Romans Rabbit Trail #2 -- Drowning into Life
This coming Sunday's reading is Romans 6:1b-11. The passage includes Paul's theology of baptism, which is stunning in its starkness. For Paul, to be baptized is not simply to enter the water and have one's sins "washed away". The only cure for souls under the power of sin is to die -- and baptism is a sacramental death.
We are squeamish about death. So we have attempted tame baptism.
After all, in a tradition that baptizes infants, how can we possibly talk about death when the candidates we baptize are so often at the very beginning of what we all hope will be long and fruitful lives? Further, when baptismal fonts more closely resemble birdbaths than burial grounds, how can the impact of the action be fully experienced?
In spite of the robustness of the language in The Book of Common Prayer at the Thanksgiving over the Water (p. 306), we all know that the few ounces of water dribbled over the head of a young child pose no real threat of drowning...so let's take a few pictures for the family scrapbook, talk about how beautiful the service was and move on to brunch.
Paul would have nothing to do with sentimentalizing this sign of identification with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Baptism drowns our old life and raises us to the new life of faith.
This morning, reading Barth's discussion of these verses in his Epistle to the Romans, I read a few sentences that flooded me again with the gravity of baptism:
Your baptism is nothing less than grace clutching you by the throat: a grace-full throttling, by which your sin is submerged in order that you may remain under grace. Come thus to your baptism. Give yourself up to be drowned in baptism and killed by the mercy of your dear God...This death is grace. (p. 194)
This coming Sunday's reading is Romans 6:1b-11. The passage includes Paul's theology of baptism, which is stunning in its starkness. For Paul, to be baptized is not simply to enter the water and have one's sins "washed away". The only cure for souls under the power of sin is to die -- and baptism is a sacramental death.
We are squeamish about death. So we have attempted tame baptism.
After all, in a tradition that baptizes infants, how can we possibly talk about death when the candidates we baptize are so often at the very beginning of what we all hope will be long and fruitful lives? Further, when baptismal fonts more closely resemble birdbaths than burial grounds, how can the impact of the action be fully experienced?
In spite of the robustness of the language in The Book of Common Prayer at the Thanksgiving over the Water (p. 306), we all know that the few ounces of water dribbled over the head of a young child pose no real threat of drowning...so let's take a few pictures for the family scrapbook, talk about how beautiful the service was and move on to brunch.
Paul would have nothing to do with sentimentalizing this sign of identification with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Baptism drowns our old life and raises us to the new life of faith.
This morning, reading Barth's discussion of these verses in his Epistle to the Romans, I read a few sentences that flooded me again with the gravity of baptism:
Your baptism is nothing less than grace clutching you by the throat: a grace-full throttling, by which your sin is submerged in order that you may remain under grace. Come thus to your baptism. Give yourself up to be drowned in baptism and killed by the mercy of your dear God...This death is grace. (p. 194)
posted by FrGaryB | 5:43 AM
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