Let Me Tell You About My Baptism

“Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (1889)

Let me tell you about my baptism last week, all right, because it was absolutely blooming perfect.

 

All right, I don’t usually put pictures of actual humans I know on my blog, but I figure we’re small enough in this one that nobody’s at risk of identity theft or whatever. Photo credit to the sister in Christ I mention specifically in the paragraph immediately following the next picture below.

It was perfect that we just caught the train down to one of our local beaches one Friday afternoon after classes finished and dunked me in the sea – because the sea is just there, and freely available, and you know, if you’ve got enough water to immerse a human being in, that’s really all you need for this business. It was perfect that we were there being church in a public area under the open sky, grey and cloudy as it was; that the visual testimony of my having died and risen with Christ my Lord wasn’t kept behind closed doors in some designated sanctfied space and shrouded in special pomp and ceremony, but instead that we carried the presence of God’s Spirit with and in us into the mundane and the secular and the unremarkable, and turned wherever we trod into holy ground. The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it; it was he who confined the sea to its borders on the third day of creation; and where two or three are gathered in his name, wherever they may be gathered, he is there with them.¹ In actual fact, there were more than two or three of us: there were ten.

It was perfect that so many of my dearest brothers and sisters in the Lord who live in the same city as me were able to be there. It was perfect that they offered up beautiful prayers for me both when a few of us met earlier that morning and then again after the event itself as I stood soaked in seawater and draped in an excess of towels; it was perfect that they took far more photos and videos than I’d asked for or wanted, as if this occasion were just too significant to risk not having proper visual records of it. It was perfect that the two individuals generous enough to do the actual dunking were among those with whom I’ve had the most meaningful conversations about our common hope, such that I have immense confidence in the genuine faith and wholehearted striving for faithfulness of both of them – and in their goodwill not to drop me, of course. It was perfect that several who weren’t able to be there in person sent messages of celebration and encouragement, and I could rejoice that though absent in flesh they were present in spirit – literally, because the spirits of all who believe sit in the presence of of God, in the company of saints of old and of angels, and to meet in the Lord’s name is to participate in that communion of all believers everywhere.²

It was perfect that I hadn’t prepared a testimony, because I know my lamentable tendency towards grounding far too much of my identity in my ability to articulate myself well, whether by spoken word or by written, and my equally lamentable self-centredness, and it would have been easy to formulate a pretty speech that ostensibly told the story of my salvation but was ultimately more about me than the one who saved me. Instead, I came out with a few fairly clumsy sentences about what I understood baptism to represent, and I’m quite sure I was altogether unimpressive, which was, I repeat, perfect. Any impressiveness on my part, after all, is nothing but an empty lie: God’s grace alone is what buried me with Christ and raised me with him; what drowned all that is worldly in me as in the Great Flood or the Red Sea; what cleansed me of my iniquity as Naaman of his leprosy; and all the credit, the glory, the applause, is his.³ And then it was perfect that one of those present read from the latter half of Acts 8 and had me repeat the lines of the Ethiopian eunuch,⁴ because it grounded what I was doing in indisputable scriptural precedent, and sang out the marvellous simplicity of the thing, that if you’ve got a feasible body of water to hand, then there is no prerequisite for baptism beyond the candidate’s belief in the identity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

It was perfect that it was a mild and slightly miserable day in March,⁵ and not just because we got free pick of the most convenient section of the near-deserted beach. It was perfect because I knew that it was my desire to be obedient that was driving this: I came to the conclusion that being sprinkled as a preschooler and then ‘confirmed’ in my mid-teens didn’t count as actually being baptised,⁶ and thenceforth my un-baptised-ness weighed on me like a dreadful burden, and I shot down any suggestion that I wait until the more hospitable conditions of the summer before allowing myself to be immersed in the chilly British sea, because, well, Jesus might come back before the summer, you know?⁷ What excuse is there to put obedience on hold to make things more comfortable for myself? Don’t get me wrong, I was terrified of how freezing it was going to be – like, sleepless-night level terrified – but then even that was perfect because it turned out not to be anywhere near as unpleasant as I was expecting: the first words I uttered after surfacing were, in rather surprised tones, “I’m actually fine!”, which might not seem terribly profound, but did contain an important lesson about not wasting time and thought and energy on being afraid of things that can’t in fact hurt me.

Happily, I wasn’t made to wear an outfit like this one when I was baptised as a toddler; now that would have been a truly terrifying prospect. Thanks to Multipedia at freedigitalphotos.net.

