Easter Vigil, Saturday, March 26, 2016 | 8:00 p.m.

Remembrance of Baptism

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

A version of this story was first published in the Christian Century in June 2011.

Many years ago, I was a member of a different Fourth Presbyterian Church, in South Boston. That was the church were I reconnected with the faith of my childhood after having been distant from Christianity for many years.

One Sunday, the pastor announced that we would be celebrating a reaffirmation of baptism the following week. In preparation, he encouraged us to talk to people who had been present at our baptisms, especially if we were baptized as infants and couldn’t remember our own baptisms.

So I called my mom and asked her to tell me about my baptism. She said, “I don’t think you were baptized.”

“Oh!” I said back to her. “Well, could you check with Dad? It’s kind of important.”

She went and talked with him while I waited on the phone. “No,” she said, when she got back on the line, “he doesn’t think you were either.”

Well, that was news to me! In retrospect that makes sense to me. When I was a child I went to a Baptist church and they don’t baptize infants. They wait until you’re a little older. But I never thought of that. I just assumed I had been baptized.

So I talked to the pastor about it and did a little research and learned that in the early church there started to be something called the Easter Vigil.

During Lent, people who wanted to be baptized would study and go through their preparations, so that on the night of the Easter Vigil they would be baptized, symbolically entering into the death of Jesus by being immersed under water, and then rising out of the water, joining Jesus in his rising, in his resurrection.

I loved the symbolism of the full immersion, but you can’t really do that in a Presbyterian church.

In my studying about the ancient traditions, I learned that another method of baptism in the early church was for the one being baptized to kneel and a pitcher of water was poured over their head.

We thought we could pull that off in this Presbyterian church back in Boston.

So the pastor borrowed his kids’ one-foot-deep kiddie pool and brought it in to the church from home. The carpet was red, so I bought a matching red velvety blanket and we covered the pool, turning it into a big baptismal font.

Here I knelt at the moment of my baptism. As is traditional, I was baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with liturgy wrapped around the words, to expand our representation of who God is.

First, I was baptized in the name of God, whom Jesus called Father. The pastor poured water on my head. It flowed around my ears and trickled down my face and neck.

Then I was baptized in the name of Christ, whom God called Son. A little more water was poured on my head, and it began seeping down in my clothing—white—the traditional color for the occasion.

Then I was baptized in the name of the Holy Spirit, who nourishes and sustains us. And the pastor began to pour the rest of that pitcher of water on my head! It just kept coming. It flattened my hair, pouring over my face, got into the edges of my mouth, running over my shoulders. All my clothing got soaked.

I had not anticipated this gushing and abundant water! I was surprised to the point of hilarity, and I giggled. My eyes were closed, but I heard the congregation like you, tittering.

But laughing got the water in my mouth and nose, and it just kept coming! And I wondered, can I drown here?

A wave of fear passed over me as the water kept coming, but I willed myself to calm down.

Finally the water stopped, and I was helped up. I was wrapped in a big white towel and wiped my face and squished my hair and patted myself dry a little bit. But I was drenched.

Then it was my turn to sing. In that church it was our tradition that anyone who was old enough to sing at their baptism sang this: “I have decided to follow Jesus. I have decided to follow Jesus. I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back. No turning back.”

And so I began singing, looking out at the faces of this congregation that had welcomed me and loved me into this reconnection with the faith of my childhood and had brought me to this moment of baptism.

I knew that in baptism—whether it was done with a sprinkle of water or that pitcher of water—in baptism I was being embraced into community, not just this one but a community of people following God in the way of Jesus that stretched back into history and on into the future.

It included this Fourth Presbyterian Church, too, though I didn’t know it at the time. In baptism we are embraced by a tremendous cloud of witnesses, and we become part of that cloud ourselves.

I had thought about all that before my baptism and talked to the pastor about it. And as I sang that song, I looked up toward the vaulted ceiling of the church and felt all that open space. It seemed to reflect the enormity and openness of God.

Overcome by the magnitude of what was happening, my voice began to tremble a little and it started to crack as I sang.

And I found out that the congregation was right there with me. When my voice broke and grew weak, they began to hum the melody. They came in under me, lifting me up, supporting me, and I felt as though they had physically grabbed my elbows and put pillows around me to keep me from falling.

That was so amazing to me that I completely choked up and couldn’t sing at all. I could only cry. And again the community was there, and they put words to their humming and my crying. They sang: “We have decided to follow Jesus. We have decided to follow Jesus. We have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back. No turning back.”

They sang for me when I couldn’t sing. They sang when I felt overwhelmed by the vastness of God and my own smallness. They sang when I felt daunted by this idea of following Jesus.

They sang while my sense of aloneness was broken by their strong presence with me. They sang while I healed, right in front of them, and after a while, I could sing again.

That is what we do for each other. That is what it means to be the body of Christ and to be baptized into that body by the Holy Spirit of a Creator God.

We sing for each other.

It doesn’t require a pitcher of water. Only a few sprinkles will do the trick. Amen.