Today I’d like to think about Christian baptism, and what it might mean for Christians to claim the power of baptismal “identity” today.
John the Baptist was a rebellious preacher’s kid turned rogue prophet who baptized people for transformation. Long before Southern Baptists, or American Baptists, or the 12th Baptist Black Church in Roxbury, Boston, in whose choir I once sang, there was John, son of Zechariah. In Luke’s Gospel, John grew up in the temple, where he must have dipped into the Jewish purification pools.
Since Luke’s dad, the priest Zechariah, had temple connections, John most likely had his pick of the numerous sectarian cleansing options of the day. The Sadducees had the nicer pools, the luxury pools, which were sometimes housed in private homes. The Pharisees had their own mikvehs, Jewish ritual baths, that they shared with their communities. The esoteric Essenes dipped daily in their pools to be cleansed and prepared for the coming Messiah. John had the inside-Temple track of a preacher’s kid—he could have dunked himself in any number of those nearby pools, but instead he trekked out to the wilderness and dove into the Jordan River’s muddy waters.
Gospel writers Mark and Matthew tell of a John who wore a loincloth and camel’s hair, a real hippy type, probably sporting dreadlocks, whose gaunt frame feasted on locusts and wild honey. John lived out there in the wilderness, wandering all around Jordan’s banks, much like his Israelite ancestors did so many years ago, pilgrimaging towards a promised land that flowed with milk and honey.
John’s baptism on the margins of the religious establishment conveyed a message of lives changed and turned around towards God. The sermon John proclaimed, cried, enacted, and shouted from the river banks was this: “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3). Repentance means to change direction, to turn around, to undergo evolution of consciousness, to transform your life. Sin is what disconnects us, estranges us from God, ourselves, and each other. And so John’s water dunking differed from the Temple’s many purification pools. John’s baptism wasn’t primarily about conversion to Judaism or purity codes; it was about turning the direction of one’s will and life and heart and mind over to God. It was about participating and finding one’s true identity in the new movement God was initiating.
Photo by Ani Adigyozalyan on Unsplash
The Christians in Paul’s day built on the foundation of John’s Jordan River plunges. Paul and early Christians thought baptism was about becoming a new person in Christ. In the early church, when someone was baptized, they descended and ascended from the water as a way of participating in Christ’s death and resurrection. In Romans 6 Paul wrote, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”
Baptism became a symbolic ritual for the journey of walking Jesus’s path.
The person being baptized went underwater, buried with Christ, and stood up from the water, “risen with Christ.” What’s more is that they likely did it without most or any clothes on. Galatians 3:27 references this ritual: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” When baptismal candidates stepped into the water, they took off their garments as a way of saying, “I’m done with the habits and ways of living that disconnect me from God. I’m done with selfishness, greed, violence, addiction, love of power, idolatry, shame, and self-loathing.” When they stepped out of the water and put on new clothes they were at the same time dressing in the ways of Christ, putting on love, mutuality, humility, service, peacemaking, and forgiveness.
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, baptism in Christ unifies. Paul writes to a fledgling community of both Jews and Gentiles who have united through shared faith in Messiah Christ. And yet the letter reveals profound conflict between these two religious-cultural identities. Paul, on one hand, declares that the doors guarding access to God have been thrown open. It was the first inclusive congregation. No longer was it necessary to follow the Jewish law to experience God’s presence and chosenness. Mainstay practices of ancient Judaism, such as circumcision and dietary restrictions, were no longer necessary, Paul said (writing as a Jew), because we have been justified by faith. On the other hand, a divergent group in Galatia begged to differ. Paul’s inclusion went too far, they thought. Gentiles could follow the Messiah Christ, but they had to obey a few basic Torah stipulations. The Law was still necessary for faith in Christ; how dare Paul jettison the whole foundation of their religion? (This analysis of Galatians comes from British commentator James Dunn, by the way).
And so baptism for Paul functioned as the ritual of oneness in Christ, of new identity beyond division. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek. In Christ there is no male or female. In Christ, there is no enslaved or free. These were the ancient and polarized equivalents of today’s divides. Before baptism Paul’s readers once held identities that defined them. They had loyalties and group memberships that helped them make sense of the world, that served to separate who’s in from who’s out, but Paul proclaims that in Christ all those identities are rendered relative. They no longer hold final sway. They no longer divide—because baptism is the marker of reconciled community that is Christ’s body, the church. We are one in Christ Jesus.
There’s one inherent challenge to embodying the oneness of baptism: this oneness at its heart excludes exclusion. It excludes domination, racism, and authoritarian “strong man” politics, because Christ pursued a different way. The baptismal waters do not seek to exclude, because they flow toward everyone, inviting each person, creature, and life form into a unifying embrace. And yet those who trample on union, who attempt to deny diversity with hate, and who exercise their will to power stand against the current of this baptismal liberation. They resist the very waters that would free them, clinging to idols of supremacy and fear. In doing so, they wage war against their created purpose of communion and belovedness and refuse the oneness that is waiting to receive them.
Baptismal water, therefore, is powerful, life-changing water. It’s water that symbolizes the intention to live lives bending in the direction of God. It reminds us to turn back towards that direction when we lose our way. Baptism points to the newness of life in Christ and declares that suffering, death, and domination are not ultimate, and that resurrection is real. Baptism is water that testifies to our true selves and true belonging. It’s water that embraces us, as Jesus was embraced at his baptism, with radical love.