The baptismal font in the sanctuary of the church I serve, First Presbyterian Church of High Point, North Carolina, was given in memory of the first child baptized in what was then the new Presbyterian church in town. She was baptized in 1928. The font was given on the occasion of that child’s death three years later, a death by drowning.
I think about this child and her family and her drowning every single time I baptize a baby at that font. If you want baptism to be something other than a saccharine moment of oohs and aahs over gowns and giggles, just think about this story of the death of a 3-year-old by drowning while you talk about dying and rising with Christ in the waters
of baptism.
I tell this story of the baptismal font on tours of our sanctuary, but I don’t generally tell it to parents who have come with their beautiful, beloved children to have them baptized. I’m not sure why. Maybe I don’t want them to scare them off. Maybe I don’t want them to give up too quickly on the whole thing. There is something in me that doesn’t dare shatter the preciousness of the day, shrouded in misconception though it may be — the superstition that somehow this baptism will protect their child from harm, or that it is just an opportunity for one more formal family photo with religious trappings, or the misperception that baptism is some sort of magical formula for faith that permits families a hiatus until confirmation. Even with all of these potential misunderstandings, I still dare not cast a shadow on their special day. But maybe I should tell this story every time. Because it brings into stark reality what it means when we say, “In life and in death we belong to God.”
The promises of baptism
The Reformed tradition understands the sacrament of baptism as the entrance into the covenant of grace that God has established with us. One moment in a common baptismal liturgy tells us: “In baptism God claims us, and seals us to show that we belong to God. God frees us from sin and death, uniting us with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. By water and the Holy Spirit, we are made members of the church, the body of Christ, and joined to Christ’s ministry of love, peace, and justice.” All of the action is God’s action. God claims. God seals. God frees. God unites. God makes us members. It is even God who joins us to Christ’s ministry of love, peace and justice. This is God’s covenant of grace for us, initiated entirely by God on our behalf.
We are not equal partners in this agreement. Our promises don’t carry equal weight, but promises are still asked of us. God’s covenant promises demand a response from us. As parents bring their children to be baptized, they are asked whether they will live the Christian faith and teach it to their children. Similarly, the congregation is asked whether they will guide and nurture and encourage the child to follow Christ and to be a faithful member of Christ’s church. These are promises that some of us slough off, and others of us strive after earnestly. But either way, they stand as our response to God’s faithful promise to us.
Baptism is for us the sign and seal of the covenant between God and God’s people, and in it is the strange recognition that we take part in a covenant that God will always fulfill and we can never entirely fulfill, but that we are called to anyway.
God’s promises to us
When God makes a covenant with God’s people, God’s promises always come first. This is what it means to be in a covenant relationship with God — it is to be bound to God by promises, knowing that God’s promises don’t depend on us at all. God, the promise-making God, is in the driver’s seat when it comes to covenant. God is the initiator, and God sets the terms. When it comes to our faith, some of us ride easily as passengers, some of us ride kicking and screaming. Some of us have trouble even admitting that someone else is in the driver’s seat, or that we are riding along at all. (“Hey! Look how well I’m pedaling this bicycle all by myself!”) None of that changes the fact that God is in control. God and the promises of God are moving us toward a future that is simultaneously mysterious and hopeful. We respond to God’s covenant promises, but God’s promises are never dependent on us.
Life with God does not mean a life without care or worry — surely we know that. Sometimes, though, we have to remind ourselves. It doesn’t take us long to slide into our own Reformed version of the prosperity gospel — with unspoken assumptions that those who have responded affirmatively to God’s covenant promises ought to be more or less successful and healthy. In fact, there is no such promise attached to God’s covenant promises. The truth is that a faithful response to God’s covenant promise may mean that you get more than you bargained for.
The Abraham and Sarah narrative tells of living in response to covenant promises, even as-of-yet unrealized covenant promises. Out of faithfulness, they leave their home and all they know. There isn’t anything easy about the call placed on their lives by God. They wait and wait on God to fulfill what has been promised. A lifetime of struggles — both with God and with other people. Laughter and tears. Anticipation and unexpected joy. Challenge. Growth. Heartache. Thrilling moments. Unexpected turns. But definitely not comfort and ease.
