So, another baptism ...

A sermon by Kim Fabricius, preached on the occasion of the baptism of Kim’s granddaughter (14 July 2013)
   
So, another baptism… I opened Bethel’s Register of Baptisms and counted. For me this is baptism number 45. All but two the baptisms of infants or small children. I mention this because I am not obliged to preside at the baptisms of infants. The United Reformed Church is a church that includes the tradition of believer’s baptism, and we have a conscience clause that states that while each and every local church must make infant baptism available, the church’s minister, for reasons of theological conviction, may choose not to baptise infants.

In fact, for me it was a close run thing. Right up until I left Oxford in 1982, just before I was ordained, it was not clear to me that infant baptism is theologically justifiable. Karl and Katie were born in 1978. Karl was not baptised; Katie was – but I wasn’t her dad then! Biblically, it is notoriously difficult to justify infant baptism. There are a few brief references to the baptism of “households” in the book of Acts, which may have included infants; in any case, scholars are agreed that believer’s baptism was undoubtedly the norm in the early church for over a hundred years.

And then there is the shambles that so-called paedobaptist churches have made of baptism: baptisms on request, done because it’s what you do (or what your parents want you to do), understood as a “naming ceremony” or “spiritual inoculation”, the rite privatised and performed on a Sunday afternoon as a “family occasion”, and for some just the starter before the main course, “wetting the baby’s head” in the pub – and the parents and child will never be seen in church again.

And people in the church, committed members, weekly worshippers, let’s face it, don’t we ourselves (as it were) water-down the rite, calling it a “christening” as if what we are doing is not a “proper” baptism? Don’t we rather sentimentalise the sacrament, preoccupied as we are with how cute the baby looks, what she is wearing, and how good – or how naughty – she is? What would you say to someone who asked you to explain the meaning and purpose of baptism? “I’m not quite sure, but I know a man who does” – and give them the minister’s phone number?

Still, despite all the arguments against it, I finally came around to saying “Yes” to infant baptism. Why? Grace. And grace again. Grace, grace, grace. God’s grace triumphs over human indiscipline, ingratitude, indifference – and a whole lot worse.

Here’s the deal. God is love – the eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit – a dynamic, dancing, daring love that bubbles up and overflows – God just cannot contain himself – and cascades out in creation. In his love God creates a cosmos, seeds it with galaxies, illuminates it with stars, sprinkles it with planets, and populates one of them with wonderful creatures and, eventually, human beings. So far, so good. But what do we do? We screw up, that’s what we do; from little goofs to major mayhem, we screw up. As far back as the historical and archaeological record take us, we screw up. And we know this – this human brokenness – deep inside and from personal experience, we know that what we will and what we do, me as I am and me as I should be, they are never consistently aligned.

We don’t only screw up, of course. We get some things right. We make love, write poetry, play music, cure diseases, and create the game of baseball. But we also invent Marmite, Twitter, call centres, and The X Factor. And from the trivialisation of everyday life we work our way up to the tragic and the terrible. We practice the darks arts of mendacity, fear, hatred, and war, and with a toxic combination of insatiable consumption and technological genius, we are now painting ourselves into the corner of ecological meltdown. We take this beautiful blue planet, colonise it, plunder it, turn it into a killing field, and prepare it for extinction. Welcome to our world, little one.

But – yes! – grace! God’s grace speaks of life, not death. God hates death, hates it. And because God loves us, loves us unconditionally – I mean really unconditionally, so that whatever we do cannot make God love us any more or love us any less (can whatever your child does make you love him/her any more or any less?) – God will not leave us in death. We will all die, of course. I’ve got another 20 years if I’m lucky, but no one gets out of here alive. One day the earth itself will become a burnt-out cinder. But because God is love, all the way down, because God in his love is never reactive, always proactive, God will not leave it at that. God has big plans for creation. His work-in-progress is a new creation. And nothing less than that is what we proclaim today in this child’s baptism.

Be absolutely clear: today is not just some family occasion or domestic do. Baptism is an act of incorporation into the church, but it is more than that too. It is nothing less than a re-enactment of the death and resurrection of Christ, which itself marks the end of the world as we know it, the world that ends in death, and initiates a new world, a new kind of life at which the Bible gestures with the phrase “eternal life”, which suggests a quality of human flourishing which is our heart’s deepest desire and wildest dream. In baptism we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ himself. He dies, we die with him; he rises, we rise with him.

