Adult baptism: the courage to live again!

Baptism is nothing like a resolution we make every year in January, quickly forgetting our good intentions with the first winter blast. (Ask me if I have hit the gym this year. Not once!) Baptism is not self-improvement. It is not a commitment to be better, do good, try harder and day-by-day keep up with an expectation to ‘Go and live your best life!’ One theologian said of his own story of coming to Christian faith as an adult that it was for him finding ‘the courage to live again.’ That is a good description of adult baptism. And if that resonates with you in any way, then take this as your invitation to our baptism and confirmation preparation course.

Everyone will have their own reasons why they want to be baptised or go through confirmation. And everyone will have their own way of naming that grown-up courage to live again. But we come to baptism because we have been seized at the core of who we are by the love of God, a love we can scarcely name. How can you put into words God whose embrace, as St Augustine put it, is “ever ancient, ever new”? You might, however, find the words to say who God is to you.

This is why the questions we are asked at baptism are so jarring and demanding. They get personal. They name a burning desire to have God pour into us, to grow love in us and transform us:

Do you turn to Christ?
Do you repent of your sins?
Do you renounce evil?

The key word in this clutch of faith commitments is ‘Christ’, to whom we reply each time with ‘I do’. If that reminds you of the wedding ceremony, it is intentional. It means that you know that Christ sees you, seizes you, draws you into God’s heart. And so adult baptism—or baptism for anyone able to make a decision for themselves—is a public affirmation that, however long you have thought about a Christian commitment, you are in the end irrepressibly alive to the love of God who loves us first.

Baptism: eddying towards God who was always there, always Love from the beginning. (Image: tidal pools around Santa Barbara harbour, California.)

This is precisely why we are not baptised into any a particular church. We are baptised into life in Christ, to use the language of the church. That is what baptism brings us to. It is not simply church membership or club identity. It is the courage to name Christ as our own.

In the act of baptism we fall into the arms of the who says, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Those who are baptised plunge into open waters, push the boat into a primordial ocean, not setting off for destinations afar, but eddying towards God who was always there, always Love from the beginning.

It is true that sometimes we hear people say that they were baptised Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, ‘free church’, and so on. But that is simply a way of saying ‘I was baptised a Christian’. In the end, all churches share the one and only baptism there is, the baptism of Christ, the promise of newness of life.

For you, of course, ‘newness’ may be a but glimmer of light, embers of faith rather than a blazing flame. That’s a start! Or so the Polish poet Anna Kamieńska tells us of ‘Small Things’:

It’s not from the grand
but from every tiny thing
that it grows enormous
as if Someone was building Eternity
as a swallow its nest
out of clumps of moments.

That you are asking about baptism, merely enquiring in an email, is faith enough: think of an acorn on the forest floor, the ‘clumps of moments’ marking out the oak tree’s entire lifespan start there!

On the other hand, baptism for you may be a tidal wave,  a dramatic ‘coming to’, a realisation that Jesus meets you where you are, has trod the roads you have trod, lifts you up when you stumble, and, on the cross, speaks a pain you recognise as your own: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’

Whatever your experience, whatever words you use to say that God in Christ is for you courage and wholeness of heart, the point of baptism, and the point of an adult faith commitment in confirmation, is that you start right where you are.

The older wording in the baptism service intended to drive home this by asking candidates, “do you renounce the devil and all his works.” That was a signal to those being baptised that we come from something, we don’t come to Christian faith empty handed: we come with life experience, and no doubt with hurts, the wrongdoing of sin, and regrets. But that means that we come to know God with the whole of who we are, body, mind, and heart.

Let’s step back in time a bit to see how this looks from a different angle.

The English mystic, Margery Kempe (in the 15th century), in flights of ecstasy, wrote of the rapture of God’s love. Margery longed for spiritual union with Christ: “Take me to you as your wedded husband,” she hears Christ say to her in visions, “take me as your most worthy darling, and as your sweet son.”

We easily make the mistake of dismissing Margery if we say, well, yes, that’s a medieval mind speaking, that’s a religious hysteric we rational moderns are better off without. But let’s not miss that Margery is in fact giving us God in the language of experience. For Margery, our story becomes God’s story. God is not abstract, distant, a metaphysical God beyond the veil. God is ‘Word made flesh’, shattering our guard and exciting every atom in us to embrace the God who is always real and always at home in the raw complexity of who we are.

The point is this: life with God begins in the life you have, not the one you imagine you could have had. And the baptism signals this in a lived experience: water is poured over you, the sign of the cross is made on your forehead, the light of Christ is symbolically put into your hands in candlelight taken from the Easter flame.

That, of course, may not at all be where you ever planned to be. And it happens every time we have a baptism and confirmation class that someone will say ‘I cannot believe I am being baptised a Christian’, or ‘I am making my confirmation as a Christian, but that’s the last thing in the world I ever thought I would do’. But life is multilayered, complex, and never made-to-order. As we grow along the way, we change.

Baptism and confirmation, making a public confession of faith, is change. It is inscribing in your body and in time the moment when Christ found in you the courage to live and love again.

If this sounds like you, then do please join us for baptism and confirmation preparation. Get in touch directly me, Ivan, by emailing ivan@sjp.org.uk. We will meet on the dates shown below.