It was perfect, then, that this time the decision was mine; that I heard God’s instruction, took it to heart, and acted on it, rather than just going through with what the people around me told me I ought to do. It was perfect that I took the initiative and carved out my own occasion because I believed that this was what God had asked of me and I was jolly well going to make sure it happened. Now, God doesn’t typically deal with me by means of overwhelming emotions, and nor did he in this instance, because the joy I felt wasn’t exactly overwhelming; it didn’t charge in and possess me, occupy me past the point of my control or anything like that. Rather, it welled tenderly up in me as if I’d just come home. “How do you feel?” one of our party asked me as we sat on the train home. “Chuffed,” I replied, and there was no other word for it.⁸ I was more keenly, deeply, beautifully chuffed than I’d ever been in my whole life, and daring to entertain even the merest sliver of a notion that God might be smiling in approval over the afternoon’s events kept me grinning all the way home and afterwards.

You know what? It was even perfect that I carelessly broke my glasses when I was moving all my various paraphernalia into the loos to get changed, because, much as everyone assumed expressions of appropriate shock and dismay when I told them, I didn’t care a bit, and there in that was the proof that this moment was so unimpeachably golden that even an occurrence that I would on any other occasion have considered irritating at best couldn’t do a jot of damage to it.

It was perfect that the whole thing was just low-key and straightforward and unformulaic and lacking in frills, because that meant that we weren’t dabbling in magic, trying to generate some sense of God’s presence and blessing through set ritual or grand ceremony or calculated employment of prop and accessory: it meant that whatever happened was real.

And whatever happened was perfect.⁹

Footnotes

¹ You’re looking at Psalm 24:1 (also quoted in 1 Corinthians 10:26), Genesis 1:9-10 (check out also Job 38:8-11 for bonus fun), and Matthew 18:20.

² As per Ephesians 2:6. I think this is what Paul means when he talks about being absent in body but present in spirit (1 Corinthians 5:3, Colossians 2:5). The same principle sheds major light on Hebrews 12:1, and also explains 1 Timothy 5:21 – with the ‘elect’ angels being referred to specifically to distinguish them from those who left their proper estate of God’s presence in heaven, as per Jude 6. I’ll stop there before this turns into a post all of its own.

³ Ooh, another onslaught of Bible references … check out Romans 6:4 and Colossians 2:12; then for the typology of the death of the world in water, Genesis 6-9 (note especially 6:13 in light of the first bit of Romans 8) and Exodus 14 (bearing in mind that Egypt tends to represent the world); and 2 Kings 5 (compare also Luke 4:27 in its context for a reinforcing of Naaman as a type of the Church). Here’s the 2 Kings, since it’s the Old Testament precedent for the baptism that’s then suddenly all over the New without further explanation: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+5&version=ESVUK.

⁴ I love this passage on so many levels: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+8&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Which is actually the coldest time of year for sea-bathing, because the sun retains a lot of the heat it soaked up over the summer through the autumn and into the winter; early spring is the point at which it’s exhausted those resources and hasn’t had enough sun to warm up again: https://www.seatemperature.org/europe/united-kingdom/exmouth.htm.

⁶ Our English ‘baptise’ is a direct coinage from Greek βαπτίζω (baptízō), which means to dunk, to immerse; the examples in the relevant LSJ entry should give you a flavour: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=baptizw&la=greek#lexicon. I have a friend who likes to remark that if they’d had Dunkin’ Donuts in Ancient Greece, they would have called them Baptisin’ Donuts, because, you know, that was the word for ‘dunk’. Sloshing a few handfuls of water over the forehead, therefore, doesn’t cut it. And confirmation is just pointless and not even slightly biblical.

⁷ Unlikely, since Jerusalem is still lacking a Temple for the man of lawlessness to take his seat in and that (2 Thessalonians 2 if you’re wondering), but nothing is too hard for God, and even if the present age doesn’t hit its consummation in the next little while, there’s no guarantee that I won’t be removed from it shortly. I could get hit by a bus. Or drown. Or die of cold from sea-bathing at the stupidest possible time of year. You never know.

⁸ My friend didn’t know the word ‘chuffed’; I glossed it as ‘very happy’, but there’s a bit more to it than that, a kind of satisfaction with one’s own circumstances. One doesn’t feel chuffed about something that’s happened on the other side of the world. Also, fun fact, it’s apparently a contronym if you take a second dialectical variation into account: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/chuffed?s=t.

⁹ Before I go, thanks to Poetry Foundation for the full text of my opening quotation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45321/crossing-the-bar. And all right, he’s talking about death which isn’t super relevant, but it had the sea and Jesus in it and baptism kind of represents death and I couldn’t come up with anything better. Also, I’m not going to apologise for enhancing your day with very good poetry. Incidentally, the sea-shanty a cappella group The Longest Johns have included a musical version of ‘Crossing the Bar’ on their latest album, which I played a couple of times over while I was writing this post: https://www.thelongestjohns.com/music.

