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.