Interrupted by God. Tracey Lind

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 may be compared to an hourglass—when the past and the future meet in the present; when all the cosmic energy of the universe focuses upon one individual and proclaims: you are a child of God; you are the culmination of the past, the power of the present, and the hope for the future. In that moment, Siah was the reason we had come together; on that Sunday morning, she held the past in her hand and the future in her heart.

      In Jesus’ baptism by John, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven proclaiming, “You are my Son; the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22). When Jesus was baptized, all the cosmic energy, all the God-stuff of the universe came together and descended upon him: firm and clear, yet gentle like a dove. When Jesus was baptized, I imagine that his ancestors in faith—Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah, Moses and Miriam, Joshua, Naomi and Ruth, Jesse, Eli, Hannah, Samuel, David, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Micah, Jonah, Ezra, Esther, Zachariah, and all those who came before in the name of God—all stood and witnessed this event by River Jordan. For in that moment, Jesus was the whole reason they had existed at all.

      Throughout the centuries, as individuals have been presented to Christ at the font of baptism, this family lineage we call the apostolic succession—the hand that touched the hand that touched the hand—has grown and expanded across oceans and deserts, through fields and forests, on slave ships, in prisons, and in courtrooms. In the waters of baptism, generations have been drowned and raised to new life, marked with the invisible, yet permanent, brand of the cross. In this sacrament of new birth, generations have affirmed an ancient and yet living covenant to be one with God and one with neighbor, saying “yes” to righteousness and “no” to injustice. In this act of initiation, generations have passed from the chains of bondage to the mantle of freedom. And whenever and wherever baptism takes place, the significance of this action, the power of this sacrament, is the same. God says, “I will have you as my own; you will be my beloved; and I will send Jesus, my anointed one, to be your guide and teacher.” And we respond saying, “I will have you as my own; you will be my God; and I will follow Jesus, your anointed one, as my guide and teacher, my Lord and Savior.”

      As I held Siah and looked into her eyes, and those of her parents, I saw the future. Preparing to wash a small and helpless infant with the waters of baptism and to anoint her with the oil of chrism (an act which she would not even remember), I exclaimed that perhaps I was baptizing a future president of Liberia. Every Liberian immigrant and every other immigrant in a church filled with immigrants from all over the world smiled, applauded, and proclaimed, “Amen.”

      On that January morning, during an ordinary Epiphany service, in an Episcopal Church in Paterson, New Jersey, one congregation and its rector realized the promise of the incarnation. Through the baptism of Jamelle Siah Phillips, we came to understand that, “in every child who is born under no matter what circumstances and of no matter what parents, the [potential] of the human race is born again.”³