Baptism: dunk, dip, douse or dribble?

Baptism by the Book (of Common Prayer)
Our daughter was baptised on Sunday morning with little fuss and great joy. Praise God!

Although the service used a more contemporary liturgical pattern, I took the opportunity to re-read the baptism services in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. I was struck by a number of things. First, as always, the saturation of Scripture throughout the service. The most obvious difference between traditional and contemporary Anglican liturgical services is not language, but length. And much of what has been cut is the reading of and reference to Scripture. For example, it really adds something to a service of infant baptism to read the passage in Mark 10.13-16 where Jesus tells his disciples (who are acting as overzealous bodyguards) to "let the little children come unto me".

Another more surprising element came in the rubric (the instructions accompanying the words to be said) at the point of baptism. But to show why it was surprising, first a little personal background.

Growing up in a Baptist church, I had only ever witnessed full immersion baptisms (dunking), where the candidate is plunged entirely under the surface of the water and then brought up again (for the hardcore, this can be done thrice: once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for good measure the Holy Spirit). This was how I was baptised just short of my sixteenth birthday. For me, immersion has always made good sense of the apostle Paul's discussion of baptism in Romans 6.3-4, where he speaks of our baptism as our having been "buried with Christ". Thus, full immersion baptism symbolises the burial of the old life and the resurrection to the new life that is experienced when a person is united with Christ by faith.

More recently, and in a tradition that embraces the baptism of infants, I have become familiar with two other methods of baptising: sprinkling (dribble) and pouring (dousing). The former can look to the sacrificial practice in the Old Testament temple (as recorded in the Pentateuch and referenced in the New Testament) and especially to the divine promise of a future cleansing through sprinkling with clean water recorded in Ezekiel 36.25. The latter may look to the frequent New Testament language of the Holy Spirit being poured out upon believers, an event associated with baptism.

As long as it was done in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and using water, all three methods (dunking, dribbling and dousing) were accepted by the early church, though there seems to have been a preference for immersion.

Yet contemporary Anglican practice (insofar as I've seen or heard about it) only ever sprinkles or pours water on infants. Given this, I'd asked our minister to at least splash around as much water as possible, pouring rather than sprinkling. He agreed, saying that the water also symbolises God's love, so the more the merrier.

Therefore, it was with some interest that I noticed that in the 1662 service for "The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants" the actual baptising is described like this:

Then the Priest shall take the Child into his hands, and shall say to the Godfathers and Godmothers,

Name this Child. And then naming it after them (if they shall certify him that the Child may well endure it) he shall dip it in the Water discreetly and warily, saying,
I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

But if they certify that the Child is weak, it shall suffice to pour Water upon it, saying the foresaid words,
I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Notice that pouring is a concession for weak babies; the normal practice is for the child to be dipped. Is this immersion (done discretely and warily)? Or immersion without putting the head under? Is anyone familiar with this practice?

I checked, and the same instruction is found in all the early English Prayer Books (and the Scottish one too). Unfortunately, I was too late to ask for this to be incorporated into the service, but I think it should happen more often. If you are having a child baptised, make sure you take along the BCP and ask your priest for a dipping!

Mary's melody: a revolutionary hope III

2. An upside down God
A little later, once she’s met with her elderly cousin Elizabeth, herself also amazingly pregnant, Mary’s trusting response finds eloquent expression in a song known to us as the Magnificat, after its first word in Latin, and found in Luke 1.46-56:

My soul glorifies the Lord
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
   for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
   for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
   holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
   from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
   he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
   but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
   but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   remembering to be merciful
   to Abraham and his descendants for ever,
   even as he said to our fathers.

Mary knows her Bible. Her song is saturated with references and echoes from the Hebrew Scriptures. From these stories, she has learnt that in choosing a nobody to pursue his plans, God is doing what he’s always done.

God chose Abraham, a nomadic herder, a nobody, to begin a family based on a grand promise. As our first reading reminded us, God chose the children of Israel, a racial underclass helping build the riches of the mighty Egyptians, an enslaved mob of nobodies, to witness the humiliating defeat of the prime and pride of Pharaoh’s army. God chose Rahab, a foreign prostitute, a nobody, to protect Joshua’s men in a hostile city. God chose Ehud, a left-handed freak, to perform a crafty clandestine operation to rescue his oppressed people. God chose David, an unknown shepherd boy, a nobody, to defeat the champion of the Philistine army and establish a Israelite dynasty in Jerusalem. God chose Esther, a young orphaned Jewish girl in a strange land, a nobody, to stand up to an emperor and foil a genocidal plot.

Mary knew these stories and more. She realised that in choosing a nobody like her to work his upside plans, God was doing what he’d always done. And so she praises his upside down wisdom, which raises the humble and thwarts the proud and lofty.
Twelve points for naming the building whose ceiling is pictured here.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII.

