On the commemoration calendar of the Lutheran church (ELCA), today we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian. On this date in 1945, he was hanged on Nazi gallows for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

A pastor-teacher in Germany in the 1930s, Bonhoeffer has been my ministry’s inspiration. His writing on grace and baptism in The Cost of Discipleship almost 75 years ago, for example, set me a long and continuing course of lifting up baptismal spirituality, beginning with a master’s thesis at Luther Seminary.

Mindful that Bonhoeffer’s pastoral ministry took place while Hitler consolidated power and went to war, I offer a few of his words that first stirred me (and many others):

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacrament; grace as the church’s inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs….

Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways….

Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ….

[Costly grace] is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live…. Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs the life of God’s Son…. [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 4, Discipleship, pp. 43-45]

Let that be enough for now, the right note to sound here in Holy Week which is truly about costly grace.

Baptismal spirituality is about Christ making us new. Yesterday, the first Sunday in Advent and the first day of the new church year, brought that home to my heart in a couple ways.

Awaking while the world was still dark, I was surprised by a fresh layer of snow on the ground. As daylight arrived, a whole new scene unfolded before us. Some of us were surprised, others almost expecting it. The drab browns and grays of November were gone, replaced by a glistening white that impressed even the winter-haters. But just as the change to snow is not easy, neither is being new in Christ. For one, there is cold and shoveling and layers of clothing; for the other, surprise and shock and accepting this new person we are. Yet how good the new is in our lives. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

My early morning devotion was a Dietrich Bonhoeffer reading* perfect for the beginning of Advent. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Luther…often said that, next to the Word of God, music is the best thing that human beings have… Luther knew that it has dried an infinite number of tears, made the sad happy, stilled desires, raised up the defeated, strengthened the challenged, and that it has also moved many a stubborn heart to tears and driven many a great sinner to repentance before the goodness of God. ‘O sing to the Lord a new song ‘ (Ps. 98:1).” *from I Want to Live These Days with You, p. 349

What God did in baptism – making us new in Christ – God continues daily in ordinary ways.

Forty years later, the Vatican newspaper announces it’s ready to forgive John Lennon and the Beatles for their boast about being “more popular than Jesus.” The paper has realized that these were just working class lads coping with unexpected success.

Truth is, they probably were more popular than Jesus! After all, “popularity” was never a value Jesus seemed attracted to. If he had, he surely wouldn’t have hung around with poor peasants, or worse, sinners and prostitutes. Nope, the Beatles always had it all over Jesus on the popularity scale.

Maybe Christians shouldn’t have become so worked up over this forty years ago. We should have just paid more attention to what Jesus was about – not popularity but mercy, peace, and hungering for righteousness (Matthew 5). Even John Lennon, it seems, wasn’t really dissing Jesus, just his followers – and that goes on all the time. Christians should be used to it, but we don’t take it well.

If Jesus doesn’t give two hoots about popularity, he does care about following. “Follow me,” he said, and he says to us. Which amounts to leaving behind what we were, and becoming someone new. End of the old, beginning of the new. Drowning our self-centeredness, coming to new life where God and others matter most. Following Jesus is, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, is the equivalent of being baptized in St. Paul’s New Testament letters. There’s not too much room for popularity where God’s doing a makeover in people.

But Christians get sidetracked too. It’s time to forgive the exaggerations of the Beatles, that’s true, but it’s an even better time for Christian self-examination. Arguments about popularity go nowhere, following Jesus does. That’s a bit of baptismal spirituality – letting go of ourselves to find our true selves. Jesus wants that. That’s where Lennon’s remark should take us too.

There’s been a big gap in my postings: I haven’t been here since early March. This is what happens when a pastor’s life get filled with Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. But here we are again.

Since the March book signing at my church for Water for Your Soul, I’ve had three more signings: at The Blue Cup, Barnes & Noble, and the Luther College Book Shop. I just returned from Decorah and Luther College moments ago. What fun these events have been, renewing relationships with many old friends who appreciate my ministry and my writing. The real goal, however, is to get my book into the hands of many people to encourage their spiritual life in new ways. So the book signings are just the beginning.

A few days ago I noticed on Amazon.com that Martin Marty is scheduled to come out with a new book on baptism. My first thought? “Oh, darn. Here I a parish pastor write one little book on baptism and struggle to get it out there, and then prolific and ubiquitous Martin Marty comes along and writes a book on the same subject and he’ll have an instant audience.” After I got done grousing I thought, maybe this isn’t so bad after all. Baptismal spirituality needs fresh articulating by more people and who better than a big name like Marty to do it. Then I thought again, maybe people interested in his book will also notice mine, and the benefits will double. Later, trying to be humble, I thought, mine may even have the better title! Well, readers, you’ll have to be the judge of that.

