Baptism: Sharing the Divine Life, Part 1
Before coming to the monastery, I served for a number of years as a parish priest in a little parish on the west coast of Canada. I’d been in the parish for about six months when a woman named Alice came out of church one Sunday and told me she had only ever heard me preach one sermon. I knew that that wasn’t true. Alice and her husband had been in church nearly every Sunday since I had come to the parish and on the rare occasion they missed a Sunday they called the rectory ahead of time to explain why they were going to be absent! I obviously looked confused because she went on to say: “What I mean is that it doesn’t matter where you start, you always end up back in the same place: at baptism.” I began to apologize, but she cut in, “Oh no, no. No need to apologize. I wasn’t complaining. I was agreeing with you, because baptism is so important for the life of a Christian.” Alice of course was right. Baptism is important because baptism is about nothing less than sharing in the divine life of God.
“O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature,” we pray in the Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas, “Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” In the Incarnation, we believe that as Christ shared in our human life, so we share in his divine life through baptism. As the Prayer Book Catechism reminds us, “Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.” Thus we share in the divine life of God by being made children of God, by being made members of Christ’s body, and by becoming heirs of the kingdom of God. If we truly believe what we say, all of this happens at the font where we die to sin and rise to newness of life through the waters of baptism, just as the First Letter of Peter reminds us: “And baptism . . . now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him” (1 Peter 3:21-22). In this way, even now and not at some future date, because of our baptism, we begin to share the reality of that divine life we speak of in the Collect, and which Christ promises to all who believe in him: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).
When we begin to understand that baptism does something to us now, and that that something is nothing short of incorporation into the divine life of God, then we can begin to experience the Trinity, not as some kind of mathematical puzzle—or a scientific experiment using water, ice, and steam showing that each of them is the same chemical but simply in a different form. Rather, we will know the doctrine of the Trinity as a lived reality. By our baptism we are invited not merely to understand, but to experience the Trinity.
Behold what you are; may we become what we receive.
Sharing the Life of the Trinity
Our founder, Father Benson, speaks about how problematic is our neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity, and his comments are perhaps truer today than they were when he first said them. Father Benson goes so far as to say:
“I quite feel that the practical neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity has been the great cause of the decay of Christendom. The Church—the Sacraments —Hagilogy, I had almost said Mythology – have filled the minds of devout people, partly for good partly for evil. Thyself unmoved, all motion’s source, this mystery of the circulating life of the eternal Godhead, has been almost lost to sight, spoken of as a mystery, and not felt as a power or loved as a reality.” (Letters of Richard Meux Benson SSJE [A.R. Mowbray Co., 1916], 187)
Imagine anyone claiming today that the decline of the Church is related to a decline in teaching about the doctrine of the Trinity! But think how rich our preaching about the Trinity could be if we connected it to our understanding of baptism. To turn again to Father Benson: “If we would know the Trinity, we must know ourselves taken into the Trinity” (Cowley Evangelist [1919]: 147).
What does it mean to say that we are “taken into the Trinity?” It actually is not as complicated as it might at first sound. Chapter Four in the Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist on “The Witness of Life in Community” explains how every form of human community takes its cue from the Holy Trinity: “In community we bear witness to the social nature of human life as willed by our Creator. Human beings bear the image of the triune God and are not meant to be separate and isolated. All of us are called by God to belong to communities.” Such a lived reality of communion and community with God and one another, rooted in baptism, brings a far different understanding to the doctrine of the Trinity than any number of mathematical conundrums by which we try to convince people that 3 = 1. As communities have broken down and families fragmented, is it any wonder that the notion of community has such appeal today? As Christians, our understanding of community is, as Father Benson would say, rooted in the very heart of God who is Community.
The famous icon of the Holy Trinity by Saint Andrei Rublev offers a powerful glimpse at what the communal life of God the Trinity looks like. Our Rule calls this life one of “reciprocal self-giving and love.” And the icon by Rublev illustrates this, depicting three near-identical figures seated at a table. They’re involved in communication. Their heads appear to be inclined towards one another, they seem to make eye contact, and their hands are captured in a series of delicate gestures, almost as if one points to another in a circle. It is as if we have caught them mid-conversation. Look again: There are four sides to this table, but only three seats are filled. The spot closest to the viewer is left open because Rublev wants to show us that there is a place at the table for us. God is inviting us into the circle of divine communion and community.
We’re invited to participate in the Trinity not as a mathematical puzzle, an intellectual quandary to be solved, but as an experience of community to be had. As our Rule explains, “Our human vocation to live in communion and mutuality is rooted in our creation in God’s image and likeness. The very being of God is community; the Father, Son and Spirit are One in reciprocal self-giving and love. The mystery of God as Trinity is one that only those living in personal communion can understand by experience.” God the Trinity is a mystery, solvable only by the experience of life in community. Whether we look to the divine community of the Trinity or the human communities in which we take part on earth, we come to know the Trinity only when we experience it as a relationship of self-giving and love. And we begin to do this in baptism. So the formula for Holy Baptism proclaims that we are brought into this relationship: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
God the Trinity is a mystery, solvable only by the experience of life in community.