At this baptism – if we really had the eyes to see and the ears to hear – we would have heard mighty trumpets and angelic choirs and seen the sky roll up like a scroll. When the water rolled off her head, we would have clutched the pew in front of us, expecting the building to rock and roll. When the name of the Trinity was pronounced, we would have thought, “Here come the dead, rising from their graves, jumpin’ and hollerin’ and two-steppin’ into heaven!” When the kiss of peace was given, we would have seen all the world’s weapons of mass destruction melt into chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, the proud and the violent weep with shame, and the filthy rich throw bills from the balconies of their Caribbean villas and welcome the filthy poor to the mother of all barbecues. And when I cwtched this child up and down the aisle, we would have thought that every woman who has ever longed for motherhood would suddenly know that, miraculously, she was with child, and we would envision every child who has ever lived laughing and playing in the perfect park, and when the sun sets and it’s time to go home, they discover that their houses are made of gingerbread.*

So, another baptism – and another world.

At the end of the third book of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when the children are sent back to their own world, Lucy protests:

“It isn’t Narnia, you know… It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are you – are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. That was the very reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

Shortly we will go back to the world of Westminster, Wall Street, and Walmart, bewitched by the deities of power, wealth, and fame. But for an hour this Sunday morning here at Bethel, you have been brought by the celebration of Christian baptism into the Narnia of the kingdom of God, where a whole new world has been disclosed to you, a world which, unbeknownst to most folk, happens to be the real world. May you take this holy experience with you, recall it often, use it to get your head straight and your heart right, that touched by grace and knowing God here a little, you may know him there, even more and ever better.

*Regular readers of F&T will note, in this paragraph, my shameless plagiarising from Ben’s wonderful Letter to a Chinese student, baptised on Easter Sunday.

Letter to a Chinese student, baptised on Easter Sunday

Dear K.,

I don't mind admitting that I'm always a bit worried when I turn up to church on Easter Sunday. Worried that we'll get it all wrong. That there will be no joy, no amazement, no startling sense of the magic of the thing. I worry that the songs will be gloomy museum pieces, the prayers morbidly introspective, the sermon a self-congratulatory piece of apologetics or a few sneering scraps of historical criticism.

I worry that we will sing our songs and pray our prayers and have our tea and biscuits and then all go home afterwards without actually celebrating anything. This worries me especially here, in Australia, where (you will have noticed) we are not very good at celebrating things. On occasions when other people would celebrate, we Australians mill about uncertainly, hands in pockets, vaguely or acutely embarrassed. You can turn up to a wedding, a funeral, the birth of a baby, even Easter Sunday, and you'll always find us standing about like that, exchanging dry remarks about the traffic and the weather, just when we ought to be shouting, weeping, rending our clothes, kissing strangers, firing pistols in the air. We like the idea of celebration, we have heard of it, but it is a language we never learned, and our bodies don't know the rules.

That's why Australians don't do Easter very well. That's why I was worried, as always – half hopeful and half already-depressed – when I turned up to church on Easter Sunday.

Yet there you were, a university student from China. You had come to be baptised.

You looked pretty nervous when they brought you ought in front of everyone. Someone poured water into the big marble font. You made promises. You turned to Christ. You confessed your belief in God the creator, God the redeemer, God the sanctifier. Then you made a profound bow from the waist – we Australians could never bow like that – and water was poured over your heard, three times, your baptism, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Watching all this, I thought we would hear mighty trumpets and see the sky roll up like a scroll. When the water ran down your head I clutched the pew in front of me, expecting earthquakes. When the Name of the Trinity was pronounced I thought it was the end of the world. I expected zombies or something of that order – that all the graves would open and the grinning dead would rise. When you stood up straight and faced us, I thought the last judgment had come. I thought every woman who had ever longed for motherhood would know all of a sudden that she was, miraculously, with child. I thought the violent and the proud and the ones who stir up war would all be cast aside like rag dolls, and the refugees and homeless would be out there dancing in the streets in shining clothes. I thought we would all find out we'd won the lottery and we would all join hands together, and all the children would go home to find their houses made of gingerbread.

But there was nothing like that. Just you, standing there facing us with your wet black hair, your lovely Chinese eyes, smiling. A candle burning on the table. Water dripping on the floor.

I thought: a baptism – a real Easter!

And for one big glad moment I believed everything, Christ's dying and rising, the truest thing that ever happened, I believed it all and saw the truth of it as clear as water, saw it right there written on your face, written all over your baptised body.

I left the church and went out in the dark. Everything was the same, everything was different. I walked under the trees. A car went by. It might have been raining. Right there on the path I danced a little jig. It was Easter Sunday, Christ was risen, you were risen with him, it was the first day of creation, and I felt for all the world like Fred Astaire.

