The Agony and Ecstasy of Baptism
Text: John 3:3-6
I am well aware that this sermon should never be long – yet I hope that it may be an important one to be shared, as I’m hoping to invite us to the agony and ecstasy of reinterpreting baptism from a feminist perspective.
First, why the agony of Baptism? Baptism has always been a sheer joy for me. It is a beautiful holy sacrament in which little ones, youth and adults are touched by the water which symbolizes our rebirth. It is also a beautiful act both to watch and witness and to officiate. The best one in my life, I would say, was the one when my son was baptized by the hands of my husband, witnessed by the congregation who loved us dearly, and by the water that expresses the inner conversion of everyone outwardly. Water sustains every being and changes everything. Min-Goo wore a stole that was woven with strips of cloth that represented the Korean traditional sacred five colours, (show it) and wrapped our son in the five colours of the stole as he completed the ancient and contemporary demonstration of welcoming an individual to the body of Christ. Baptism had never been an agony for me, until I encountered the article: The Agony and Ecstasy of Baptism by Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, who introduced herself as “a card-carrying feminist theologian, Baptist minister mama.” It was published in Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine, this month. Natalie writes about giving birth to her daughter Georgia; In her own words, “Georgia arrived vulnerable to this world on a cold December night in a downtown Toronto Hospital. And she arrived vulnerable to the life of faith on a hot September morning in a downtown Toronto church.” In her writing, she offers her honest and authentic struggle about bringing her daughter to the baptism font “Because the formal liturgy required solely masculine naming for the Divine.” She continues, “My daughter’s entry to the church necessitated the erasure of her birth from a woman, to instead be re-birthed by a Father, Son, and at best, non-gendered but usually masculine – Spirit.”
Her description led me to a very important reflection - I’ve had several inner conversions in my spiritual journey, and this reflection sparked another inner conversion that transformed me – That only when we surpass the ‘normalization’ of masculine naming for the Divine and the thinking that it is ‘natural’, can we appreciate baptism with an agony-free joy.
In our practice, at UCiM, we baptize with the Riverside formula: “We baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.We immediately injected “One God, Mother of us all” inside the traditional formula, yet we are not yet completely free from the call to share the agony of Natalie’s and the hundreds of female and male feminist theologians and followers of Christ who want, who need change. Patriarchy, by definition, is a system of distributing power in society that hierarchically ascribes importance to all things male and masculine over all things female and feminine.
I still remember a mother in my last congregation telling me that she adopted a girl child in China. The parents put great effort into insuring that their daughter grew up with great confidence in her identity. She was baptized at church and her family actively participated in church life. She attended a Christian private school. Her mother shared her agony with me. Her daughter, in grade 4, was asking a lot of questions, and insisted on finding a convincing answer about why we always call God He in church. It is the default descriptor, even in the United Church -“He, He, He.” God, He. Son, He. the Holy Spirit, He. All is masculine. This little girl, this smart child, never had the chance to hear the opposite. (To be inclusive, we choose to refer to God as God, avoiding using the gendered pronoun, but do we use the female gendered pronoun with freedom or apprehension when we talk about God, the Cosmic Christ, the Holy Spirit?) God being locked into one gender had long been an agony for this girl. When we only exercise the masculine naming for God, the Christ, the Holy Spirit and do not feel really comfortable with the alternatives, it is not just about the naming. It confirms that we, even though we call ourselves progressive, are still carrying the trace of the masculine-dominant world, and not really challenging our own inheritance of patriarchy.
The struggle against the deeply rooted patriarchy of the church and baptism that is still enmeshed in the social hierarchy of gender calls us to share the agony. It is agony. Natalie says, “Yes, I struggled with the idea of baptizing her into a worldwide communion of Christianity that in various insidious ways was going to teach her over the course of a lifetime that as a girl she matters less, or that would draw the lines around its capacities to celebrate whomever she loves based on her and their gender.”
I sense that the conclusion (destination) of this reflection is not guilt or depression. Deeply and honestly engaging with this agony invites us to the ecstasy of Baptism. Baptism is not only the continuation of the tradition, bridging the generations; it is also the resistance, the call to cut off the sins of previous generations. Originally, it was created as a form of resistance to Roman Imperialism and the stratified religion of Jesus’ time. It was a resistance to coercion and exclusivism. Jesus adapted the baptism of John to mean that everyone must be “re-born” by the baptism of water and the Spirit. The greatest character of water and the Spirit is equalization. Everyone needs water to sustain their life; the Spirit does not leave any body unchanged.
I have always been interested in feminist thought, mostly in my life outside church. Yet, I haven’t really dared to insist upon God’s inclusive vision to challenge our own patriarchy of the church, through intention and action. I now realize that we need to carry that insistence inside the church now, more than ever before! We can do it - it is the easiest time ever in history. We live in a North American society which is proud of the highest representation of women’s status in the world. I am not insisting that the feminine renaming of God will be the one solution to disempower the Patriarchy. My invitation for our reflection today is that we, the bearers of God’s vision, have not yet gone far enough to fundamentally challenge the patriarchal, religious foundation of our own Christian faith. God is yet to be re-born in the true realization of the ecstasy of Baptism; let our newly baptized Blaine, Brooklyn, and Hana be the forerunners for the future of all in Ecstasy.
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