saying that we stand by the family in raising the child. There was a family who came to the church in Winchester and wanted me to baptize their baby. They did not live in the state, they were not believers, just wanted it done in a church they had attended as a child. I said I would baptize the baby if they would leave it with me when they went back home. Of course, they were shocked. I explained to them that this was not some magic ritual, but an entry point into the faith community, and I could not do this and let the child go back into the world. As my friend Charles Brockwell has said, “Baptism [adult or infant] is not our individual vote for Jesus. It is entry into the covenant community.” This is hard for us individual westerners to take—we think we make the decision and then we get baptized and then… so many adults baptized and where are they now? Fallen back, because the Church does not understand what God does through water and the Spirit! But I digress.

Anyway, I said to Pedro that this could be a huge moment for the church, to say that this family struggling to faith is giving us their babies while they figure it out. Peter’s comment was classic: “at that point, baptism is the only appropriate response.”

Ah yes, life in the fourth century is good!