The current issue of The Christian Century (November 3, 2009) happens to feature not one but two articles touching on baptism – and especially how it anchors our lives.
Pastor Heidi Neumark’s “Sermon in stone” tells of her trip to Lubeck, Germany, this past summer to follow up on her recently discovered roots. This Lutheran pastor’s grandparents were Jewish, and so she tells, brought her father as a child to St. Mary’s Church font in Nazi Germany in an “act of desperation, assimilation, or both.” Perhaps baptism would enable their child to escape the fate of other Jews.
As Neumark tells the story of the bronze font dating from 1337, a masterpiece with figures from Adam and Eve to Jesus and the surprise of the wise and foolish maidens along with more predictable apostles, the reader appreciates the both the unique glories of font itself and this pastor’s fascination. Even more surprising to her is that the church’s pastor admitted to never looking at the font and its incredible art. “I just baptize babies here,” he confessed as Neumark pondered “this sermonic lodestone.”
For whatever pastoral riches this font could yield, in the end it’s blessing was personal, earthy, transforming, and touchable as Neumark concludes, “…whatever drew my grandparents there with their son has been transmuted by mercy. My life in Christ began in this indestructible bath, and I am grateful for my place in the dance.”
Neumark’s story is worth a special read, but she shares with all of us the blessing of travel to special places, sacred places where God has worked, in this case, using earth’s water in a font in unique and terrifying wartime circumstances.
In the same issue (pp. 12-13) Miroslav Volf, professor at Yale University, tells of being a “reluctant pilgrim” to the Holy Land with his oldest son. Never one to be into “sacred places,” he really didn’t expect much from “holy sites” in this land where fact and legend were often indistinguishable. But at the baptism site dedicated to John the Baptist, a relatively new place of pilgrimage, he found himself fascinated by the historical and spiritual authenticity. The Gospel of John (1:28) describes John’s baptisms at “Bethany across the Jordon.” An earlier pilgrim account from 333 A.D. support John’s baptizing there in the Jordan five miles from the Dead Sea near a hill where Elijah was taken up into heaven. Volf admits that suddenly he found himself immersed in the events of Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel and John with Herod and Herodias. It also helped that the souvenir shop was kept at a respectable distance in the visitor’s center.
Again travel connected the believer to story, and the past becomes present and alive. The stories of Jesus, his people, his enemies, his mission, soak deeper into us in the places we can see and feel and meander. That’s appropriate to a baptismal spirituality in which earth and heaven touch.
What did travel to this place do for Volf and his son? “…[I]t turned us into pilgrims because it presented to us a sacred space – a space free of mercantile culture in which we are drenched and space inscribed with sacred narratives that point a person to the spring of living water and the tree of true life.” The bottom line, however, comes in his son’s words, “I felt somehow connected with Jesus.”
As in baptism’s earthiness, we are immersed into the story of Jesus – and God.
