I had the privilege of baptizing five new believers today. In preparation for today, I’ve been reflecting throughout the previous week on the reality that baptism reenacts (or enacts, as many Christians believe). The foundational declaration of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth is the crucified and resurrected Lord; then, secondly, that we can participate in his death and resurrection – not as a quasi-existentialist metaphor, but as sober truth. This real death and resurrection is what baptism is all about. 

We tend to say that being baptized means dying to sin. This is true, but not the whole truth. Baptism means dying, full stop. Baptism is not so much about changing lives as it is about ending them. 

What we would like to do is make our current life better – to become the best versions of ourselves, maybe, or to live our best lives now. We would like to cut out some bad habits, wake up earlier in the morning, acquire a new skill or two, be more interesting at parties. Or more seriously, we’d also like to find moral courage, self-acceptance, peace, spiritual richness, the ability to love and forgive, the opportunity to devote ourselves to some great cause. 

So imagine your ideal life: disciplined, focused, healthy, interesting, passionate, loving and devoted. That is the life you are irrevocably giving up when you go into the water. That is the self you’re bringing to be drowned. This flood claims everything – your darkest sins and your finest moments – and leaves nothing behind. Baptism is the public declaration that none of it counts any more to God or to yourself. It’s a promise that you won’t use any of it to make a case for or against yourself – actually, that you’ll stop making cases regarding your own self-worth altogether. 

Baptism is an unconditional surrender of your passions, ambitions, projects, talents. Dead people don’t have any of those. They go down into the water with you; what they emerge as, is not up to you. One of the men I baptized told the congregation that “God’s love has no stipulations.” That is true in more ways than one: he sets no stipulations on anyone who approaches these waters in faith, and we set none on what our resurrected life looks like. 

The person who comes out of the water is both the same and different from the person who went in, in a manner that has proven notoriously difficult to define with philosophical rigor. “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says, “but nevertheless I live.” That’s probably about the best we can do. 

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Or so goes the theory. As the applause and shouting and iPhone-picture-taking from the congregation subsides, you dry off with a towel and go off to the bathroom to change into dry clothes. After the service, you drive home with pretty much the same set of phobias, ambitions, habits, relationships, skills and limitations that you brought with you to church that morning. If that is not immediately apparent, it will be within a week or two. You’ve promised to hand all those things over to Christ, but he has apparently handed them all right back. 

Sinks full of dirty dishes and laundry are still real things. So is chronic back pain or acute anxiety. Various appetites continue to be unruly, as do two-year-old children. An alarming amount of sheer pettiness continues to characterize your life as both giver and receiver. All around you, the world rolls along according to the same old logics, quite unperturbed by your affirmation of faith and ritual dunking. 

All that to say, this new life in Christ is probably going to feel an awful lot like the old one. Stories of radical and rapid transformation (e.g., near-instant freedom from alcoholism) are real, but if we’re honest, they comprise the exception rather than the norm. The initial enthusiasm wears away, as is the manner of initial enthusiasm. On a typical Tuesday afternoon in the office around 2:00pm, when you’re too brain-dead to even contemplate a concept like “buried with him in baptism and raised with him to new life” – well, it’s not so easy to point to the concrete thing that makes the new life so new.

Nothing has changed and so has everything. I realize that that is the kind of statement that turns off non-believers (and exhausted believers) who would like huge metaphysical claims to be backed up with, you know, a bit more tangible impact in the realm of our particular late industrial capitalist society. How is the new life different from the old one at 2:00pm on a brain-dead Tuesday afternoon? 

That’s the question I’ll try to begin to tackle in my next post.