Yours, &c.,

The icon of theophany: one lingering glance

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Then suddenly, like an axe laid violently at the roots, a voice splits the silence of eternity and some holy thing plummets straight down towards the one who stands alone amid the flowing waters, 

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whose life is as purposive as running rivers, shunning the heights and seeking out the lowest place, rushing down so far and so fast that our hands can hardly reach him, not without leaning dangerously near the edge, just as startled strangers once stooped to touch him in the cradle and afterwards to feel his cold unyielding body in the ground, 

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all his flesh exposed to those cleansing Jordan waters as he stands in silence, as low as any river's end, so that the baptist has to bend his frail starved body like a bow to discharge the quick sharp blessing, reaching down to touch the head of him whose sandals none is worthy to undo, as though this one had need of human blessing or approval when he himself is the silent benediction resting on all creatures, or as though he could win glory from any of the sons of men when he is the holy brightness pulsating at the hidden heart of things, the still point about which all the worlds revolve, 

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so that even the holy angels, bright in heaven's raiment and terrible beneath their wings of fire, lean hungrily towards his gentle silence, zealous for the devastating undreamt-of majesty of his unexceptional and still unwounded flesh, poised beside him like runners before the race and clutching their robes as towels, having waited longingly through all ages for one chance to pay him menial honour, as though the highest hope of dreadful cherubim and seraphim were to wipe cold bathwater from human flesh (for eternity's immortal monsters covet meekness, lowliness, and anonymous service just as the mortal children of Cain crave power, fame, and recognition), 

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this fleshly being who transcends us only by standing infinitely lower than us, almost inaccessible in the extremity of his poverty and abnegation,

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and who might remain forever hidden from a world that worships power had not the tremendous voice like thunder announced his rank as first-born of creation, and the birdlike lightning energies cascaded down upon him without measure, cleansing him whose touch makes all things clean, 

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while the baptist's mad wild eye looks on in terror and the angels turn their faces meekly down, folding their burning wings and bending with shimmering towels to dry his body in preparation for his second baptism, that funereal pyre in which the dove will descend as cataracts of flame,

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and what has fallen to earth will leap again heavenwards like tongues of fire.

On catechesis and catastrophe

The day my mother turned seventeen, she went to the local Canberra police station to apply for her driver’s license. When she walked through the door in a short summer dress with a ribbon in her hair, the driving instructor looked up with interest. When she flashed him a smile and said she would like to take the driving test, he thought she was very pretty. When she batted her long black eyelashes and said it was her birthday, he beamed at her and fumbled madly for his camera, then took her photo and, without further ado, issued her with an Australian driver’s license. It was, he told her with a confidential wink, a birthday present.

And so, without so much as turning a key or operating a windscreen wiper, my mother was authorised to pilot one of the most dangerous high-speed weapons ever devised by the dark mind of man: the automobile.

My mother’s older sister had saved up and bought a brand new gleaming white Mini Minor, the kind all the groovy kids were driving in those days. Soon after my mother’s seventeenth birthday, they went on a road trip together to Melbourne. Now the highway from Canberra to Melbourne, if you have never made that noble journey, is an easy eight-hour drive that takes you through the sprawling languid dairy country, down along the great Murray River, and up through the hills of the Great Dividing Range. My mother being a licensed driver, her sister gave her a turn at the wheel. On a long, perfectly straight road, without another vehicle in sight, my gleeful mother held the wheel and plunged down her accelerator foot. In the passenger seat beside her, her sister closed her eyes and began to dream. The little Mini Minor gathered speed. It began, ever so slightly, to wobble. My mother pushed harder on the accelerator, smiling at the charming dairy fields. When the poor little car began to shake violently, my mother did as any person driving for the first time might do: she accelerated a little more, and then, to compensate for all that wobbling, began to nudge the wheel from side to side – gently at first, then harder, with a playful jubilant vigour. Side to side, side to side: no doubt about it, it had been a splendid birthday. Dreamily she watched a flock of birds go by. The car was wobbling wildly now, so she swerved the wheel a little harder and felt the accelerator – at last! – go flat to the floor.

That was how it happened that, on a long stretch of straight flat road, with no vehicles or obstacles of any kind for miles around, the brilliant new hundred-mile-an-hour Mini Minor found itself toppling and rolling like a rugby ball, over and over, until at last it came to rest in a wide dusty ditch, bent and crumpled and crushed, while my mother, breathless with birthday exhilaration beneath a shower of glass confetti, still clasped the wheel with both hands – in fact, still rocked it back and forth with dazed but undiminished glee.

Though they now had no car and little money, the two sisters somehow made their way to Melbourne. A few nights later, at a party a friend’s place, my mother drank for a while, drank some more, talked loudly and laughingly about her marvellous birthday, and then, wandering alone through the house, noticed some keys on a table and idly picked them up. She twirled the keyring round her finger. She went out the front door and twirled the keys beneath the encouraging smiling winks of the stars. She found the car that fit the key, a lovely red sedan, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

It was such a cool clear evening, such a perfect night for driving my mother thought as she turned the next corner, windows down and engine blazing. By the time she made it back to the party twenty minutes later, she had reduced her second automobile to a twisted steaming wreck on the corner of a quiet backstreet three blocks away.