If you haven’t purchased my book, always available from the publisher as well as from me, you might be interested to know that one of people who endorsed it warmed my heart when he told me it contained a combination of the best of Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Alvin Rogness (Luther Seminary professor and popular writer who died some years ago). I invite you to read Water for Your Soul yourself and decide if you agree with him.

This coming Sunday I’m looking forward to a book signing at my congregation. It’s really a celebration of the result of a long process and a lot of work. How great to share it with the supportive people who gave me sabbatical time to work on my first draft. 

Preparing for this event reminds me of how long my book’s topic has been a passion for me. I remember sitting in our small camper-trailer at Green Lake, Wisconsin many years ago writing a proposal for a master’s thesis in theology. I was excited at the time because I’d found in Dietrich Bonhoeffer a spiritual guide for issues around baptism, and now I was suggesting a topic with him and baptism as the focus. How little did I realize that beginning would have many surprising effects on my ministry for years to come, including the book that I’ll sign on Sunday, Water for Your Soul.

I suppose the stirrings of a concern for baptismal spirituality began when I discovered how apparently little this sacrament meant to some. Well, maybe that’s not fair. But very early in my ministry as a young pastor I was finding myself with requests for baptism by people I didn’t expect to approach me. I expected to be approached mostly by folks I served in my rural Wisconsin parish – the members, church-goers, believers, Christians, worshipers I saw on a regular basis. But just as often I found the Sacrament of Baptism being requested by parents I had never met before for reasons I wasn’t quite sure of. Sometimes they were members who didn’t worship (an interesting reality, of course); other times they had even less connection to the church, even just passing through. 

What I discovered is that lots of people had some interest in baptism – the day, the event, the family gathering, the ceremony, the “insurance” – but fewer were enthused about the Christian life. It was like baptism was the end or goal: you get it done and that’s it. I had trouble big-time with that. I was convinced, and still am, that baptism is really a beginning. 

So back to Bonhoeffer. I did my research and wrote my thesis for Luther Seminary (St. Paul, Minnesota), but that was just the beginning. I prepared pre-baptismal studies for parents of children to be baptized, and even sold these “learning packets” through an enterprising company for a time. That was an exciting experience in being published too, but I thought it was even more exciting for what it would mean for the church. Not much baptismal education was being done at the time. Now there was a tool, which I still use in a modified form, which gives parents an extra chance to study, think and pray about this extraordinary event for their child – and what it can mean for them too. I continue to love these conversations, especially when this new baptismal reality “clicks” for them. 

But that’s just part of the story on the way to Water for Your Soul. More next time….

This is a new venture: a blog on baptismal spirituality. I call it “Water and Word.” Why? Because that great man of faith Martin Luther who shook up the world nearly 500 years ago liked to say that baptism is not water only, but water used “according to God’s command and connected with God’s word.” Baptismal spirituality gets you both, water and word, not one or the other but both. And God in both.

I decided I liked the idea of starting this blog near November 11. That’s the anniversary date of Martin Luther’s baptism. He was one day old. If spiritual value of baptism has a champion, Luther would head the list of nominees. He loved baptism. He believed that God did great things in humble things like water and the word. In fact, Luther believed he and every Christian received so much in baptism that he – and we – can spend our whole life learning what it means.  

Luther is right, at least in my opinion. That’s why I’m beginning this blog, to think aloud about baptism’s often unused benefits, about a baptismal spirituality that’s good from our diaper days to our dying day. That’s I wrote a book too about baptismal spirituality that has the publication date of February 4, 2008. I am eager to share it with you. What about that February date? That’s the anniversary of the 1906 birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who died for his faith, hanged by Hitler’s henchmen in April 1945. He loved baptism too – and he followed Jesus all the way. One person who read my book told me informally that he thought it had the best of Luther, Bonhoeffer, and a beloved departed pastor in the church, Alvin Rogness. I am humbled and pleased by that thought. 

So I invite you to stay with me. Between now and the publication date for my book, I’ll give you some hints of what it means to live baptized every day. There’s a lot of spiritual hunger in the world, and baptismal spirituality is a great treasure that can refresh and renew us. Even with simple things like water and the word.