The Baptism

The Baptism Pawel quietly rubs his hands together, repeatedly covering first one and then the other. He was not prepared for what he was feeling today; not by the bible studies, not by the baptism class, not even by the writing of his testimony. He looks around the room at the faces of the others waiting with him and he chuckles cynically at the absurdity of it all. Here he is sitting in a room full of strangers with perfect hair and perfect lives in a room seemingly designed to offer as little inspiration as possible. “What does all this have to do with real life?” he mutters to himself, “These people have never had to live in the real world.” He has taken to calling them cookie-cutter Christians, believers who have bought into contemporary evangelical ideology that says children are to be home schooled, women must adore their husbands and live for the opportunity to cook and clean for them, while their men brave the world with its dangers and snares in order to provide for the family as only a man can. They are well-off financially, and their difficulties begin primarily with the difficulties they have scheduling all of their children’s activities and their family vacation plans. Pawel shakes his head every Sunday as he waits his turn to enter the enormous parking lot of the church. He smiles and waves to the patrolmen who is assigned this weekend duty in order to reduce the inevitable traffic jams caused by several thousand people attempting to enter and exit three services on any given Sunday morning. Pawel’s ten year old mini-van is not entirely out of place, but he can’t help thinking sometimes that he brings down the property value every time he pulls into the lot. But he has made the decision to attend this church, and attend he will until he feels that its time to move on. Where else would they go anyway? Their last church experience, actually the first for him and his wife in over ten years, was such a disaster that they both felt the need for the safety and security of a doctrinally sound church, even if it was not filled with people they could relate to. And this is a doctrinally sound church. The Word of God is faithfully preached without apology each and every Sunday, and Pawel and his wife need that more than anything else. Now, after two years of attendance, Pawel and his wife have finally decided that they ought to be baptized. They made it through the church’s Baptism Class which consisted of four one hour lessons on the means and mode of baptism, the symbolism of baptism, and the sacramental nature of baptism. They each wrote personal testimonies of faith in Christ, and they each worked through public declarations of faith with one of the deacons. They were supposed to have been adequately prepared. It all sounded so simple, so doctrinal; Pawel felt obedient and sure in making this decision to mark himself for Christ publicly. Baptism, the pastor had explained, was merely a symbol of the much more complex and life altering change that had already taken place in their lives. When they had first believed in Jesus, their lives were remade, they were reborn, he had said, into eternal life. Baptism was only the external mark applied afterwards as an act of obedience on the part of the believer to the command of Christ. But knowing the truth of a reality and living it are often two different experiences. Pawel was now feeling that he had somehow missed something in the class that would have helped him tremendously in understanding what was going on right now. He must have missed something important, because he was definitely not prepared, not for this, not for what had been happening in their lives over the past couple of days.