It seems to me that it would be worth questioning any call of God on your life that keeps you perfectly comfortable, completely safe and doing exactly what you want to do all the time. Those who assent to God’s covenant promises, those who get into business with God, can count on being uncomfortable.
Promises within the covenant community
One of the reasons that any response to God might make us uncomfortable is because it is going to bind us to other people — and perhaps not the people we would choose. We live in covenant relationship with one another as a community of believers. That plays out in small communities of Christians that we work with, day in and day out. Being in covenant relationship with God and one another is about promises. It’s about promises made and kept. It’s about promises broken and forgiven, and begun again. It’s about the way those promises form us into the people that we are, and it’s about the way we can rely on those promises when everything around us seems to give way.
Ultimately, it is the case that we are in covenant relationship with every part of the Christian community, throughout all time and space. Because we are united with Christ, we are united with one another. We are bound to one another through the covenant God has made with us. As far back as God’s covenant with Abraham, we see that God was not so much interested in creating lots of individual covenants with individual people with individual futures, but a covenant with a people with a shared future. “I will be your God and you will be my people.” That is: All of you together will be my people. Not “you will be one of my people, and you will be one of my people and you will be one of my people.” We are joined together as one people, one body, because we are joined together in this covenant that God has made with us. We are God’s people, together. Sometimes that seems like good news, sometimes it does not. We, as the people of God, embarrass one another. Sometimes we hurt one another. But at our best, we love, support, serve and care for one another.
We are called to those things that represent us at our best. This is the ethical dimension to covenant. We can’t escape it. Because we are bound to one another, our lives are intertwined with one another. Many of us have become aware during the COVID-19 crisis that the way we are bound to one another can be illustrated by considering our own health. It has become more evident than ever that even our own health is not a personal, individual issue. How we take care of our own individual health has an impact on those around us and has an impact on our shared future — with regard to the spread of disease and the use of resources, which sometimes become scarce. It has become abundantly clear during this time that we are inextricably bound to one another in our families, our communities and even globally with regard to health — and so our own health as well as the health of others is shared responsibility. We are bound to one another in so many ways: consider the spread of disease, mitigating the spread of disease, protecting the most vulnerable among us and maintaining our resources. We are responsible to one another, as we live in covenant community with one another.
Promises remembered
When the Israelites had nearly ceased their wandering and had all crossed over the Jordan River and made it safely to the other side, 12 men, one from each tribe, chose stones from the river, and set them up as a memorial at Gilgal. Joshua told them that these stones would be a memorial forever, a jumping off point for conversation, so to speak, so that “when your children ask you in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’” they would know what story to tell (Joshua 4:6).
The baptismal font in our sanctuary is heavy. It’s made of stone — marble, actually. I think about that, too, when I think about the fact that it was given in memory of a child who drowned. I think about her parents, and I think about the day in the early 1930s when they gave that baptismal font as a gift to the church, a memorial gift, and how it was set up as a remembrance by them. And I try to imagine what they were thinking and feeling. That perhaps they understood that God had brought them to the other side, through the waters. I can only imagine what they were feeling when, on the same Sunday that they gave the gift of the font to the church, they also decided that their second child, an infant son, would be baptized in that same font. Despite the tragedy they had endured, they still trusted in God’s covenant promises enough to assent to them again. And I imagine that they understood exactly what God promised, and what God never had: that God had never promised that water wasn’t dangerous. That God had never promised that this world would not be scary and heartbreaking. But that they trusted that God claimed their small daughter. And that God claimed them. That in life and death we belong to God. And so, we can trust in those same covenant promises — that God claims each one of us. “You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism, and marked as Christ’s own forever.”
Erin Kesterson Bowers is associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church in High Point, North Carolina. She lives in High Point with her two daughters and her husband, who is a United Methodist pastor. She enjoys traveling, all kinds of theater and performing arts, and reading.
