Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.
-John 21:18
We have been dealt a grave injustice when it comes to the pressing theology of baptism we encounter in our culture. This is not to say that the individualistic, my personal jesus, moment of personal salvation, look at me I am special, modus of baptism is inherently wrong... it is just drastically and overwhelmingly incomplete. It is heretical not in the sense that it is wrong but in the sense that it is disproportionate.
When we baptize an individual we weave a whole new thread into the Body of Christ. We name as essential to that Body something that up to this point was missing. When we get to the end of the right it is not only the individual being baptized that is born a new... it is the entire Body of Christ that has been reborn.
There is a reason why we stray away from this more robust theology. Pivotally it means that Baptism is more than transforming one person to be like Christians... it means that Baptism is transforming Christianity towards an individual. It means, quite possibly, being taken where we might not want to go.
The reality, however, is that Christianity has the capacity to grow old. To stop moving where it is called to go and instead simply go where it wants to go. To no longer seek to transform and be transformed but instead to simply seek conformity. This is why the Proclamation of Christ Crucified from outside of Christianity is so essential for our well being as a church... This is why movement to incorporate said Proclamation in Baptism is so essential. We get pulled where we might not want to be... but in so doing we are made young again because new threads are woven into us, parts we did not even know were missing are now here in our midsts.
So that such which is new goes in the direction it is called, perhaps pulling that which is old in ways it does not want to go, but the Body of Christ is reborn in its midst. Often there are those who do not want to die, who do not want to be reborn, but throughout the church every baptism is a call to just that reality, to recognize the Spirit working in a person whose voice we are just beginning to hear and to enter into the reality where that voice is made old... so that we must begin the cycle again.
There is a reason why we stray away from this more robust theology. Pivotally it means that Baptism is more than transforming one person to be like Christians... it means that Baptism is transforming Christianity towards an individual. It means, quite possibly, being taken where we might not want to go.
The reality, however, is that Christianity has the capacity to grow old. To stop moving where it is called to go and instead simply go where it wants to go. To no longer seek to transform and be transformed but instead to simply seek conformity. This is why the Proclamation of Christ Crucified from outside of Christianity is so essential for our well being as a church... This is why movement to incorporate said Proclamation in Baptism is so essential. We get pulled where we might not want to be... but in so doing we are made young again because new threads are woven into us, parts we did not even know were missing are now here in our midsts.
So that such which is new goes in the direction it is called, perhaps pulling that which is old in ways it does not want to go, but the Body of Christ is reborn in its midst. Often there are those who do not want to die, who do not want to be reborn, but throughout the church every baptism is a call to just that reality, to recognize the Spirit working in a person whose voice we are just beginning to hear and to enter into the reality where that voice is made old... so that we must begin the cycle again.