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As the day of their Baptism drew nearer an air of discontent seemed to permeate their home. Pawel grew increasingly agitated and upset over the smallest things. The children seemed to regress in their behavior and were irritatingly whiny at every opportunity. Pawel’s wife began to respond negatively to Pawel’s agitation and temper and the household erupted with argument and dissention. In addition to this, they all seemed to be coming down with a flu bug or something. Pawel wondered, ‘Why is all this happening this week? Why now?’ It felt as if they were being attacked by some unknown monster wfed on flesh and feeling. What Pawel didn’t know and what neither the Baptism Class, the deacons, nor Pastor had told him, was that there is much more to an act of faith of the magnitude of the kind they were undertaking than mere doctrine and symbolism. To reduce it to such a trivial rite is to attempt to steal its power and glory right out from under the King who has commanded it. And to simplify Baptism to only theology is to play into the hands of those who seek to undermine the work of Christ on the cross; our great enemies the demons. You see, in the world there exists that which we can see and feel and taste with our senses, and that which we can know exists only with our minds and our hearts and our spirits. The former is that which surrounds Pawel now as he sits and waits his turn at the pool: the Concord Gray linen wallpaper and the deep mahogany finished wainscot of the waiting room, the artificial leather upholstery on the chairs that so efficiently support his weight, the softly etched and scalloped wall sconces that help create the mood for reflection and solitude, and his brothers and sisters who wait with him, bowing their permed and pressed heads. These things occupy the physical senses and comprise the physical world in which we live. These are the things that create in us a sense of reality and permanence as we interact with them through our work and play, our joy and our pain. But there is so much more beyond this curtain of the physical, beyond these purely temporal ‘things.’ There exists, just past these things (or possibly even just inside of these things) the realm of the spiritual. In the spiritual realm there exists a completely ‘other’ reality. A reality filled with host upon host of other types of beings, filled with a life that is as different from our own as ours is different from the dead. For the most part these beings willfully serve their Creator, the Lord Almighty, as they sing to Him praises that He alone can hear. But there are others among them who have willfully decided not to serve their Lord and Master. These others wage war instead upon His Kingdom in heaven and His kingdom here on earth. They walk this earth seeking only the destruction of God’s children and the prevention of His kingdom being fulfilled as was written in scripture. And they are largely ignored. The writers of sacred scripture freely acknowledge not only their existence but also their evil intentions. We are told again and again of the work of these demons and of the battle that God wages against them with his army of holy angels. We are given example after example of their methods and tactics in their war against mankind. And yet we do not teach the new believer to consider them when they begin to walk the Way of faith. We do not help them to prepare for engagement in the spiritual realm when they make the crossover from death into life. We simply do not take seriously the battle as it is described in scripture, and as a result we enter Life woefully ill-equipped and unprepared for it. And as such, Pawel is beginning to learn that which his teachers had neglected to mention. He is learning that as he steps out in faith in obedience to His Lord and Savior, there will be arrayed against him the forces of

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wickedness in every conceivable fashion, simply in order to prevent him from growing in the faith and making his stand among the faithful of the Lord. He is learning this day that these beings seek to devour him and that somehow he has to learn the means of survival. Pawel looks over at his wife. She too has her head bowed as she quietly waits her turn. She is holding her two-minute testimony and folding it back and forth absently. He reaches over and takes her hand. She looks up at him and gives him that small smile that she has when she is still upset at things but has resigned herself to the fact that ‘stuff’ happens- even on special days such as this. This is a special day. They had come a long way to get here. And to think that just a short time ago they were completely ignorant of the ways of the Lord, living in their sins as if theirs weren’t half as bad as they could be and certainly not bad enough to worry about changing; and they were arrogant enough to proclaim that fact to anybody who would listen. And then along came the boy- a baby, a newborn innocent, a chunky, round faced, laughing, and crying baby boy who proceeded to change everything. He was the gift that caused them both to seriously reflect upon who they were and what it was they had become. They began to ask themselves, “What do I desire this boy to become and what will he believe? What do I believe?” They began to see that what they were was not what they wanted for him to be. They wanted more, both for themselves and for their child. But they had no idea what that ‘more’ consisted of nor how to go about getting it. They tried to change their ways; they tried to cut out the obvious vices and behaviors, but with every success they realized that there was much more work to be done underneath. It seemed that they were powerless to do anything more than merely polish the exteriors of their lives. But God, of course, had this in mind all along. God began to call them to Himself, first through the boy, and then through His church. He sent to them believers who opened the bible with them, invited them to church and illumined the Way for them. He provided them with a means to begin their lives again and to remove the weight of their burdens. In short, they were ‘born again.’ They were changed from the inside out, by the Lord who received their confession of sin and their profession of powerlessness outside of Jesus. They were cut free from the chains that had bound them to their past and their flesh, and they were sealed forever with the silver cord that now binds them to His throne. Yes, this day is special. It is a day that will mark them forever in the eyes of their congregation and the church universal as believers in Christ. It is meant to be a public profession of faith, witnessed by the body before the Lord Himself. It is a rite that was commanded by the Lord Jesus and a task that He commissioned to His church to perform in all nations, and to all peoples who profess to believe. But there is so much more. For it is also the sealing of a covenant between the Lord and His children. He has made a promise that through His Son Jesus, any who would come to Him in repentance, would receive not only forgiveness but the gift of eternal life as well. He made a promise, open to all, that whoever believes in Jesus Christ will be saved from damnation. The sacramental rite of baptism is the believer’s circumcision through water that seals that covenant. It is a mark placed upon a believer that forever identifies him in the spiritual realm as belonging to the Lord. And the enemies that live in that realm work tirelessly to keep that mark from the backs of God’s children. They prowl and they stalk, they attack and they seek to devour any who would dare to leave their grasp and enter into His. “Are you two ready?” asks the smiling Deacon. It is Deacon Anderson, a tall and slender man with a hooked nose that gives him a distinct resemblance to the Scarecrow in

