HELD BY BAPTISM: LIFE EVERLASTING IN THE MIDST OF PANDEMIC
Orthodox Christening by Yuri Orlov.
The morning of my baptism I remember being filled with nervous excitement. When my parents said it was time to go, I carefully replaced the toy train I’d been playing with on the shelf, making my first of many commitments to myself to be tidier in the days to come. I was five years old, and this memory stands clearly as one of the few from those days. I remember the day from that point through the baptism clearly. I don’t remember if I had attended any classes or instruction on what I was undertaking. I wasn’t raised Episcopalian, and here at this large brick Assemblies of God church, my mother led me to the back to find a white baptismal gown that would fit me. She was probably back there the whole time, but I don’t remember that. I remember standing in a circle with youth and adults and the pastor, the smallest one by far that day, staring down at the hem of my too-long robe, to have a moment of prayer before we went out to the large glass-fronted baptismal pool set high in the wall behind the main stage.
I could barely touch the bottom and the pastor had to lift me up so I could be seen to make my profession of faith. “My name is Anna,” I said, “and I love Jesus.” From there I was submerged three times in the warm waters, once each for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and helped out the far side.
Then my family and extended family that had come to witness my baptism all went out to lunch somewhere - I think. I’m not sure. Someone gave me a stuffed lamb. I felt holy and confused and perhaps that’s all right because that pretty much describes the rest of my life with Christ: always a bit in awe that I’ve been made holy and working through one form of confusion or another.
What is life everlasting to a five-year old? It’s somewhere between waiting for dinner when you’re really hungry, or waiting for the weekend so you can play all day. It’s not even a month or a year or eighty years. A summer day can hold life everlasting when the game is good and the playmates are right.
I don’t think I would’ve understood any more of my baptism had I recited the Apostles’ Creed, all I know was that it definitely took. But I love the catechism and the creed and the baptismal covenant as a framework for our understanding, a framework to build off of as we grow in the faith. Even for five-year-olds, this framework is vital.
In the sacrament of baptism we enter into Christ’s death and resurrection in the act of entering the water, whether by immersion or by having it poured over us. We enter the water and are raised to new life in Christ. Christ entered into humanity, taking on all of the frailty and the ability to experience pain, sickness, and death in order that we might share in his life everlasting. This is the promise of life everlasting: entering into his life as he once entered--and continually enters--into ours, forever incorporating humanity into divinity.
This truth is one to cling to in this moment of uncertainty. What is the promise of life everlasting in the midst of a pandemic? Can it comfort us when fear and uncertainty and anxiety abound? Can it give us courage when we are frightened for the health and very lives of ourselves and our friends and our family?
I sometimes look to the early mothers and fathers of our faith who lived in times far more precarious than ours has typically been to see where they found their certainty. This quote from Julian of Norwich, reflecting on a time when she believed she was dying, is made new for our present time: “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.” (Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 82).
Her vision of the love of God fits in with Jesus’ own description: “ I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10: 28 NRSV). If you take the first half by itself it seems a promise that we would never die, however, we know that is not the case. The key is in the second part: “No one will snatch them out of my hand.” This puts me in mind of the end of Romans 8 where after a description and a fairly extensive list of hardships--peril, famine, persecution, and so on--the Apostle concludes, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39, NRSV).
It’s not that life everlasting is a promise that nothing bad happens to us. Nor is it a mantra to use as a shield against misfortune. It is a promise that in falling and rising we are kept in God’s love and nothing--not even death--can snatch us from the palm of God’s hand.
My soon-to-be nine-year-old this year went through a preparation and retreat time with his catechesis class to make his first confession and receive solemn communion. And in one conversation I had with him about it, I mentioned confirmation as something he could do later to make an adult profession of faith--meaning that he would publicly say that he was choosing this faith as his own.
He looked at me with an expression of surprise and said, “Wait, I get to choose what faith I have?” And I said, “yes, buddy, it wouldn’t be faith if you didn’t.”
But even at the age of nine, it hadn’t yet occured to him that he didn’t have to have the same faith as his parents. He was baptized as an infant, and we took the vows for him: to raise him in the family of God. At the age of five, I ostensibly took the vows myself, but in reality it was an act of my family and community. I wasn’t making an adult, independent decision at five, and this experience helped convince my adult self that baptism is a sacrament. We don’t have to understand it to partake in it by faith. And as we collectively renew our vows with every baptism, saying again the covenant with the newly baptized, or at the Easter vigil as we round out our observance of Lent and move into the Easter season, we affirm that we will do all in our power to support one another in our lives in Christ. Our life everlasting is not our own on an individual level, it is realized in relationship with God and each other.
As Ben Myers put it in his work on the Apostles Creed, “In the same way, Christian hope is never just hope for myself. It is a social hope. It is hope for humanity. The only future that I may legitimately hope for is a future that also includes my neighbor” (The Apostle’s Creed, Ben Myers, “The Resurrection of the Body”). Myers pulled this observation from one of Origen’s sermons on Leviticus where Origen interprets the valley of dry bones as a metaphor for the resurrection of the body--but not just individual bodies. The dry bones were the “whole house of Israel” (Ezekiel 37:11). We are one body and our resurrection--our life everlasting--is bound up in each other.
In this time of pandemic, our interconnectedness has been laid bare. For those that subscribed to the myth of self-sufficiency, this virus has come along and shown us that the only way that we will make it through this is to work together and care for each other. Our individual thriving is bound up in community and the common good.
But it has always been this way. Shalom--or total well-being--is never possible as individuals. It has only ever been possible through our interdependence and participation in community. We only truly thrive when everyone is thriving. So too is our life everlasting bound up with our participation in the community of God. Life everlasting is a promise and a call. A promise that nothing--neither pandemic, nor isolation, nor anxiety, nor sickness, nor death--can take us out of the precious love of God. And a call to fulfill our vows to do all in our power to support each other in our life with Christ. May we all know that we are held.
