Tuesday • 7/20/2021
It’s summer, and it’s the first week of the last year of my sixth decade. Another break from the Daily Office seems to be in order. I’m offering, this week, yet more worship themes I’ve developed with my friends at Worship Leader Magazine. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, July 26.
Praying Baptism’s Story
We stood around a large, water-filled salad bowl that served as a makeshift baptismal font. We had gathered to renew our baptismal vows. Each of us responded to the water as we saw fit. One dropped a nail into it: “Thank you, Jesus, for taking away my sins.” Another dipped his hands into the water and touched his forehead, his eyes, his ears, his lips: “Lord, be in my doing, my thinking, my seeing, my hearing, my speaking.”
Several told the story of their baptism:
“I wore my best dress the day of my baptism because I knew that I would rise from that water a new person.”
“At my baptism, the minister totally messed up my name. It reminded me that God and nobody else gave me my new name.”
One plunged her hands into the water and then touched the hands of each person in the group: “These waters so often divide us. But today, may they make us one. May it be with us, ‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism.’”
Baptism is where our vastly different stories become one story—indeed, where they become God’s story.
Changing Plotlines
The early church understood that baptism marked the place where believers stepped out of one story and into another. That is one of the things their liturgies and their catechisms shout to us across the centuries. I have learned to punctuate worship services (baptismal and otherwise) with elements of the baptismal prayers of the ancient church:
We give you thanks, eternal God,
for you nourish and sustain all living things
by the gift of water.
In the beginning of time,
your Spirit moved over the watery chaos,
calling forth order and life.
The watery rhythms of life bear the kiss of God: from precipitation to condensation to evaporation, from Central Florida’s gorgeous thunderclouds to Iceland’s majestic glaciers, from rivers that flow to tides that wax and wane. Here is a God who is wildly alive. Here is a God to celebrate.
In the time of Noah,
you destroyed evil by the waters of the flood,
giving righteousness a new beginning.
Finish Line
God’s storyline will end with evil vanquished, and with good and right in charge. Some days this very hope is all that gets me out of bed.
You led Israel out of slavery,
through the waters of the sea,
into the freedom of the Promised Land.
We do not have to live in chains of guilt or shame or impotence, but can walk in the open spaces of forgiveness and peace and power and virtue. In addition, to work for the freedom of others is not futile. That is mighty good news!
In the waters of Jordan
Jesus was baptized by John
and anointed with your Spirit.
By the baptism of his own death and resurrection,
Christ set us free from sin and death,
and opened the way to eternal life.
Redemption
God permanently strapped our humanity to himself. Jesus walked in perfect fellowship with his Father. Like “early rain” that promises an abundant growing season, Jesus’ dominion over sickness and death and evil prefigured humanity’s own calling and destiny. He poured out an offering that covers all our disobedience. It is wondrously beyond comprehension. It staggers the imagination. It … redeems the imagination.
We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism.
In it we were buried with Christ in his death.
From it we were raised to share in his resurrection,
Through it we were reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit.
By some divine mystery—known only to faith, revealed only by the Spirit, and touched only when we step into the waters with Jesus—his death and life become ours.
In joyful obedience to your Son,
we celebrate our fellowship in him in faith.
We pray that all who have passed through the
water of baptism, Father God, may continue forever
in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
Baptism’s story gives me a stake in the well-being of everyone with whom I share its water. Baptism’s bond trumps all others. Sharing baptism’s heritage and prospect overshadows all other loyalties, all other claims, all other affections. Baptism tells a story of water that is thicker than blood.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Baptismal Font, Stykkisholmskirkja, Stykkishomur, Iceland