I often think about that good, sweet-natured Canberra policeman who had given my mother her license as a birthday present. On the night of her birthday, I imagine the policeman lounging happily in his favourite chair at home, thinking of the girl with the beautiful brown eyes, the long eyelashes and dimply smile, congratulating himself on his chivalry, never dreaming that he was, that night, the most dangerous man in the commonwealth of Australia. For it was he who had made my mother a Driver. It was he who had single-handedly turned every other person and every vehicle for hundreds of miles around into a prospective victim of my mother’s birthday joy.

Many of our church leaders today are very much like that innocent-hearted policeman. We would like to make it as easy as possible for people to become Christians. Catechesis is too demanding; education is a chore; deliberate instruction in the Christian faith will put people off. And so with a knowing wink, we waive all the requirements and hand out the baptism certificate. We are charming, gallant, spiritually magnanimous – and ruinously dangerous. In our eagerness to make sure everybody is included, to reassure inquirers that the Christian faith is indeed an easygoing undemanding thing, we are looking only at the dimples and batted eyelashes. We are forgetting the longer view, the screech of tyres and the shriek of twisted steel and the long split-second when a windscreen becomes a million tiny diamonds in the sky. We blame the new converts if after some time they make a wreck of their faith.

But after considering the matter carefully and objectively, I find I cannot blame my mother for the magnificent trail of automobiles left smoking in her wake: I blame the generous heart of a magnanimous policeman.

Welcome to my world: a baptismal sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

I’d like your opinion about a couple I know, about something they did, did to their child. Of course they loved their baby to bits and surrounded him with all the care in the world, cooing and cuddling, bathing and bonding, taking tender care about all his needs and his feeds and his smelly little deeds. They were good parents. But then one day they made a decision: they decided they didn’t want to keep their baby to themselves, or even to their own kin; they decided they wanted to share their child with other people, indeed to raise their child as part of another family, a genetically unrelated family, where their child would have not only other brothers and sisters, but also other mothers and fathers too. In fact, this new family would, in principle, supersede their own family as the child’s true and ultimate home. Tell me, what would you think of parents who would do such a thing with their child?

And another thing. To mark this transition from the biological family to this new family, this couple arranged for a special occasion – but what an odd occasion it was. For one thing, it took place on a Sunday morning, when most other folk were still in bed, and in a rather odd building. For another thing, there was no booze (fancy a special occasion without any booze!). And then there were the guests: many of the people at this occasion the parents didn’t even know, or didn’t know very well. In fact, it was precisely these people, many of them quite old, and a few even a bit doddery, who turned out to be their child’s new parents and siblings. Again, what would you think of such parents?

And a final thing, perhaps the most outrageous thing of all. At this occasion there was a man wearing a sombre black gown, as if he were taking a funeral. In fact, that is precisely what the man said was happening: that his parents were bringing their child to this occasion to mark his death, his death to the world from which he was brought, but which (so the man in the black gown declared) is a world that is itself passing away, yet a world that spends most of its time and energy pretending it will go on forever, thereby entangling itself all the more inescapably in the cords of its own extinction. For is that not the nature of the world we live in? Do we not live in fear and denial of death, compulsively seeking longevity, security, the ultimate risk-free environment, which, however, a moment’s clarity exposes as the sheerest fantasy? On this occasion, however, (so the man in the black gown declared) we get real and deny this denial of death, as the child, in the ritual of the occasion, dies and is buried, with everyone present acting as celebrants of his funeral.

Again, for the last time, what would you think of such parents? Let’s be honest: bringing their child to be handed over for shared parenting is outrageous enough, but bringing the child to his own funeral, what kind of parents would do such a macabre thing? You might think that, at best, they were being irresponsible, at worst, abusive, and that they should be reported to the police and social services. In fact, if you are not a Christian, you are bound to think this way. In fact, many Christians themselves think this way. Which just goes to show how domesticated and sentimentalised baptism – because, of course, that is what we are talking about here, baptism – it just goes to show how domesticated and sentimentalised baptism has become, and how the church itself has colluded in “watering-down” the meaning of its sacrament of initiation. Indeed it goes to show how close the church is coming to losing its identity, and in losing its identity, losing its very soul.

Hear again Paul’s words in his letter to the church in Rome, which go straight to the point: “Surely you know that when were baptised into union with Christ Jesus, we were baptised into union with his death. By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death …” (Rom 6:3-4a).