Mary's melody: a revolutionary hope I

Songs of the Season
During advent at church we have been running a series of sermons under the title "Songs of the Season" (an idea we stole from Barneys last year) in which we study scriptural songs of messianic hope, hoping to understand how Jesus was the hope of Israel, and as such is also our hope. Here are the titles and passages for the series:

• The coronation anthem: a royal hope
       Psalm 2 (& Luke 3.1-23)
• The lament of the abandoned: a hope for the hopeless
       Psalm 22 (& Mark 15.25-39)
• The servant's song: a hope for all nations
       Isaiah 42.1-9 (& Luke 2.25-35)
• Mary's melody: a revolutionary hope
       Luke 1.39-56 (& Exodus 15.1-18)
• Zechariah's carol: hope for those in darkness
       Luke 1.67-79 (& Isaiah 9.1-7)
• The Angels' chorus: the birth of hope
       Luke 2.1-20

I thought I'd post my sermon on Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1.46-56) over the next few days. For an introduction, I played this video, and noted at the end that looking at the world upside down can give us a fresh perspective on life.

Father, too often we find ourselves stuck in a rut, following the same old habits and going nowhere. Give us wisdom to see life afresh today from your perspective, even if it means turning our world upside down. Turn us right way up for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII.

On prayer

Prayer begins in silence. This is because we do not know God unless he speaks first. There can only be a conversation because he has taken the initiative. Left to ourselves, we invent gods of our own wishes and fears, but the good news is that God has spoken to us in his Son. We are not left in the dark, but can respond to his gracious invitation to relationship with him as our heavenly Father. If he had not reached out to us in our need, then we would be ignorant of both the true nature and depth of our need and the identity of the one whom we might call upon to help.

Of course, sometimes our needs are so pressing that all we can do is cry that most basic of prayers: ‘Save me, Lord!’ And the Scriptures promise that ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’ (Joel 2.32; Acts 2.21; Romans 10.13). Yet it is not just any lord to whom we fly in our distress, but to the God and Father of Jesus. As we come to know him, we also grow in our understanding of ourselves and the depth of our dependence upon him.

Our prayers are profoundly shaped by our conception of God. If God is a cosmic Santa Claus, we will bring our shopping list. If he is a harsh and distant judge, then our pleas will be fearful, brief and infrequent. And so to grow in prayer, it is important to remember again the good news about Jesus and allow our prayers to be moulded by God as he truly is.

First, God is the creator to whom we owe our existence and all we have. Every good thing comes from him, and so it is right that our prayers be filled with adoration. And not just when things are good. The Psalms are filled with examples of David and others continuing to praise God in the midst of danger and suffering (Psalms 5, 73, 77, 86 and many others).

When we face our own strife and failure it is usually partially self-caused and partially the result of circumstances outside our control. To the extent that we are at fault for our own pain, it is God whom we have ultimately offended and so it is also right that we confess our errors in our prayers: whether large or small, public or private, in word or deed – or even through not doing what we ought to have done. At this point, knowing the heart of God to whom we confess makes all the difference. This is the one who is ‘merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’ (Exodus 34.6), the one whose Son lived, died and rose to secure our forgiveness.

Not only has God given us life and all the good things we enjoy, but in Jesus he has also brought new life to all of us living in the shadow of death. This includes both release from guilt and the gift of the Spirit to set us free from the compulsion to do evil. In Christ, we are adopted as God’s children and let in on God’s plan to set everything right through Christ. We have so much for which to give thanks in our prayers and so it is no surprise that Paul tells the Thessalonians to ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’ (1 Thessalonians 5.16-18)

Yet we know that everything is not yet right. Jesus has risen from the dead and we follow his path with the help of the Spirit, but death still interrupts, sins still entangle. Paul told the Christians in Rome that the whole world groans for the day when what was begun at Easter for Jesus is finished for all creation (Romans 8.18-23). And we also groan, yearning for the day when Jesus will return to bring life and peace once and for all to his dying and war-torn world. Such prayers might consist of ‘sighs too deep for words’ (Romans 8.26-27) or they might simply cry ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ (Revelation 22.20)

And so that leaves us today, cleansed from our past, eagerly waiting for the future, and living each day relying on God for all our needs. Consequently, we ask for daily bread from the one who fed Israel in the wilderness and who gives good things abundantly even to those who ignore him (Matthew 5.45). We need not be embarrassed about asking from one who loves to give. But neither ought we fear asking: ‘Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.’ (Psalm 37.4) If our delight is in God, the desires of our heart will be shaped to be his desires and so he will satisfy them with more than we can ask or imagine.

There is power in prayer, but it is not ours; it is God’s. Prayer is not a magic formula giving us access to a secret and mysterious force. Prayer is an admission of our impotence and need, and of God’s generosity and strength. The more we know him as we hear and obey the good news about Jesus, the more our prayers will be filled with adoration, confession, thanksgiving, groaning and requests.

And the more we will pray.
Twelve points for the first to correctly name the location of the each photo.

God with us? II

God with Israel: Exodus 25
The first half of Exodus is a riveting and rollicking story: a baby saved from the bulrushes and brought up amongst foreigners; murder and betrayal; a burning bush and plagues; dramatic rescue and great rejoicing; suffering and complaining; bread from heaven, a flaming mountain, earthquakes and God himself writing on tablets of stone. It’s the kind of material you’d make a movie out of – or maybe two.