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the Wizard of Oz. He is the one Deacon that Pawel feels he can relate to. This Deacon is an auto mechanic. He owns his own garage and has a good reputation for doing excellent work at fair and honest prices. He knows how to work for a living, something that Pawel appreciates, and he doesn’t have perfect hair, something else that Pawel appreciates. He’s ‘real;’ so when he asks about them, Pawel is inclined to talk. “No, I don’t think we are okay, Deacon. We’re not okay at all. We probably oughtn’t do this baptism right now.” A puzzled look spreads across Deacon Anderson’s face and he squats down in front of them in order to listen to Pawel. “We’ve had a terrible fight this morning… last night too. I’ve been angry for two days now, about really stupid stuff. I’ve been yelling at the kids, they’ve been incredibly whiny this past week. And me and my wife are arguing about everything. It has been a horrible couple of days… How can I go out there and profess to the grand and lifealtering change of a believer when I’ve just finished cursing and stomping around my house for two days? I would be nothing more than a hypocrite.” Pawel sighs and looks down at his hands. He’s rubbing them together again nervously. His wife reaches over and covers his hand with her own; he notices her ring. Such a pathetic little thing. It doesn’t even come close to the rings he sees on some of the women’s hands down here. He bought that ring when he was just nineteen years old, almost twenty years ago. He was not much more than a boy and not nearly the man that he should have been. What a long time ago that seems now. There is a long silence between the Deacon, and Pawel and his wife. The Deacon slowly rises to his full height with a sigh and reaches for a chair. He pulls it over real close and sits directly in front of the two candidates for baptism. “Let me tell you what I think Pawel. A hypocrite is not one who steps out in faith and says that he believes in the one Lord Jesus Christ and that he knows that he has been changed by Him, and at the same time knowing that he possesses deep and wicked sin within himself. That is not hypocritical, that is Christian, Pawel. The Christian knows that he sins, Pawel. The Christian knows that something is seriously wrong inside of himself. He knows that he is therefore lost without the help of God. You are Christian now, Pawel, and not because you are better somehow than you were before but simply because you now know that you have a long way to go. You are a Christian, Pawel, not a hypocrite, because you know this and because you trust God to help you to overcome. “So, you go out there today, and take your wife with you, and together you profess your faith and allegiance to your new Master. Give notice to those old masters who have been hounding you these past days, that no more will you hide who you really are. Your brothers already know of your sin Pawel; we know because we too are Christian and we carry our own burdens. Today is the day that you stand up and acknowledge that you need Jesus to take you from who you are to whom He would have you to be.” Pawel looks away as his throat begins to constrict. It really is such a burden to carry; the shame and guilt of sinfulness; it would be such a relief to let it go. He squeezes his wife’s hand and feels his tears welling up. He leans over toward her and looks deep into her eyes. “I love you honey,” he whispers. “I know sweetheart, I know. I love you too.”

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The door opens and the Pastor enters. He announces that it is time to begin. He rehearses a final time the baptism procedure and asks if anyone has any last questions. There are none so he gathers the believers close together and offers up a prayer of thanksgiving and a petition for blessing upon the faithful. “May the professions of faith of these your children please you this day, O Lord. May you bless them as they step out into faith in the Name of Your Son Jesus, Amen.” Pawel and his wife wait their turn as their brothers and sisters step forward through the door that leads into the darkness of the staging area. When their turn comes they step through the curtain and into the bright lights of the sanctuary and the cool waters of the baptismal. Mike Spencer/ April 16, 2008

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