There it is in the Bible (I’m not making it up!): to be baptised is to die – but it is a certain kind of death: it is to die with Christ. And it is a certain kind of funeral: it is to be buried with Christ. But if that is so, it means that, appearances notwithstanding, in baptism our deaths are now behind us. Which, in turn, means, that we are released from our obsession with death, our fear of death, our denial of death, all of which speaks of our enslavement to death – from which baptism frees us. For not only is death now behind us, above all life is now ahead of us. But again, a very specific kind of life: it is life in Christ. For as Paul continues: “By our baptism, then, we were buried with him and shared his death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from death by the glorious power of the Father, so also we might live a new life” (6:4).

We are all gong to die. One day Adam is going to die too. But today we proclaim that, in fact, Adam’s death is now behind him and that life, the life of Christ – a new life of love, joy, and peace – is Adam’s future, and indeed is there now for the taking – or rather the receiving – through his union with Christ.

And that’s where we come to Adam’s “new family”. For in being baptised into union with Christ, Adam becomes a son and brother of everyone else who has been baptised into union with Christ. He has been born anew, of water and Spirit (John 3:5), born, that is, into a new family, with new siblings and new parents (including the doddery ones!). Fellow Christians are now, in fact, Adam’s closest relations. “Blood is thicker than water,” people say. Not so, Christians say: “Water is thicker than blood.”

I am under no illusions of just how mind-blowing all this is. And not only because baptism is, ultimately, supernatural, but also because (as I have tried to suggest) it is quite unnatural, and a quite unnatural way of life follows from it, a way of life that contradicts the way the world and his wife go about their business. For if we are introducing Adam to the new way of life of Jesus, we will try to teach him not to become an earning, shopping, and consuming machine, ever agitated and restless, or someone who wants to be “famous”, but a human being who is happy in his own skin and, above all, grateful just to be. We will also try to teach him not to become a cunning climber and schemer, ever out for Number One, but a human being whose Yes is Yes and No is No, who doesn’t deceive or discard other people but puts them first. And, finally, we will also try to teach him not to become an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy but a turn-the-cheek kind of geek, who is kind to everyone, who takes a punch rather than gives one, who prays for those who wish him ill, who lives at peace even with his enemies.

Yes, all this is so radically counter-cultural, for it clearly involves living an exposed and vulnerable life, a life at considerable risk, a life on which the “health and safety” bureaucrats might like to slap a restraining order, a life that might incur suffering in some contexts, even if only ridicule, for its eccentricity, in our own.

That’s why bringing your child for baptism – some may think it’s sweet; in fact, it is quite heroic. If you want a life of ease, pleasure, and success, a gated and protected life among your own, then the last thing you want to be is baptised. If, however, you want a life full of real meaning and lasting purpose, the kind of life God wants us to live, the kind of life, in Jesus, God shows us how to live; if you want a life that is not ephemeral but eternal, a life not just for now but forever, life as it is going to be when God completes his work in progress, life that begins even now, in the sacrament of baptism that proclaims the old world going and a new world coming, and calls us to live tomorrow’s life today – then you’ve come to just the right pace, you’re taking part in just the right occasion, you’re watching a sneak preview of the end of time as we know it, and the beginning of time as you couldn’t imagine it in your wildest dreams.

Today, the Lord says, “Adam, welcome to my world!” Indeed God’s invitation is always open to everyone to enter this strange new household of the church, and this strange new world of being a Christian.

The trouble with kids today: a baptismal sermon

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Text: Luke 18:15-30

“The trouble with kids today…” “When I was their age…” “Remember the days when…”

Get the picture? Old people talking about young people. And ever has it been so between one generation and the next. Old folk look back and see the time of their own youth if not as a golden age, then certainly as a better age than the world of today’s little creeps. We tend to view time from the then to the now as one of decline and fall. And young people, in turn, look at grown-ups and see people out of touch, who don’t understand them, who don’t understand anything. One word sums it up: we’re “boring”, and, if you’re parents, you’re “embarrassing” too. “The young think the old are fools, and the old know the young are fools” – that’s one George Chapman, writing four hundred years ago! Plus ça change, plus la même chose. “Whatever,” teenagers would add!

Me, I think this is a healthy state of affairs – at least for the young. Kids who don’t go through a period of viewing their elders with – well, the range is from condescending hilarity to lofty contempt – kids who don’t go through a stage of alienation and – yes, rebellion – they’re missing out on an essential part of the human experience. Indeed a younger generation that doesn’t set itself against their elders bodes ill for the time when they will become the older generation. For does not every generation of young people have something to be angry about and rebellious against? Has not every generation of parents left their children a world in a worse state than the one that was bequeathed to them by their parents? Do we not therefore warrant the accusation that we have screwed things up, and today, given the ominous state of the ecology, screwed things up big-time? The rebellion of the young, I’m suggesting, is, at heart, of moral significance, with its idealism, energy, and can-do optimism, in contrast to the quite immoral cynicism and complacency that, alas, inevitably seems to set in with thinning hair and sagging bottoms.

