BEING CHRISTIAN - BAPTISM - Part 5

"In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh has been put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through your faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead."

(Colossians 2:11-12)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus

In the series, 'Being Christian' I am trying to share with you the activities that signify a Christian essence in the life of the faithful and what kind of people we might hope to become in a community where these activities are practices. With this hope in mind, we started with the most important sacrament (or a rite) by which an individual is brought to the Christian family - the Baptism.

Dear brethren, let us first recap on the last few blogs on what we covered on baptism and the deep thoughts the church associated with one of the important sacraments by which an individual was brought towards Christ Jesus. We started by understanding that baptism does not confer a special status on the baptized that marks them off from everybody else, but leads in claiming a new level of solidarity with everyone else. Just as Jesus was brought into the middle of human sufferings on a very intimate level, so also are the baptized brought into the midst of human chaos and are also those who go with Jesus into the risk and darkness. The baptized person finds not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle but also in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We also tried to understand that from this unique relationship, the prayer of the baptized people is a prayer that is always moving in the depths, sometimes invisibly and from places that we can seldom understand. Continuing on, let us try to understand why and how the path of the baptized person though a dangerous path is also called the path of life.

All the changes that we tried to understand in the life of a baptized person are all results from the upsurging life of the Spirit in the center of ones being, coming from the heart of God. The path is both a dangerous and life-giving for me as an individual believer - but not only for me. The other great truth about baptism is that it brings us not only in the proximity with God the Father, not only with the suffering and muddle of the human world, but with all those other people who are invited there as well. Baptism brings us into the neighborhood of other Christians; and there is no way of being a Christian without being in the neighborhood of other Christians. (It might seem like bad news for many, because other Christians can be so very difficult!) But that is what the New Testament tells us very uncompromisingly: to be with Jesus is to be where human suffering and pain are found and it is also to be with other human beings who are invited to be with Jesus. And that, says the New Testament, is a gift as well as sometimes a struggle and even an embarrassment.

It is a gift because in this community of baptized people we receive life from others' prayer and love, and we give the prayer and love that others need. We are caught up in a great economy of giving and exchanging. The solidarity that baptism brings us into, the solidarity with suffering, is a solidarity with one another as well. It is what some Christian writers have called 'co-inherence'. We are 'implicated' in one anther, our lives are interwoven. What affects one Christian affects all, what affects all affects each one. And, whether as individual Christians or as individual Christian groups and denominations, we often find that hard to believe and accept. We find it hard to accept it as a gift - yet a gift is what it is. It means that the darkness that belongs in the baptized life is never one own problem exclusively. It is shared: how it is shared is very mysterious, and yet most of us who are baptized Christians can witness in one way or another to the fact that it works.

So baptism restores a human identity that has been forgotten or overlaid. Baptism takes us to where Jesus is. It takes us therefore into closer neighbourhood with a dark and fallen world, and it takes us closer neighbourhood with others invited there. The baptized life is characterized by solidarity with those in need, and sharing with all others who believe. And it is characterized by prayerful life that courageously keeps going, even when things are difficult and uncompromising and unrewarding, simply because we cannot stop the urge to pray. Something keeps coming alive in you; never mind the results.

Through the following blogs we will try to understand the roles that are bestowed on us with baptism that we share with Christ Jesus. In the meantime, do keep me and my family in your prayers.

The blog is based on the book - "Being Christian" by Rowan Williams

BEING CHRISTIAN - BAPTISM - Part 4

"In Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh has been put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised with Him through your faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead."

(Colossians 2:11-12)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus

In the series, 'Being Christian' I am trying to share with you the activities that signify a Christian essence in the life of the faithful and what kind of people we might hope to become in a community where these activities are practices. With this hope in mind, we started with the most important sacrament (or a rite) by which an individual is brought to the Christian family - the Baptism.

In the previous blog we tried to understand that just as Jesus was acknowledged in the waters of Jordan as God's son, we too are given an opportunity to be acknowledged as God sons & daughters by becoming recipients of the Holy Spirit. And in so opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, we also are to open up to the needs and requirements of the people around us. We who are baptized are to be found in the middle of the love that God has for us and in the middle of the human suffering showing to the world Gods love for them as well. The baptized person is not only in the middle of human suffering and muddle but also in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That surely is one of the most extraordinary mysteries of being Christian. 

Growing out of this blessing - to be in the middle of the heart of God and being in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain, the prayer of baptized people is going to be a prayer that is always moving in the depths, sometimes invisible - a prayer that comes from places deeper than we can really understand. St. Paul says just this in his letter to the Romans: "The Spirit helps us in our weakness... that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26). The prayer of the baptized people is never just 'rattling off' the words at surface level. The prayer of baptized people comes from a place deeper that we can penetrate with our minds or even our feelings. Prayer in the baptized community surges up from the depths of God's own life. Or, to change the metaphor, we might say that we are carried along on a tide deeper than ourselves, welling from God's depths and the world's.

The prayer of baptized people is always growing and moving into the prayer of Jesus himself and therefore it is a prayer that may often be difficult and mysterious. It will not always be cheerful and clear, and it may not always feel as though it is going to be answered. Christians do not pray expecting to get what they ask for in any simple sense. Rather, Christians pray because they have to, because the Spirit is surging up inside them. Prayer, in other words, is more like sneezing - there comes a point where you cant's not do it. The Holy Spirit wells and surges up towards God the Father. But because of this there will be moments when, precisely because you can't help yourself, it can feel dark and unrewarding, deeply puzzling, hard to speak about.

That might be the reason why so many great Christian writers on the spiritual life have emphasized that prayer is not about feeling good. It is not abut results, or about being pleased with yourself; it is just what God does in you when you are close to Jesus. And that of course means that the path of the baptized person is a dangerous one. To be baptized is not to be in what the world thinks of as a safe place. Jesus' first disciples discovered that in the Gospels and his disciples have gone on discovering ever since.

It is a great privilege to know and learn about people who live in dangerous proximity to Jesus; where their witness means they are a risk in various ways. And when we get to know people in places like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria or Pakistan living both in the neighborhood of Jesus and in the neighborhood of great danger, we understand something of what commitment to the Christian life means, the commitment of which baptism is the sign. But we also see this when we look at the lives of the great saints whose path of contemplation has led them to deep inner desolation, loneliness and uncertainty. All this results from the upsurging  life of the Spirit in the center of our being, coming from the heart of God. Like the saints before us, we tread a dangerous path - which is also the path to life.

Stay tuned for more on the path of life in the following blog.

In the meantime, do keep me and my family in your prayers.

The blog is based on the book - "Being Christian" by Rowan Williams