BLOG 1/28/17. BAPTISM AS A ‘STATEMENT OF CONSENT’ ?

BLOG 1/28/17. BAPTISM AS A ‘STATEMENT OF CONSENT?

      What if baptism could cost you your life? Actually, it does! Yes, of course, we focus on God’s extravagant love and reconciling, recreating ministry to us in and through Jesus Christ. Those are the promises we love to celebrate. … But then there are also the demands of Christ’s message, and the requirements of obedience to those who choose to come to him. Here’s another part of our message.

Somewhere back there in history, when it became legal for Christians to even exist, being baptized into a identity with Jesus Christ became something of safe experience, … almost routine because it was a polite rite of entrance, celebrated by friends and family. In some regions of the world it is still illegal to be a follower of Jesus, and can still cost you your life in any lethal sense. When church and ‘empire’ or dominant order, become congenial to the Christian faith, the danger diminishes. When the church and the empire became congenial to each other, it was also routine to even baptize infants, though they had no engagement of mind or will in the rite, only a promise to their parents that there were promises given to them about their children. Adults responding to Jesus Christ and expressing faith in him were baptized as a part of becoming members of Christ’s church. Baptized children were expected at some early stage to state their own faith (though most had known no other faith) in a rite called confirmation. But my readers know all of this, and there are libraries arguing it, pro and con, so I will not pursue that.

What provokes this Blog is the fact that Jesus’ call to discipleship is anything but casual: “Unless a person forsakes all that he has he/she cannot be my disciple.” “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many/ For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take his cross, and follow me.” “He who saves his life shall lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake and the gospels shall find it.” … for starts. But there is no need to refer you to the many books on this costly reality, and, ultimately, of the risks one takes in receiving baptism—one has only to read the teachings of Jesus: his was the teaching that those who follow him must be totally committed to his servant role, to lose all, even to be willing to die for his sake and the gospel’s.

I, personally, had a profound ‘conversion’ experience as a young adult (and an ordained pastor) reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, … “when Jesus calls a man he bids him ‘come and die.’” Costly obedience.  Forsaking one’s own self-centered agenda. Becoming a servant to all.  These are not cheap, or safe. Yet as the church became immunized to such claims, and became a ‘comfort zone’ of religious Christianity, such radical demands moved more and more to the margins of the church’s disciplines of entrance. Even the classical baptismal formula included the vow to “renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God … renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God … renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God … turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Savior … put your whole trust in his grace and love … promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?” (plagiarized from the Episcopal rites)

A person might think twice about that if there were doubts about his or her willingness to be crucified with Christ, and had mixed motives about identifying with the people of God.

I thought of that recently in a strange moment of my own life. I was about to have a delicate surgical heart procedure done, and shortly before they rolled me into the operating room, the staff brought me a legal “Statement of Consent” to sign, since heart surgery is risky business, at best. It meant that I was putting my life in the hands of my surgeons, and that I absolved them from legal procedure is it all ‘went south’. That’s something like the vows of baptism, i.e., placing my whole life and career as a living sacrifice to God in Christ, to be his faithful disciple, no matter the cost … and then to rehearse that all-encompassing vow regularly so that its consequences don’t become dim and ineffectual in my life. To live in Christ, is to have his genome operational in me by His Spirit.

But it could cost me my life. It is not cheap, … but it is the way to the that life beyond asking or imagination that Jesus promises to those who sign His statement of consent.

 

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About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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