Which is why I am a worried man. No, not because my hair is thinning and my bottom has long since sagged and dropped – though that is true! No, I am worried by what I take to be a distinct lack of rebelliousness in today’s young people. Instead of repudiating and bucking the system, the system has sucked them in. They’ve become its biggest fans. The in-your-face self-expressiveness of young people, always an essential element of their identity – it strikes me as so conventional, conformist even, it smacks of the manufactured and manipulated. By whom? By us older people, of course! By the marketers, advertisers, and commercial providers. Young people have become, fundamentally, economic units, consumers, defined, indeed defining themselves, by their spending power.

(Are you aware, by the way, just how recent a phenomenon youth culture is? It only started after the Second World War, and only began really to kick in during the late-fifties and sixties. Pocket money and ever-increasing amounts of it – that is, available capital, purchasing power – and the rise of a distinct youth culture: they go hand in hand.)

Does the irony escape you? We lament that children today grow up too fast when in fact the whole project is being funded by adults! Check out the magazines kids read: they’re adolescent versions of the glossy world of fame, fashion, and ersatz beauty that obsesses and drives the twenty-to-fifty-somethings. And so the advertising industry quite rightly treats the purchasing public as such as children. For the flipside of children growing up too quickly is adults not growing up at all – we have become infantilised. That’s what money and ennui will do to you. But savvy kids should know better.

Which leads me to point out the interesting juxtaposition of passages in today’s New Testament reading. On the one hand, there is the story of Jesus blessing the children who come to him; on the other hand, there is the story of the rich man who walks away from Jesus. The juxtaposition is hardly arbitrary, and it’s one of contrast and critique.

Jesus is talking about how a person enters the kingdom, or reign, of God. Not how to get to “heaven”, but how to become part of the world God wants it to be, a world of peace, justice, and love, the world Jesus came to announce and inaugurate. How? Answer: by receiving it like a child. But what particular childlike quality does Jesus have in mind? Not, I can tell you, innocence or humility. We’re talking real kids here, not Teletubbies! There was nothing sentimental about Jesus’ view of children; Jesus was no Victorian romanticist. Indeed if the text suggests anything about children it is their weakness and helplessness – they have to be brought to Jesus. No money, no possessions, no position, no power – these are the things that make them role models for the kingdom. Interesting that. We’re always banging on about children needing adult role models, whereas our Lord thinks just the reverse: it’s adults who need children as role models.

And this interpretation – that it’s children’s pennilessness and powerlessness that make them role models for the kingdom – this interpretation is confirmed by the following story of the rich man. For here is the proverbial man who has everything – and observe that he is a good man too, he keeps the commandments, he is a pillar of the community, a member of the Rotary Club or the Round Table – yet so possessed is he by his possessions that he is quite unable to enter the kingdom of God, which demands dis-possession – demands weakness, not strength, demands helplessness, not control.

But as I have suggested, today’s kids would seem to have more in common with the rich man than the child. Just look at the possessions – from designer clothes, to mobile phones, to personal computers. And odd though it may at first sound, they’ve got the power to go with them – and it comes by via the tacit permission of their parents. Just think of the manifesto of the famous Spice Girls – Girl Power – and think of their target audience, the target audience, for that matter, of all girl and boy bands: ten-to-twelve-year-olds. And think of how parents, in oblivious obeisance to the market economy, and to keep the domestic peace, collude in turning their children into shoppers.

I know, I’m beginning to sound like the old man I began with: “The trouble with kids today …” I don’t mean to. Rather I’m simply trying to sketch out the reality of youth culture today, which strikes me as virtually the same as the virtual reality of adult culture today. Consumerism is the common theme: the commodification of everything that moves, the itching and scratching of restless, insatiable desire, the celebration of ever-expanding choice, choice, and more choice. Isn’t this our common reality? It is little Matthew’s reality too.

HOWEVER: whenever we baptise a child in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, baptise him/her into Christ, we initiate him/her into a different reality, an alternative reality, a counter-cultural reality we call the church. At least that’s the theory. Because you and I both know that, in practice, on the whole, Christians are as mesmerised as non-Christians by the idol of consumerism.

