“Here’s your angel child. He’s a boy.”
As the group stood quietly around the mattress, each with his or her own thoughts, Pearl’s child crept up to Becky and her infant. He leaned over them, kissed the baby on the cheek, and whispered in his ear, “I hope you find a place to live.”
Becky gazed at Bill smiling with tears in his eyes. She then looked up at Pearl and her child, Lisa, and all the people standing in the sacred circle. Quietly she asked, “What shall we name this baby?” Lisa smiled and said, “How about Jesu? And on that cold, winter night, in an abandoned house, in a poor city neighborhood, a child was born, a son was given, and his name was Jesús.
Becky and Bill are fictional characters. And yet, I meet them almost every day in my ministry. They come to our churches for food, shelter, clothing, and money and sometimes for prayer and counsel.
Lisa, on the other hand, was a real person. In December 1991, Lisa and her companion, Ivan, were homeless. Actually, they were living in an abandoned storage trailer in the parking lot of a factory across the street from my church. They both had been on the streets for some time, in and out of the shelter and jail systems, and they had become my friends. I had been trying to convince them to get off the streets and into permanent housing. I feared they wouldn’t survive the winter months. Each time we talked about it, they laughed and told me not to worry.
On Christmas Eve, I asked Lisa if she would like to be the angel in my Christmas message. In her excited manner, she was delighted. In appreciation, I gave Lisa and Ivan money to have a shower, a meal, a new set of clothes, and a bed for the night in the hotel across the street from the church. I then invited them to attend Christmas Eve services and hear the story.
As I rose to the pulpit that night, I saw Lisa and Ivan sitting in a pew in the middle of the nave. Both of them were freshly showered and wearing relatively clean clothes. When I first mentioned Lisa’s name in the sermon, her eyes lit up, and by the end of the story, she was grinning from ear to ear.
The next day, Lisa and Ivan were arrested for trespassing. Because of bench warrants, they were locked up in the county jail and had a warm place to sleep for the next several months. Maybe God was watching out for them. Both Lisa and Ivan have since died and are now real angels in heaven. I know they still love each other.
A Baptism to Remember | CLEVELAND, OHIO, 2001
A Baptism
to Remember
Before performing a baptism, the minister approached the young father and said solemnly, “Baptism is a serious step. Are you prepared for it?” “I think so,” the man replied. “My wife has made appetizers, and we have a caterer coming to provide plenty of cookies and cakes for all of our guests.” “I don’t mean that,” the minister responded. “I mean, are you spiritually prepared?” “Oh, sure,” came the reply. “I’ve got a keg of beer and a case of wine.”
This stupid pulpit joke makes a serious point. Many of us get our priorities confused when it comes to baptism. We often get caught up in the christening parties and the outfits, and we lose the real meaning of the sacrament into which we’re entering. We fail to remember the power of this liminal and formative experience.
How many of us remember our baptism? Do we recollect when or where we were baptized? Can we recount who witnessed this sacred event? Do we remember the priest or the minister who performed the baptism? Do we even recall the water being poured over our head and the invisible sign of the cross being engraved upon our forehead? Most of us probably answer “no” to these questions. We don’t remember our baptisms. Many of us were too young to remember since we were baptized as infants or toddlers, long before our conscious memories took shape.
Isn’t it a shame that we don’t remember this rite of passage, that we can’t recollect the promises made or the love offered on that very special day. In fact, most of us can’t recall whether we laughed, cried, screamed, smiled, or slept through one of the most important events of our entire life.
Our baptisms are worth remembering, even by reconstruction. Although the act of baptism lasts only a few minutes, and the baptismal party is over in a few hours, the incredible, divine love made visible in our baptism lasts forever. The love that welcomes, bathes, cleanses, redeems, and saves us is also a love that will sustain us all the days of our lives, even unto our deaths. Even though we might not remember the initiation of this love, it forever protects, envelops, and enfolds us. This love that gives meaning to our lives and the world around us is worth remembering.
Martin Luther, the great sixteenth-century reformer, believed that the sacrament or sign of baptism was quickly over, but the “spiritual baptism” lasts as long as we live and is completed only in our death.1 Therefore, Luther intentionally remembered his baptism every morning. When he washed his face he would say, “I am baptized.” It was a way of reminding himself that living out his baptism was a daily event.
Once a year, on the Sunday after the Epiphany, the church intentionally remembers Jesus’ baptism. On this feast day, we celebrate with baptisms and the renewal of our baptismal covenant. And it gives the preacher a good excuse for talking about the meaning of baptism.
One snowy January morning, I baptized Jamelle Siah Phillips, whose middle name means “firstborn girl.” Siah, as she came to be called, was the firstborn and American-born infant daughter of two Liberian immigrants in my Paterson congregation who were seeking political asylum in the United States for the duration of the Liberian civil war. Siah’s parents were bright young adults, descendants of slaves returned to West Africa after the American Civil War. They were the great grandchildren of the founders of Liberia. They had come to study in the United States with every intention of returning home to live, work, and raise their family. But circumstances changed, and while they were here, they got caught in the crossfire of war in Liberia and were unable to return home.
The night before Siah’s baptism, I saw the powerful, painful, and hopeful film, Amistad. The movie is based on a true story about a freedom mutiny on an African slave ship, and the ensuing trial that challenged the very foundation of our legal system by calling into question the basic right of freedom.
At one point in the drama, the leader of the slave revolt, Cinque, was preparing for trial with former President John Quincy Adams, who came out of retirement to fight for the Africans’ cause in the United States Supreme Court. They had an extraordinary conversation. John Adams said to Cinque: “We’re about to go into battle with a lion that’s threatening to rip this country apart. And all we have on our side is a rock. . . . The test ahead of us is an exceptionally difficult one.”
Through a translator, Cinque replied: “We won’t be going in there alone. My ancestors will be with us. I will call into the past . . . far back to the beginning of time. And I will beg them to come and help me. At the judgement, I will reach back and draw them to me. And they must come. For at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.”2
When I heard that line—I will call upon my ancestors, and they must come. For at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all—I received a new insight, a new understanding about baptism. Baptism is a sacred moment in time when God, the saints on earth, our ancestors, and all the company of heaven come together as a great cloud of cosmic and earthbound witnesses to welcome a new member into the community of faith, to claim kinship, to declare belonging.
Baptism