'Hunted' and a Hundredfold Houses

“My name is Lemony Snicket and I am on the lam, a phrase which here means ‘conveying this information to you while being relentlessly pursued by the law’. Being on the lam is a disheartening and an uncomfortable way to live, not unlike being squeezed into a tight, dark box tossed at high speed from a moving vehicle and abandoned on a dusty patch of road, tormented by doubt and unsure of where you are, which, if you are on the lam, is often the only way to travel. The Baudelaires, too, found themselves on the lam, tormented by doubt and unsure of where they were going, especially when their fire truck ran out of gas deep in the Hinterlands, a term which here means ‘a desolate place unlikely to bring their troubles to an end’. But your own troubles could be over this instant if you are sensible enough to halt this dire programming by pressing any nearby button marked ‘stop’.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S2 E7, ‘The Hostile Hospital: Part One’ (2018)

So I have an idea for how to win Hunted. I mean, of course I do; coming up with your own strategy is half the fun of watching the programme. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a sort of twist on the reality genre where a number of ordinary civilians go on the run for twenty-five days, while a team of elite military-intelligence types try to track them down and accost them using a wealth of resources replicating certain powers of the state: from access to CCTV recordings and vehicle number-plate tracking, to phone tapping and interrogation of known associates, to camera-equipped helicopters and drones. Successful evasion of the hunters earns a share of a hundred thousand pounds. Aside from the irritating propensity it shares with most Channel 4 documentaries for spending an excessive proportion of the runtime reminding you of what happened before the last advertisement break and previewing what’s going to happen after the next one, it’s a really fun and engaging bit of televised entertainment. So call that a recommendation if you have the time to spare; each of the four series released so far is a perfectly manageable six episodes long.¹

 

A CCTV camera. The UK has a lot of these that the hunters can exploit for their purposes.

The contestants on Hunted are usually a pretty varied bunch – in terms of where in the UK they hail from, their manners of employment and areas of interest, and so forth – but despite that, they almost always trip up and meet their downfall in very similar ways. Everyone knows that the surest way of evading the hunters’ detection is going off grid: get yourself out into the countryside somewhere, preferably in a bit of the UK with which you have no prior connection, take your map and compass, plot a course that avoids any heavily populated areas, and sleep wherever there’s space to pitch the tent you’re hefting around on your back. But doing that for twenty-five days straight just doesn’t work. For a start, you need some means of transport with which to get to that remote bit of countryside from your initial location, which the hunters are aware of, by the way. You also need supplies – food and so forth. And the importance of keeping your morale up shouldn’t be underestimated, either: for some reason, sitting alone in a little tent in the middle of nowhere, while rain pelts down outside and you’re uncomfortably aware of your desperate need for a shower, doesn’t seem to fill most people with positive and motivated sentiments about the day ahead. And so, one by one, the fugitives crack. They go back to familiar turf. They turn to good friends and pre-established associates. They risk everything to arrange meet-ups with close family members. And the hunters smell blood, move in, and strike.

To summarise, then, you can’t survive on Hunted without accessing any sort of network at all; and yet accessing any sort of network at all immediately gifts the hunters a golden opportunity to find you, because their powers allow them to find out all about the society you keep – and then to bug their conversations, track their movements, steal their digital data, personally question them, and do whatever else they need to do to find out what your associates know about where you are. What you need is a network that’s both too large to keep tabs on and fiercely loyal to its every member; you need a network whose support you can reliably access even in regions of the country totally unfamiliar to you; you need a network full of people you’ve never met before who will nevertheless bend over backwards to help you out.

Enter the Church.

I’m serious: wouldn’t it be a fascinating experiment to run, to see whether the Church in this country would be up to the challenge of concealing certain of its members from the eyes of a hostile government? Because the thing is, we blooming well ought to be up to such a challenge. We ought to be ready to bend over backwards to help out fellow members of the body of Christ, even ones we’ve never met before. A Christian fugitive ought to be able to disappear into the local community of believers wherever she goes. She ought to be able among them both to have her physical needs supplied – food and a shower and whatever else she needs after a few days off grid – and to have her spirits lifted by the encouragement of spending time in the company of the saints: reminding one another of the hope we share, bringing our concerns before our common heavenly Father, pooling our understanding of the scriptures which enable us to know him in his peerless glory better and better. The Church ought to be the absolute best network to have on your side if you’ve got no other connections to rely on. Check out the following snippet of Acts 4:

And of the full number of those having believed, there was one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things belonging to him was his own, but everything was held in common for them. And with great power the apostles were giving the testimony of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. For there wasn’t any needy person among them; for as many as were owners of lands or of houses, selling them, brought the value of the things sold, and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each, as any had need.²