NEVERTHELESS: here you are, and here a few of us come, week by week, to see and hear the church “fess up”: to laugh at the pretensions of consumer capitalism’s ridiculous little gods, to expose the lies the world lives by, to tell it like it is to each other in love, even when it hurts, and to practice the quaint and lost arts of forgiveness and peacemaking when violence and vengeance make all the running with the good guys and bad guys alike. And there is no bouncer at the door. All are welcome here without distinction – saints and sinners, losers and winners, the poor and the wealthy, the ugly and the beautiful, the queer and the supposedly normal. Because here the good news of God’s foolish, prodigal, disarming love is proclaimed, as we try to keep alive the rumour of an altogether different God from the one you will find anywhere else, the God who passes judgement on wealth and power, valorises the vulnerable, and calls us into a community of belonging, need, and care.

And so today we not only baptise little Matthew, we also hold him up as the very embodiment of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If we want to enter the kingdom of God, we will get in line behind him.

A hymn for infant baptism: "O what a happy day!"

A hymn by Kim Fabricius

(Tune: Franconia / Carlisle)

       O what a happy day!
       We celebrate a death –
a dying into Jesus Christ –
       a girl’s/boy’s re-birth by Breath!

       All sin is washed away,
       now all is undefiled.
The Lord says, “I will be your God,
       and you will be my child.”

       Incorporate in Christ,
       and by the Spirit sealed,
this girl/boy will have a special place
       reserved for holy meals.

       Her/His bondage now is past,
       an exodus begins,
a pilgrimage in company
       of Christian kith and kin.

       This family of God,
       by water and the Word,
may all be found at journey’s end
       as faithful as our Lord.

Encounters with tradition (3): from Congregationalist to Reformed Baptist

A guest-post by Guy Davies

Charles Haddon Spurgeon began his Christian life as a Congregationalist who believed in infant baptism. But soon after his conversion, he embraced Baptist views. His Congregationalist parents were a little disappointed in Charles’ decision to seek baptism. But they gave him permission to follow his conscience. His mother wrote: “Ah, Charles, I often prayed to the Lord to make you a Christian, but I never asked that you might become a Baptist.” The dutiful son replied with a note of typical Spurgeonic wit: “Ah, Mother, the Lord has answered your prayer with his usual bounty, and has given you exceedingly abundantly above all you asked or thought.”

I began my Christian life as a rather charismatic Congregationalist. I quickly became disillusioned with charismatic experiences as it became obvious to me that my “speaking in tongues” was just me blurting out incomprehensible nonsense. I needed something that would give my new Christian life depth and stability and I found this in the riches of Reformed theology. In Puritan and Reformed teaching, I discovered a convincingly biblical theology that was married to an emphasis on true experiential Christianity. Here I found head and heart united to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

The transition from Charismatic to Calvinist was accomplished in a brief period of time. But it took some years to shift from a paedobaptist Congregationalist to a Baptist. As a young Christian I learned that the great Congregationalist divines like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin were infant-baptists, as were the reformers and the early church fathers. Their argument seemed pretty convincing: baptism has replaced circumcision as the sign and seal of the covenant. As (male) children were circumcised under the old covenant, so children of believers should be baptised under the new. This view was based on a semblance of biblical theology and backed up by many of my theological heroes. How could it be wrong? Besides, I was just a little fed up with Baptist friends telling me that I needed to be baptised! As far as I was concerned, I was baptised – as an infant, and that was that.

But the more I thought about the matter, it became clear to me that infant baptism is neither implied by the Old Testament nor taught in the New. Reformed Baptists are committed to applying sola scriptura to the matter of baptism. We honour the reformers and Puritans – but on this issue, they were mistaken. This reminds us that our heroes have feet of clay. Tradition is to be valued, but the Bible alone is our authority. “Repent, and let every one of you be baptised” (Acts 2:38). In the New Testament, water baptism always follows repentance and faith.

There is a danger that when we changes our views we set ourselves against those we formerly agreed with. But I still hold to Congregationalist views of church government, and still have deep respect for infant-baptist Christians. There are aspects of the Reformed Baptist tradition that I am not entirely happy with. The movement has sometimes veered away from evangelical Calvinism into hyper-Calvinism and even antinomianism. Some Reformed Baptist churches will not allow infant-baptist Christians to join them at the Lord’s Table. To me that is uncharitable and sectarian. But I think that the Reformed Baptist position, as set forth in the 1689 Baptist Confession, is a faithful expression of biblical Christianity.

An even worse liturgical invention

A while back we were all discussing the worst liturgical invention. But my wife has now come across one that’s hard to beat. On the weekend she visited a large church, and the church’s newsletter included the following announcement:

Water baptisms: held the last Sunday of every month.
Baptism in the Holy Spirit: held the second Sunday of every month.

One cannot even parody such an announcement, since it is already its own parody. Anyway, my own suggestion was that they should also schedule regeneration for Tuesday evenings and sanctification for the third Friday of every month.

