Since I owe Bonhoeffer my long-time interest in baptism and the Christian life, today’s posting is a brief quote from his London baptismal homily on Joshua 24:15, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

“…From now on, your house shall have only one Lord, Jesus Christ, only one will, the will of God, only one spirit, the Holy Spirit…. There would be something wrong with this day if there would not be a real change in your homelife from now on. For Jesus has come to dwell with you and wherever Jesus comes he changes lives and houses…. 

Nobody can foretell the future, and it is no use doing it. But however dark it seems to be, there is only one man who is free from fear—the man who believes God is his help.”

– from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: London, 1933-1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 13, p. 364.

I remember a discussion many years ago about how much water was required to do a baptism. Even how a baptism could take place if one was without water in the desert. One fellow insisted that sand could be used because even in the driest sand, a minute amount of water would exist. I guess the letter of the law mattered in that discussion.

I’m not very interested in such arguments anymore. Especially all those that push the envelope at the edge of our experience, the exceptions. I’m much more concerned about ordinary baptisms, and what happens to the people who get splashed in the font or dunked at the lake.

During Earth Week, I’ll be thinking about this: who sees the spiritual connections between the water in the font and the water in the water – or in the shower or the lake or the puddle or the drain, etc. I’ll be thinking about the connections between holy water and common water and remembering that it’s all water, a marvelous creation and a gift of God. I’ll be thinking of the holy water from the font poured on the ground mingling with rain water and run-off and flood water and sewage. And I’ll be thinking that we can’t hold the first (holy water) in high regard while ignoring or demeaning the other (common water).

And if we are truly made new in the water event of baptism, and if we are in Christ, we can no longer be the proverbial wild west rancher of the past who insists on all the water for his herd while his neighbor’s cattle thirst to death. Drowned in the waters of baptism, that “old Adam” in us can’t have free rein the way he used to. Water itself, precious and free and life-giving, must somehow become a sign of the new age too. The gift is for all and the gift must be cared for.

On Earth Day we’ll work at that again, so that other days will be blessed too.

He has water from “next door” and water from the Sea of Galilee, water from the Potomac and from the Mediterrannean. And when it comes time for a baptism, families and sponsors add water to the font from their home area as he add drops from his worldwide collection.

What a wonderful way to demonstrate the connections baptism give us. Not only are we connected to God in Christ, but to earth itself in all those watered places and to the people there. Spiritual and physical connections weave their way through sacramental action.

Read the full article, “Scarce and sacred water,” in The Lutheran, April 2010.

How difficult is it to relinquish a theological or political position we have defended with vigor? Then later to admit, “I’ve changed my mind?” Terribly so, painfully so, for many of us. Like leaving behind a part of ourselves. Like dying, almost. For us Christians this can be an experience of baptismal “remembering,” if you will, of our dying and rising with Christ, but a remembering so anchored in our baptism that we are also secure “in Christ.”

The Christian Century does well to quote Martin Luther in reference to its occasional series: “It is by living and dying that one becomes a theologian.” This is earthy stuff of the real world.

In the January 12 issue, Carol Zaleski writes of her baptism on the day of the Feast of St. Benedict and how “any views [she’s] acquired since then pale in significance, washed out in the light of the gospel and creed [she] accepted on that day.” Yet she really lays the foundation for change with her admission that “there are corners of [her] mind that still haven’t heard the news.” No surprise then that her article bore the title “Slow-motion conversion.”

Peter Marty’s piece (strictly not in the series) in the February 23 issue, “Love that changes minds,” intrigues the reader with the sub-title, “The case for inconsistency.” It’s really an argument for being open to having one’s mind changed. Marty makes his case with a poignant day-after-Christmas meeting with parents stunned over their daughter’s unexpectedly announced homosexuality. Mom and Dad sit down with their pastor saying this is “contrary to everything we hold dear as a family” and “not what the Bible professes.” But they are there. And they love their daughter, present with them. Where do they go from here? Where do they even begin?

Because of love – but not love without pain –in these three lives, Marty writes of gradual changes over several years. Mom understands God’s love for all God’s children in a new way. Dad finds Jesus more important in his faith than before. And how about Jenna in all this? She loves to come home.

