The rite of baptism is a snapshot of the transformation that God seeks to work in us throughout the rest of our Christian lives. In the Christian churches, the rite of baptism is both a rite of entry and an instrument of transformation. But because we are taught that baptism is a one-time act, we may not know how to use this rite fully as the formational help it is intended to be.
I’d like to suggest some ways we can experience our baptism again, intentionally, on a daily basis. As Martin Luther observed, our baptism—however long ago the event—offers “a garment which the disciple is to put on every day, each day putting the old person to death a little more and nurturing the new person toward maturity.”[1] By holding our own baptism regularly before our eyes, by returning again and again to its implications for our lives, we become more fully each day the new person who came to birth by water and the Spirit.
In the words of Michael Green, “the whole of the Christian life in time and in eternity is, in a sense, encapsulated in baptism. The Christian life is a baptismal life, and it is all about dying and rising with Christ, in this world and hereafter.”[2] The rite of baptism initiates us into this baptismal life. It sets out the contours of a transformational process that we are intentionally to engage each day.
In my own spiritual journey, both Scripture and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer have been equally formative for my understanding of the baptismal life. Scripture provides the primary images and expresses the essential significance of baptism; the liturgy (itself infused with Scripture and sound spiritual counsel) offers a means by which people can grab hold of that significance, begin to live it out, and return to in order to find help for the ongoing journey.
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[1] Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, tr. Robert H. Fischer. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959, 90, adapted.
[2] Michael Green, Baptism. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987, 50.