Baptism and ecumenical unity

“Baptism is an incentive to promote the work of unification definitely and energetically. In this whole area, theological and pastoral differences have no really profound significance, much less a significance that could legitimate division.”

—Harald Wagner, in Hans Jörg Urban and Harald Wagner, eds., Handbuch der Ökumenik III/2 (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifatius-Druckerei, 1987), p. 149.

Kurt Anders Richardson: Reading Karl Barth

Many thanks to Baker Academic for sending me a review copy of Kurt Anders Richardson’s recent book, Reading Karl Barth: New Directions for North American Theology.

In this book, Richardson brings Barth’s theology into dialogue with various aspects of contemporary theology, and he seeks to take up Barth’s thought as an instrument of theological and ecclesial reform. Although it is an uneven book, and although it is not structured as clearly as it might have been, Richardson has a fine instinct for interpreting Barth, and he understands clearly what is involved in reading the Church Dogmatics: “To read the CD is more than a literary act or even a philosophical one; it is a religious act because Barth’s work is so fundamentally shaped by his testimony to the Word of God” (p. 12). To read Barth correctly, then, we must read him as a “witness”—and this will always mean to read him in relation to our own theological questions, “to read him and then to move on” (p. 23).

At the heart of Richardson’s own reading of Barth is the conviction that we should begin at the end of the CD, reading the whole work “back to front.” The little fragment on baptism (CD IV/4) thus becomes a “lens” for interpreting Barth’s theology. Although this exciting approach is announced at the beginning of the book, Richardson only develops such a reading in detail in Chapter 6. This is by far the best and richest part of the book—and it’s worth the admission fee for this chapter alone (pp. 161-208).

Here, following Eberhard Jüngel, Richardson explores the (anti-) sacramental theology of CD IV/4 as the hermeneutical key to the whole of Barth’s dogmatics. The triadic structure which Barth develops in IV/4—Deus extra nos, Deus pro nobis, Deus in nobis: “God outside us, God for us, God in us”—is taken up as the underlying logic of the entire CD, and as the most refined expression of Barth’s doctrine of election.

No one has written more acutely and extensively on Barth’s doctrine of baptism than Eberhard Jüngel. And in a lengthy engagement with Jüngel (pp. 176-208), Richardson defends Jüngel’s interpretation of Barth and sharply critiques George Hunsinger and John Webster for muting or dismissing this radical, reforming doctrine of baptism.

Just as Jüngel makes IV/4 the true test of Barth-reception—“whoever wishes to baptise infants should not proclaim his closeness to Barth’s doctrine of predestination!”—so too Richardson critiques all readings of the CD that privilege the sacramental language which Barth was still using in I/1.

Only with the development of his doctrine of election (II/2) did Barth wholly overcome the notion that human action can in any way be “analogous to divine action” (p. 193). Here, Barth’s “analogy of faith” (analogia fidei) achieves its full depth and systematic expression. And it is finally in the doctrine of baptism (IV/4) that “the trajectory of the entire CD achieves a striking degree of clarity” through its expression of the central themes of “correspondence, election, and the distinction between divine and human action” (p. 206).

A three-year-old's sacramental theology

Yesterday my three-year-old daughter approached me with a small cup of water, and asked if she could baptise me. I agreed, but said that she would have to dry my hair afterwards.

So with great pleasure and solemnity, she proceeded to pour the cup over the top of my head. When it was over, I asked: “Do you have a towel to dry my hair?”

She thought for a moment, and then replied: “No, this is actually a Baptist church, so we use a blow dryer.”

Church Dogmatics IV/4 (fragment)

Note: Barth drafted IV/4, a volume on “the Christian life,” and his plan was for this volume to be structured around the three main events of the liturgy: baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Lord’s Supper. But Barth only completed the section on baptism, and this was published as the final “fragment” of the Church Dogmatics.

Summary: At the beginning of the Christian life we are baptised with the Holy Spirit, and as a faithful response to God’s faithfulness we are then baptised with water by the Christian community.

Quote: “Since Jesus Christ is a servant, looking to Him cannot mean looking away from the world, from men, from life, or, as is often said, from oneself. It cannot mean looking away into some distance or height. To look to Him is to see Him at the very centre, to see Him and the history which, accomplished in Him, heals everything and all things, as the mystery, reality, origin and goal of the whole world, all men, all life. To look to Him is to cleave to Him as the One who bears away the sin of the world. It is to be bound and liberated, claimed, consoled, cheered and ruled by Him” (p. 150).

Notable section: Section 1—Barth’s account of baptism with the Holy Spirit as the manifestation in our own lives of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

Kierkegaard on infant baptism

Thanks to Wyman Richardson for this entertaining post on Kierkegaard’s view of infant baptism (with a follow-up post here).