The Matter of a River

My girls have asked me more than once whether people have to be baptized in a river. The answer, of course, is no. We have water at church. Clean water. Predictable water. Warmer water. Water that stays where we put it. All to say, there is something wonderfully unnecessary about baptizing people in a river.

A river is another matter. A river has already been somewhere before it reaches us, and when we step into it, it does not stop. It moves around our ankles, around our knees, around the bodies we lower into it, and then it keeps going in the direction it was headed. Perhaps that is part of why rivers have carried so much weight in the Christian imagination through the centuries. God's own life is like that. It has already been moving before we arrive, and it will still be moving when we leave. We step into something we did not begin.

This Sunday, when we gather for Church at the River and celebrate Holy Baptism, that is part of what I hope we will notice. Baptism is received rather than invented. It is our entry into something Christ has already entered before us.

And so it is with the waters of baptism. Baptism is what happens when the future of Jesus is spoken over an ordinary human life. We enter the water to be changed because Jesus Christ, the unchanging and eternal God made flesh, has entered the waters before us. When he stepped into the Jordan, creation received the touch of its Creator.  The waters became a place of blessing, burial, birth, and new creation.

This is one of the recurring mysteries of the Gospels. Water becomes wine. A few loaves and fishes become a feast. Mud opens blind eyes. A tomb opens onto life. Wherever Christ enters, creation becomes more than we thought it could be.

Ever since, Christians have stepped into the water trusting that what Christ has entered has become a place where human lives may be remade in him. That is why, in baptism, the Church speaks with such confidence. You belong to Christ. You have been buried with Christ. You are being raised with Christ. You have been brought into his Body. You have been given a future.

Before we baptize those gathered at the water, we pray over the water. Like all prayer, God returns to God through us, and through our prayers the water becomes sacramental: ordinary creation caught up in the promise and presence of God. And the same is true of us. Ordinary human lives, with all their joys and wounds, failures and hopes, are taken up into the life of Jesus.

This Sunday, some among us will step into the river and receive that promise in a visible, bodily way. The rest of us will stand nearby and remember that we too have been caught up in something larger than ourselves. The river was moving before we arrived. Grace was here before we were. And Christ is still making all things new.

I hope you will come and witness it.

For the heart of Christ and the good of his people,

Bliss+