Sometimes baptism’s impact is like the effect of rain on earth: it seeps in, slowly but surely changing the scene.

I had those thoughts as I read Sue Gamelin’s words in the November 2009 issue of The Lutheran, an issue focusing on patriarchy’s negative impact on our lives.

Sue’s story opens with her childhood love of the Bible, continues with her pain of leaving the church (“good girls don’t ask questions,” for example), and returns to finding the church again at her first child’s baptism. Eventually her experiences bumping up against patriarchy and male privilege gave way to the magnetism of Jesus’ profound respect for women – until one day she headed off to seminary.

Looking back over her journey, she witnesses to baptismal spirituality seeping deeply into our lives and weakening patriarchy’s underpinnings: “Soon after my ordination in 1980, a male pastor, asked me what I was trying to prove. Taken aback, I couldn’t answer him properly then. But now I would tell him that I’m trying to prove that my baptism ‘took.’ I put on Christ – and that has made all the difference.”

When we are “in Christ,” being male or female isn’t the issue.

Read Sue Gamelin’s full story on page 25 in The Lutheran, November 2009.

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.

This is just a quick stop to post a beautiful water prayer that Lutheran World Relief mailed as a bookmark. Note the imagery from both the world of nature and the Scriptures. Then pray it – with thanks to LWR for their good sustainable development work around the world. I encourage you to support them. Water…a physical and spiritual blessing…so many ways.

The next Holy Saturday is April 11. The day between Good Friday and Easter. As a pastor I always felt that Holy Saturday was a very different, strange, in fact. A little bit like being on a journey and then getting lost. You know where you’ve been but you can’t go back. And where are you going? Well, you don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’ll be different, like nothing you’ve seen before. Unknown.

When I was a pastor, I’d put the finishing touches to my Easter sermon on Saturday morning, maybe even do the heart of my preparations. I seemed to need to go through Good Friday and it’s death-of-Jesus-drama to take this step. Then I could go to the blank sheet of paper or computer screen. But only then – Saturday – this odd  time between, the past gone, the future not yet.

In baptism, it’s the time of being plunged into the water, deep into it, drowning, being suspended there and not coming up. The old is ending, or ended, and the future is what? So much we don’t know. And yet for all the unknowns, we are there with Christ. That is the certainty.

I’ve found myself thinking these first days and weeks of my retirement are another version of Holy Saturday. All those years, nearly 38 of them, I’ve been a pastor. Who I was, what I’d do, how I’d spend my days – well, that was all pretty clear. Now it’s not, not the same at all. A key part of my identity is impacted, as it is for many people who retire. Work has been such a major component of our lives. Who am I now? Who will I be? The answer will come.

So I visit our adult children and help them on projects. I go to the games of grandkids. I do things at home. I read a few more books. I begin to look at some writing projects on my list. I get hints of what will be, but it still feels like unfamiliar territory. Like driving home from a few days helping a son, and thinking I had to be “on the job” the next morning…. Then realizing, No, I’m retired. I’ll get used to it, and it’s okay. Even better than that.

But there is something of the character of Holy Saturday, and the time must be lived through. No skipping it. A milestone moment. But there still is Christ who is with me in it all. And I am never just what I am giving up or losing. I am who I am in Christ, beloved, a child of God, a brother to so many others – and one who moves into the world of a new and different future.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my book on baptismal spirituality, Water for Your Soul, by Infinity Publishing.com. Just days before its publication date of February 6, I excitedly opened a box with the first copies. I am very pleased with the quality of the printed product, and I hope the book will serve well the church and the Gospel message. 

The book has 31 chapters about living the baptized life every day. For years of my ministry, I have been concerned about moving our understanding of baptism from a little ceremony for infants and children into a spiritual event that blesses and affects our whole life. So I have written pre-baptismal materials to use with parents. I’ve preached and taught on the meanings of baptism. I’ve begun personal practices related to baptismal to deepen my own spiritual life. But this book pulls together all this “baptismal spirituality” in ways I’ve been dreaming of and working at for a long time. When you get your copy, I hope you’ll enjoy it – and more than enjoy it, that you’ll be affected in your heart and life. 

You may find Water for Your Soul interesting and valuable if –

          ● you wonder what your own baptism – maybe as an infant – has to do with your spiritual life today;         

          ● you watched impatiently as a baptism took place in church because “it doesn’t mean much for the rest of us;”         

          ● you hunger for a deeper spiritual life and wonder if there can be more meaning in rites of the church.  