Here is baptismal spirituality. People who’ve died and risen with Christ in baptism are anchored and secured “in Christ” so that, remembering that baptism, they can open their minds and change strongly held opinions albeit, sometimes, in fear and trembling. Change and let go –because the rivers of love run so very deep.

Soskice promises to take the reader on a journey of discovery of biblical manuscripts, the copies that hold out the promise of discovering the early texts of our Bible. This holds out for a being an intriguing journey, especially taken by two independent women at a time when the household was the typical province, and especially when they were challenging men who possessed all the finely-honed university credentials they did not. So I read on.

Fascinating at this early point, however, is the spirituality that moved Agnes and Margaret with energy and drive. They grew up in Scotland, where their father saw that they received a quality education, not a second-best one typical for young women of the time. And they were part of the Presbyterian Church where they heard one of the premier preachers of the day. What that all came to mean was that they lived with a deep sense of calling – or a sense that their life under God needed to be useful. They were not about to pitter their lives away dancing, socializing, or ordering the household because that was typical of young women with money.

Be useful. Soskice attributes that need to their Presbyterian upbringing – and I have no doubt of that influence – but I read that and find another meaning, that usefulness belongs to a rich and deep baptismal spirituality. Yes, in baptism we connected to Christ in a great grace, accepted and loved by the God of the universe. But there’s more. In baptism, we are given a calling from God. We are children of God, yes, but we are also called to become someone whose life is uniquely shaped by God to be of some earthly good  – or as Agnes and Margaret believed, to be useful.

They wouldn’t call it baptismal spirituality, and I shouldn’t impose that upon them, but I confess to seeing it here in a 100+ year old story.  And now I read on to see the paths where this spirituality takes them.

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.

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.

“…Tim Robbins’ character serves a life sentence for a crime he did not commit, but he eventually escapes through the prison’s sewer system, makes it through the outfall pipe and collapses in a river. He staggers to his feet, and in a deafening downpour, lightning flashing around him, he stumbles through the water from the earth and the sky, takes off his prison clothing and heads toward freedom. When I first saw that scene, all I could think of was one word – baptism. He had just crawled through some of the worst muck imaginable. He had just lived through the worst life imaginable. And now he’s in the water, shedding his old self.”

What a marvelous description! For a long time, The Shawshank Redemption has been at the top of my list of favorite movies, and now writer Dean Nelson has just articulated another reason it appeals so deeply to me.  The spiritual dimension of life itself flows through the movie, even, as Nelson insists, the sacramental character of life. The more-than-mundane in the mundane. The holy in the ordinary.

I found myself considering the baptismal elements in the scene Nelson describes. Here are a few:

• Immersion in the water
• Being washed by the water
• Shedding old garments to receive new
• Leaving behind the old life
• Facing the new with all kinds of emotions: fear, joy, uncertainty, etc.
• Moving into freedom.

Nelson’s article includes the Celtic insight that there are “thin spaces” between this world and the greater unseen world. Ordinary activities have more going on within them than we take in with our senses. We often miss this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Nelson concludes, “Wearing the lens of the sacraments can show us that it has been there all along, hiding in plain sight.” The title to his recent book  indicates the same, God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World.

Baptismal spirituality is part of that seeing, a way to know God when God often seems absent. And sacraments like baptism , I would add, help us name our experience as one of “the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  I look forward to reading Nelson’s book to nurture my own spiritual awareness.

I’ve been thinking of Lent out of season. In fact, I just posted on my book’s website, www.waterforyoursoul.com, information on a Lenten preaching series for pastors to use in 2010. If you’re a pastor, I invite you to give this a look. At the site, just click on “For pastor especially” for the PDF on “The Baptismal Plunge with Christ.” I encourage you to print it out and consider using it for midweek services (or Sundays).

 Lent is the time when, with Christ, the church moves from death to life, from ashes to resurrection. Lent is a powerful time of baptismal spirituality, a time of dying to sin and rising to new life. My book on baptismal spirituality, Water for Your Soul: Living in Baptism Every Day, lends itself to a preaching series to take people deeper into the waters of grace and discipleship.

The PDF (above) and one copy of my book are the basics for the series, but there’s flexibility to go different ways with the materials. In any case, Lent is a great time to learn and experience that baptism’s benefits for our spiritual journey keep going and going. I hope you try the series and are blessed.