The Mystery of Baptism

Today we’re celebrating the Baptism of our Lord. This is one of the major feast days in our church year, and it’s not hard to see why. In our scripture and our liturgy, we remember Jesus taking part in what would become the quintessential act of Christian faith and life. Foremost among the sacraments, Baptism is many things for us. It is the rite of initiation into the Body of Christ and into a particular worshiping community. Baptism is a commitment, whether personal or on behalf of a child, to the life of discipleship. Baptism signifies the forgiveness of our sins, because in it, we are symbolically participating in the death and resurrection of Christ.

But all of this important symbolism has taken the Church generations to articulate. Back in the first century CE when Jesus met John at the Jordan river, the concept of baptism was still new, and our Gospel passage today is marked by confusion. John doesn’t understand why Jesus would need the rite of Baptism, or how a sinner like himself could be worthy of baptizing the Messiah. And of course, ideas like forgiveness of sin and discipleship were pretty fuzzy, because Christ’s ministry had not yet truly begun.

2000 years and a lot of literature later, we have a lot more to say about Baptism. But take it from the person who had to write a sermon about it, there’s still a lot of confusion. What actually happens to a person during Baptism? How is life different afterwards? What draws people to it? Come to think of it, we could ask these same questions about most of the sacraments. It seems that the Baptism of our Lord is frank reminder that regardless of how Christianity has matured over the centuries, the sacraments, at their core, are simply our best attempts at expressing the mystery of the Divine life.

Well, strange as it may seem, when it comes to sacramental theology, there’s no one I trust more than Flannery O’Connor. The master of Southern Gothic literature, O’Connor is known for her absurd characters and gruesome tales that always feel remarkably familiar to those of us born and raised in the American South. One of my favorite images of baptism comes from her short story, “The River.” It’s the story of a young boy who spends a day with his babysitter and ends up getting baptized in a river by a traveling preacher. I’ll share with you a brief excerpt.


“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked. “What’s that?” he murmured. “If I Baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?” “Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river. “You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.”

The young boy’s response to the preacher always makes me smile. His mistaken belief that the Kingdom of Christ is under the water is endearing and comical. And his excitement to get away from life as he knows it and begin a new life in the Kingdom is a sensation we can all relate to. But even more compelling than the boy’s charming and poignant misunderstanding of baptism, is O’Connor’s deep and thorough understanding of it.

O’Connor’s faith was lived out in every single story she wrote, and for her, the crux of Christian life as well as the heart of any story, is the uncanny embrace of the mystery of the Divine. In a lecture about her own faith and work, O’Connor wrote that,

“[She] often ask[ed] [her]self what makes a story work… and [she] decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be the one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery… In “The River,” it is the child’s peculiar desire to find the kingdom of Christ… None of these things can be predicted. They represent the working of grace for the characters.”



I don’t know if O’Connor meant for this lecture to outline her sacramental theology, but she says it better than I ever could. In a few moments, we will baptize Raymond into the kingdom of Christ. It will be unlike any other action in his life. It will be both in character for him and beyond character. It will suggest both the world and eternity. It could not have been predicted. It will represent the working of grace in his life.

Of course, all the other things that the Church has come to understand about Baptism will also be true. It will be Raymond’s initiation into this family. It will mark the beginning of his life of discipleship. It will signify the forgiveness of his sins. But at it’s core, the sacrament of Baptism, which we will all participate in today, is about the unexplainable, irresistible, mysterious pull towards the Kingdom that Raymond can no longer ignore.

We’ve all felt it; even those of us baptized as infants know the tug of the Spirit which can scarcely be put into words, that is unlike anything else in our story, that is totally right and totally unexpected. This uncanny draw to the divine that we experience in the desire to be baptized, the desire to enter the Kingdom, is one of God’s greatest gifts. Even for folks like me who usually prefer answers to mystery, the beauty of the sacraments, and especially Baptism, can scarcely be denied.

And so, like the young boy in O’Connor’s story, we dive in. We get wet. We embrace the strangeness of this Christian life that is unlike anything else we’ve ever known, totally unexpected and yet totally right. We participate in sacraments that suggest both the world and eternity. We accept the gift of God’s grace working in us.

So thank you to Raymond for letting us share in this wonderful experience. And thanks to this feast of the Baptism of our Lord for reminding us that we belong to this community, that we have committed to lives of discipleship, and that our sins are forgiven. And most especially, for reminding us of the glorious mystery of the Divine life. Amen.