I am convinced that baptism is a wonderful treasure of the church that we need to celebrate and learn to “spend” in our daily lives. My intent is that Water for Your Soul helps us do just that. Whether you’re a parent wanting your child baptized, a Christian who wants to grow, or a skeptic about baptism, I hope this book will connect you with God in new ways. 

I am very grateful for the many people who’ve had a hand in helping this book reach printed form, but special thanks go to The Louisville Institute for a summer writing stipend and to the congregation I serve, Holmen Lutheran Church, for granting me uninterrupted sabbatical time. What blessings! I look forward to marking this event in my congregation with a book signing early in March. And now you really should check out Water for Your Soul for yourself.

What a wonderful person! That’s what I thought on Wednesday morning as I read about Earl Madary while I was eating breakfast. A professor at Viterbo University, he seemed to embody the qualities he taught, walking the world with wonder and awe. How sad, I thought, to be getting acquainted with him through a story about his death. That story began, “Earl Madary loved the water,” so I shouldn’t have been surprised about what I was reading three days later. 

La Crosse Tribune writer Joe Orso did the follow-up piece too on the funeral Mass at San Damiano Chapel on the Viterbo campus. Below the program’s cover of St. Francis of Assisi spinning in dance were these words after Madary’s name:

Born to life: May 1, 1965

Born to eternal life: December 16, 2007

Joe Orso’s comment was that “I hadn’t seen ‘death’ written as ‘life’ before. When I read the words, my heart felt like it bloomed.” 

Ah, yes, I thought, that’s exactly the right response. Joe went on to say other wonderful things, but I want to add: Here is baptismal spirituality at its center. Here is what God is doing all the time and it comes to its fullest and final expression in the movement from death to eternal life. 

Notice I said “its fullest expression.” God is always bringing life out of death, beginnings out of our human endings. I am sure God used Earl Madary in the classroom to stir faith where it hardly existed. It happened when, as a longtime friend and colleague of his put it, Earl “would turn ordinary events into extraordinary encounters.” This man saw and practiced the wisdom of being generous and full of grace rather than hard-edged or critical. And in all this, God was doing what God did in Earl’s baptism – moving from death to life. 

Oh, death is hard. We ache for Earl Madary’s family and friends. Their loss is so great. But they have known great love and faith, and that helps them. Christian baptismal spirituality means that the last word is life. We go from this life to eternal life. We even go from death to life. The certainty was set long ago, the day of our baptism, when we died with Christ and rose with him. Life is the last word.  

How appropriate and beautiful, I thought, that the Tribune provided a link to listen to Madary performing his song, “I Go to the Water to Remember You.” Even that sounds baptismal.

The Belief Watch article in the December 17 Newsweek, “Bless This Bottled Water,” gives a new twist on “holy water.” 

Ambitious entrepreneurs are bottling under labels like “Holy Drinking Water” and “Spiritual Water.” Labels of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, for example, adorn some bottles, along the Hail Mary, making this water help you “stay focused, believe in yourself, and believe in God.” Other water even claims to have good vibrations promoting a positive outlook. Interesting! 

The Franciscan Sisters in northern Minnesota have launched a letter-writing campaign against large producers of bottled water. “Water is life.” Sister Mary Zirbes adds, “It really should not be a commodity to be bought” – presumably under any label, secular or religious. 

A baptismal spirituality resonates with the line, “Water is life.” God, who created water, uses it again in baptism for a new creation. In the process water blesses us twice, creation and re-creation. If you’re baptized, it’s harder and harder not to appreciate the wonder, the beauty, and the life-power of water. And water links us with the whole world, connecting us to people everywhere by its free-flowing movements and wind-blown rain clouds. If Christian baptism creates separation by making us part of a new community of faith, the church, we still need to remember that the baptismal water forever links us to the people of every place and race. Water is baptismal spirituality’s truth of interdependence: our lives are always intertwined with others on earth. 

Sister Mary sounds the truth: “Water is life.” Water doesn’t belong to any one of us, any more than the air we breathe. (Like ranchers of the old west, our world may increasingly be drawn into fights about our “water rights.”) How we can increasingly love and care for the water of our interdependence is one of the great issues of our time. Could it be if we do a better job on this that we will be treating water as more holy than buying it bottled with a picture of Jesus?