But the movies – and most readers – give up when they hit the second half. After 20 or so chapters of action, most of the second half of the book seems to be building instructions.

My in-laws are architects and so I’m learning to love buildings, but even I find these chapters hard going. First come seven chapters (Exodus 25-31) filled with detailed instructions on making a box (ark), table, lampstand, tent (tabernacle), altar, courtyard, dress clothes for priests and more, then a few chapters on the golden calf incident (Exodus 32-34), before the same elements appear again in similar detail recording the actual construction of each element (Exodus 35-40).

All together, it probably looked something like this or this or this.

The tabernacle was basically a mobile tent with portable furniture. The Israelites traveled with it and set it up wherever they pitched camp while wandering through the wilderness. The tabernacle would be in the center of the camp, and the 12 tribes of Israel would set up their tents around it. There was a fenced courtyard, and then the tabernacle itself was divided into two sections: the holy place, which contained the lampstand, table and altar, and the holy of holies, which contained the ark of the covenant. This ark was a wooden box overlaid with gold in which were placed the tablets recording the covenant (binding agreement) made between God and Israel at Mount Sinai. On top of the ark were golden statues of two winged angels (cherubim) facing each other.

Unless you’re an archeologist or have a thing for tents, it’s all a bit of a slog to read. What’s it all doing here? What’s it all about? The key is in Exodus 25.8: And have them make me sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them. God's presence in the midst of his people Israel - that's what this whole section is about: the concern for holiness; the importance of the sacrifices; the repetition and symbolism of different numbers; the position and orientation of the tabernacle; how the quality of the metals increases the closer they are to Holy of Holies (bronze, silver, gold); the way the ark was meant to represent the throne of God, such that he would sit ‘enthroned between the cherubim’. All this was to highlight what an awesome and weighty privilege it was for the Israelites to have the living God in their midst.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI.

Williams on church leadership

What I have been proposing is that the empty tomb tradition is, theologically speaking, part of the Church’s resource in resisting the temptation to ‘absorb’ Jesus into itself, and thus part of what its confession of the divinity of Jesus amounts to in spiritual and political practice. Jesus is not the possession of the community, not even as ‘raised into the kerygma’, because he is alive, beyond qualification or risk, he ‘lives to God’. The freedom of Jesus to act, however we unpack that deceptively simple statement, is not exhausted by what the community is doing or thinking – which allows us to say that Jesus’ role for the community continues, vitally, to be that of judge, and that those who are charged with speaking authoritatively for or in the community stand in a very peculiar and paradoxical place. The distance from the community that is built into their role has to be something other than a claim to share the kind of distance that exists between the risen Jesus and the community. They remain under the judgement of the Risen One, along with the rest of the community, and their task is to direct attention away from themselves to Jesus, to reinforce the community’s awareness of living under Jesus’ judgement.

- Rowan Williams, 'Between the Cherubim: the Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne' in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 192-93.

This fascinating essay is sobering reading for one charged to speak in the community this Sunday. I've re-read it since I'm preaching on the tabernacle (and ark) in Exodus 25-31. Here's another quote from earlier in the essay where Williams is setting up the imagery of the 'empty throne', the space between the cherubim on the ark of the covenant, where the God of Israel is said to dwell. Williams reads it an emobodiment (or disembodiment as the case may be) of the second commandment:

The cherubim flanking the ark define a space where God would be if God were anywhere (the God of Judah is the one who sits between the cherubim or even ‘dwells’ between the cherubim); but there is no image between the cherubim. If you want to see the God of Judah, this is where he is and is not: to ‘see’ him is to look into the gap between the holy images. What is tangible and accessible, what can be carried in procession or taken to war as a palladium is not the image of God but the throne of God, the place where he is not. … YHWH is not capable of being represented definitively or indeed at all except as the one who is invisibly enthroned on the kapporeth [mercy seat] of the ark. … [There is a] non-representable, non-possessible dimension [to] the paradoxical manifestation of God to God’s people.

- Williams, 'Between the Cherubim', 187.

The prohibition against images of God is to remind the people of God's freedom, that though he might be 'on our side', he is never in our possession. He can't be put in a box, because he sits on the box!

Yet there is another dynamic here that Williams places less emphasis on: God makes his own image. Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Col 1.15; Heb 1.1-3). God's transcendence and invisibility might lead us to silence about God, theology dumbfounded. But this is not the case because God himself speaks. He supplies his own icon in Jesus. This is how we are to speak and think about God. This is how we are to follow and obey him. This is what we can and must hope for. God's freedom is not an endless deferral of open potential. He decisively acts to give himself.

Nonetheless, in doing so, he does not give himself away. He remains the Lord. And this is the thrust of Williams' christological point in the first quote. We don't own Jesus. Jesus' friends can and do get him wrong.
Eight points for correctly naming this English abbey.