Dunking and Being Dunked

"Going under symbolizes the end of everything about your life that is less-than-human. Coming up again symbolizes the beginning in you of something strange and new and hopeful. You can breathe again."
- Frederick Buechner on "Baptism"

There we were, a bunch of white-gowned seminary students, sandled or bare-footed, loitering at the main steps of the Student Life Center pool. Our professor, Dr. Price, also clad in the traditional baptizing gown, was preparing to take us carefully through the process of performing what is certainly the strangest sacrament of the Church, though not at all meaningless. In the SLC, the pool is an odd conglomeration of tile and cement. It is no discernable shape, but instead made up of different areas, including a few slightly-less-than-olympic-sized lap lanes, an open area next to a water basketball goal, a higher-set hot tub, a lazy river, and a large, spiraling water slide. As I entered the pool area, I joked that the use of a water slide in baptism might just be what the "church of tomorrow" needs. I could see it all right then: Extreme Baptism: Take the Plunge ... into Jesus! Youth ministers would suddenly have no problem getting kids to join the church. At age fourteen I was baptized, and I definitely would have been open to water-sliding into the sacrament. After all, there is not much else you can do to make Baptism more silly than it already is, at least as it appears on the surface.

It was the oddest of feelings, standing there in the three-foot high water, taking turns dunking my fellow students. We could not help but laugh as we were again and again welcomed into the Church. For the two or three lap swimmers across the pool area, there couldn't have been anything more absurd to behold as they surfaced from the water and removed their goggles. Yet, even as we laughed and made light of this practice, it was inspiring. Most of the students from this class will one day find themselves standing in a baptistry - or a creek or river - reaching out their hand, welcoming a brother or sister into the water. They will watch them tense at the first sensation at the temperature, shrug their shoulders as they descend into the pool as if they need to keep the water from soaking their torso too quickly, nervously fold their arms and hold their nose, and then these fellow students will guide the people under the water. They will raise them up, dripping and wiping their faces, and there is something wonderful in this act for both the baptized and the baptizer - a cleansing of both minister and congregant.

What is the appearance of this act, but the strange, ritualistic dunking of a person underwater? Sometimes they struggle to regain footing, sometimes the water splashes over the side onto the choir, sometimes there is sputtering and coughing - it is the most comic scene the Church regularly enacts. If you, in witnessing a baptism, are not at least quietly chuckling, just a little bit, you're missing something of the wonderful absurdity of the sacraments.

What is the meaning of this act? As Frederick Buechner wrote, that which is less-than-human within us is symbolically being put to death - buried; drowned if you will. When a person rises from the waters, they are, as the pastor in the home church of my childhood used to say, "raised to walk in newness of life." I have taught others the cute phrase that baptism is "an outward expression of an inward decision" and that is true, but there is much more to this. There is something very human and very holy in the practice of it. If it is only a declaration to a church body of the repentance you have professed, it is no more meaningful than if you set up a flannel board in front of the altar and walked the congregation through the steps you took to become a Christian. "First I knelt beside my bed, as you can see here ... then I folded my hands ... then I bowed my head and said, O God ..."
The sacrament of Baptism is a metaphor, and the most meaningful teachings and practices of the Church are done in metaphor. The understanding of God as father, of Christ as king, of the solemnity of the bread as flesh and the wine as blood, of the front of the stage as the "altar" at which to kneel and pray ... It is all wrapped up in metaphor. It is something that holds meaning beyond what our five senses report to us. The life of a Christian is a mess of failings and praisings, of penitence and patience. It is the story of a creature sick with humanity finding rehabilitation in that which is holy. It is as absurd a condition as what we gaze upon when a person is dunked under the water of a baptistry. That does not render it any less true - any less necessary. Baptism is the moment out of our lives when we can, in our limited human minds, recognize in a single, wonderful act this extended experience of redemption.

That old life left behind, you come up sputtering, sniffing, maybe even choking a little bit, but the air is fresh and you can fill your lungs anew and wipe your eyes and see clearly, and there are smiling faces and applause and those gathered before you begin singing a song that, even as your ears unclog, still sounds like touchable grace. There is that inkling that you have never been more home than you are at that moment. You take the loving hand offered you and step out of the water to walk in newness of life.