For one thing, look at how that middle sentence is so inextricably sandwiched between the stuff about the nascent Church’s attitude towards property – and at that ‘for’ at the start of the third sentence (Greek γὰρ isn’t a particularly forceful conjunction, but I think it’s worth including in a translation). When his Church behaves like this, God’s favour – grace – is on them. It glorifies him when we don’t treat the material gifts he has granted us as if they were prizes we had a right to, or as if they meant something in light of eternal life, but instead use them to provide for our brothers and sisters in need; it glorifies him because it reflects his own generous character, and because it brings into effect his provision for his chosen people, and because it spits in the face of the world’s tragically shortsighted ideas about what’s important, and because it humbles the rich and lifts up the lowly. What’s more, the testimony of the resurrection is put forward with great power when it’s backed up by this kind of living, living that clearly has its hope set on something beyond what can be obtained in this life – beyond, you know, a nice house and a nice car and a nice wodge of savings to retire on. Living like this is part of how we show that we believe our Lord when he tells us that if we leave behind worldly things for him and the gospel, we shall, after the pattern of his own resurrection as the firstfruits of the crop, have eternal life in the age to come. But if you recognise the passage I’m alluding to there, you’ll know there’s another bit in there too:

Jesus said: Truly I say to you guys, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, because of me and because of the gospel, and will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the coming age, eternal life.³

In this chunk of Mark 10, the receipt of a hundredfold in various categories of family members, ‘now in this time’, is explicable straightforwardly enough as referring to the family of the Church: start following Jesus, and every Christian in the world is suddenly your brother or mother or child. If you wanted to run with that all the way, you could even make a not entirely implausible case that the mention of ‘houses’ is better construed as ‘households’ and also refers to human beings. But fields? A hundredfold recompense of agricultural land, now in this time? How can we account for that in a way that doesn’t err towards prosperity-gospel thinking? Well, in light of Acts 4, that’s how. Notice that there it’s lands and houses that are mentioned as things people sold in order to provide for fellow-believers in need, parallel to houses … and fields in Mark 10. The way Jesus’ promise of a hundredfold in recompense is fulfilled, is by the holding in common of property among the Church. If none of us considers anything that belongs to us to be our own, then each of us has access to everything that belongs to every other one of us, according as we should have need of it.

 

Hey look, a field.

This isn’t a political standpoint, by the way. The Bible tells us how to run the Church; it doesn’t tell us how to run a country, because that’s very clearly not what God wants us to be doing. We’re to preach the coming of his kingdom, not ally ourselves with earthly kingdoms inevitably built according to the model of Babylon;⁴ and just as his kingdom is totally different from any earthly institution of power, so are we to look totally different from any earthly institution of power. And part of that is this business of holding everything in common out of love for God and neighbour.

You see what I mean, then, about my proposed Hunted strategy. Usually, physical needs coupled with a longing for home and family grind down the fugitives’ resolve to the point where they see no option but to reenter the geographical and societal territory familiar to them, thereby walking straight into the hunters’ hands; but for the Christian, the Church stands ready to fulfil those needs and longings wherever she is in the world. That’s no accident, either. Jesus’ promise of recompense comes in the context that following him into eternal life may require leaving behind all sorts of things you treasured in the life you led before – just as Hunted’s fugitives have to cut themselves off from the lives they led before they went on the run if they’re to evade capture. The Church would be the perfect support network for a fugitive with nowhere else to turn, because that is precisely the role it is designed to fill.

But would it fill that role successfully? The Church in this country right now doesn’t look very much like the one described in Acts 4, does it? And don’t we find all this talk of everything in common and distributing to those in need a fraction uncomfortable? Wouldn’t we rather tone it down a bit and content ourselves with a direct-debit tithe and the odd bit of spontaneous charity, than stir ourselves to strive for the ideal laid down in scripture? I know I would. And doesn’t that just prove that I’m one of those rich who needs to humble myself for the sake of others, before God runs out of patience and does it for me? There is great grace and great power of testimony to be gained in getting this jazz right; what if we were to try, small step by small step, to get closer to that?

So yes, I’d be absolutely fascinated to see whether my suggested Hunted tactic would actually work, or whether the Church as it currently is would fall short of the challenge. That said, I have absolutely zero interest in applying as a contestant for the next series of the programme: I am certain I’d make a thoroughly useless fugitive, which would not only stress me out no end, but also slightly ruin the experiment if I were to end up captured through my own incompetence rather than the failures of my network. I don’t suppose any of you reckons you might do all right at being on the run and fancies giving my strategy a go?

Footnotes

¹ You can get the full boxset on All 4: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/hunted.

² Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+4&version=ESVUK.

³ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+10&version=ESVUK.

⁴ I will never understand why English translations give the Hebrew בָּבֶל (bāvel) as ‘Babel’ in Genesis 11, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11&version=ESVUK, and ‘Babylon’ in every instance thereafter. It’s the same word, guys. Now chase the thing right through the scriptures all the way to Revelation 18, and you’ll see what I mean about earthly kingdoms being irredeemable.