What Are You Immersed In?

In a recent service at the First United Methodist Church of Barnesville, Georgia, Pastor Cyndi McDonald led us to remember our baptism. At the end of the service, she invited us to dip our hands in the water in the baptismal font as a way of doing so.

During her excellent sermon, Pastor Cyndi explained that Methodists baptize in three ways: sprinkling (which requires just a little water), pouring (which requires more water), and immersion (which requires a lot of water).

I’m a lifelong Baptist who often attends a Methodist church and often preaches in Presbyterian (PCUSA) churches. I used to be Southern Baptist, but now I identity with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I’ve often said that I was Baptist before I was Christian. A few of you will know what a Cradle Roll is. It was a big deal back in 1958 when I came along. When babies were born into a Baptist church, they were placed on the Cradle Roll, which meant they were enrolled in Sunday School. I can’t prove it, but I suspect someone was standing in the delivery room at the Lamar County Maternity Shelter to sign me up the second I entered the world. My mother would have wanted it that way.

When Reverend Bill Coleman baptized me one Sunday night in 1966 (along with others, including my friend Debbie Smith Haywood and my distant cousins Bruce Swatts and Rudy Knight), it was by immersion, which is a fancy word for dunking. There’s a scene in the 1970 film Little Big Man in which a frontier preacher holds Dustin Hoffman’s character under the water for so long that he almost drowns. Preacher Bill didn’t do that to me, but he did dunk me thoroughly.

Whenever I participate in a service in which we remember our baptism, I remember my first one. I was doing some continuing education at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. During worship, we were invited to remember our baptism. I think I was the only Baptist among a bunch of Presbyterians and other Protestants. One of the Presbyterian ministers asked me what I as a Baptist thought about putting my fingers in the water to remember my baptism. I replied, “I found it very meaningful, but I did have to fight off the urge to jump into the bowl.”

I find it helpful to remember my baptism. It’s encouraging to remember the warm water enfolding me. I realize better now than I did then (and if I didn’t after the passing of fifty-three years, how sad would that be?) what the act symbolizes: I have been buried with Christ and raised to new life in him.

What does it mean to be immersed in the death and resurrection of Christ? What does it mean to be buried with him and to be raised to new life in him?

Surely it means that we are immersed in the love, mercy, and grace that Jesus embodied. Surely it means that we live in faith and in hope. Surely it means that we practice acceptance and inclusion.

I don’t know what to think when I encounter baptized folks whose lives indicate that they are immersed in fear, in despair, in hate, in anger, and in prejudice. I don’t know Christ that way, and I don’t understand how someone can follow Christ in those ways.

Don’t hear me wrong. No Christian fully follows Jesus all the time. We stumble and fall. We sin and fail. But surely we should always be growing toward living in the way our baptism points us toward.

The water of baptism dries, but the effects of baptism continue.

I hope my fellow believers and I will continue to grow in practicing Christ’s love, grace, mercy, faith, and hope.

A Broader Perspective

1968 was a tough year. The Vietnam War was raging. Assassins struck down Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy. Riots tore apart major American cities. The divisions between people were sharp.

But something happened at the end of that year that showed us something we really needed to know. And many of us watched it on television.

I was ten years old, sitting on the floor in front of our nineteen-inch black and white television set in the little den of the little house on Memorial Drive. I joined millions of other people in watching the images of the moon’s surface being beamed to Earth by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. I listened as the three explorers— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—read the opening verses of the creation poem found in the first chapter of the biblical book ofGenesis.

It was—and I am very selective in how I use this word—awesome.

As Apollo 8 took its ten trips around the moon, Astronaut Bill Anders took many photographs of the moon’s surface to help identify possible landing sites for future lunar missions. On one of the craft’s revolutions around the moon, Earth came into view. As it did, Anders took several shots of it. One of those pictures has become iconic. The photograph, with its image of a blue globe rising over the bleak lunar landscape against the blackness of space, is known as “Earthrise.”

The astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were the first human beings to travel to the moon and back and to see the far side of the moon. In an essay written for space.com on the occasion of the fiftiethanniversary of their Christmas Eve 1968 experience, Anders reflected on the Earth that he and his fellow astronauts saw from their lunar orbit:

The Earth we saw rising over the battered grey lunar surface was small and delicate, a magnificent spot of color in the vast blackness of space. Once-distant places appeared inseparably close. Borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious-but-fragile sphere.

Anders went on to say,

Fifty years later, "Earthrise"—the lingering imprint of our mission—stands sentinel. It still reminds us that distance and borders and division are merely a matter of perspective. We are all linked in a joined human enterprise; we are bound to a planet we all must share. We are all, together, stewards of this fragile treasure.

We had never seen Earth from the perspective of astronauts orbiting the moon. We had never had the privilege of seeing it as a unified whole rather than in its constituent parts.

Fifty years later, I’m afraid we’ve forgotten that we’re all in this together. I’m afraid we’ve failed to remember that all human beings share responsibility for this planet. I’m afraid that we seldom think, talk, and act as if there is more that unites us than divides us.

In the 1996 film Independence Day, aliens launch a devastating attack on Earth. Eventually, forces from all over the world band together to carry out a counterattack. Former foes join to fight against a common enemy in order to save humankind.

I know that the divisions in our world—and even in our nation—are deep. But I believe that we need to come together to combat our common enemies. The list of those enemies is long, but I’ll mention just two: climate change and poverty. Both of these crises drive and will continue to drive the problems of war, famine, and mass migration that beset our world.

 I realize that our perspective tends to be narrow: we focus on our nation, our state, our community, and our family. But I want to call your attention back to the perspective the Apollo 8 astronauts gave us. Let’s adopt a broader perspective.

We all live on this planet. We’re all in this together. We need to work together for the sake of all humanity.