This is Keith, and this is Ben, and this is main street Lutherans. Today we're going to talk about another sacrament. We already talked about communion. Today we're going to talk about baptism. So, Keith, let's do a sacrament recap. You know, we talked before about what sacraments were, but somebody complained that maybe we got it wrong. So let's see if we can do it wrong again.

At least we'll be consistent.

That's right.

Or maybe we'll be wrong in a completely different way. Who knows?

Let's hope.

Yeah. So at the time when Luther and Melanchon and their peers were teaching and writing and wrestling with all of this, they weren't seeking to add any sacraments, but they did seek to define them in a particular way, which led them to narrowing the number of sacraments from.

The church of the time, which would have been the Roman Catholic Church now.

Right. Had seven sacraments. And I will struggle if I try to name them all, so I won't. They did include communion and baptism. The definition that Luther came up with is that a sacrament is something that is commanded by Jesus. In the Gospels, it is connected to an earthly component, an earthly element, something that you can touch and taste and see, and it has a covenant attached to it, a promise. And so by that definition, especially the earthly element piece, we come down to the two sacraments of baptism and holy communion. And the ElCa's practices, as in a practical way, are outlined in a document that we've talked about before, called the use of the means of grace. And I think we've got a link to that in the show notes we do.

When you're looking for baptism in particular, it starts on page 19, but that's just the title. Page 20 starts with the meat. It includes things like, it should be done by a pastor, it should be done in community, that sort of stuff. Not our theological thoughts on it, but the practical what should be done and how should it be done.

Yeah, and there are some exceptions to all of those things, too, and we'll even talk about a few of those later on.

Absolutely.

So what's baptism for then?

According to the know, as a christian church generally, right. It's answering God's call. Jesus says to go baptize all nations, right. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so that is what baptism is for us. It's bringing people into the family of God. I think that's generally what the Christian Church, we can say that all christian denominations that do baptisms, that's what we agree on. Roman Catholic Church has a more precise definition to that. I'm not really acquainted with that. Protestants in general have sort of a looser definition to it, but we all baptize in the name of the triune God. That's what we hold in common there.

Yeah. And that baptism sort of initiates us into the family of the.

And, you know, if we talk about Luther, the way I perceive it anyway, and you can correct me on this, is that our baptism links us up, gives us the kernel of faith. I think of it like a corn seed or something, that the baptism gives us that initial faith that God then feeds us with through the church, with in particular communion, that, that grows our faith, that helps nurture our.

Yeah, yeah. And we also talk about it as the place where. I don't like the expression where we receive the Holy Spirit, because that somehow makes it sound like, know didn't have it before. But we talk about baptism as being sort of the theological root of our understanding that God works through us, in the world around us, and the lives of the people around us. And the Holy Spirit and our own spiritual giftedness is kind of the language that we use to talk about that. And we do indeed link that with the sacrament of baptism, and it links.

Us to Jesus death.

Yeah. So it makes our rebirth. Yeah. It makes that promise, which is a very general. It's kind of like I heard it described once, as taking the very general statement that God loves all people, which is certainly true. And in that specific moment, it's God saying, and I love you, you child, that is currently being baptized. So it takes that very general promise, which again, is completely true, and makes it very personal, very specific to that person. We talked about the ways of the means of grace a little bit. But one of the questions that comes up in various conversations about baptism is the appropriate age to be baptized. Some traditions practice what might get referred to as a believer's baptism, but it's really a baptism where they are able to make that choice for themselves and say, I want to be baptized. And so in some traditions, that happens at various ages, might be twelve, might be 16, might be older than that. So of course, babies can't make choices other than, no, I'm not going to eat that. People say, well, why is it then you've got an infant that will not ever remember anything about this, that has nothing to say in whether it is happening or not? Why is it appropriate to baptize them? And the answer is simply because they are God's beloved child, and that's why it's appropriate to baptize them. And there is scriptural support for the practice. In the book of acts, there are stories of someone having a dramatic conversion experience as an adult, and they are baptized, and so is their entire household with them, which would include, presumably, the children. And again, practically speaking, it's a part of that understanding that it's not only that we make this choice at a particular age, but that we are as parents, we're equipping our child to make that choice as they grow, make that choice over and over again, to be a part of the church, to be a part of the body of Christ. And so we're saying that this child is being baptized in the context of a christian community and in the context of a christian family, with the parents being given the responsibility of helping to raise that child in the faith along with the resources that the church provides to raise that child in the faith. So, practically speaking, that's why we feel it is appropriate to baptize infants in particular. Not to say that we don't baptize older children and teenagers and adults and old people as well.

Yeah, I think the use of the means of grace specifies that anybody can be baptized, that we like to baptize babies. I think our congregations like to baptize babies in particular. It's always fun.

Yeah. The moving things that I've seen sometimes are when you've got two generations of a family being baptized together, maybe it's a parent and an infant who's just been born, or maybe it's a parent and a teenager or an older child being baptized at the same time. That's a really powerful experience.

So functionally, when we baptize, I think most churches do a sprinkle.

Is that what you do in the lutheran church? Predominantly, yeah. So you would have what can amount to a very small amount of water, and it's just scooped either with the pastor's hand or sometimes with a seashell in certain communities and just sort of poured lightly over the head of the person being baptized. I've seen baptismal fonts in lutheran churches that would allow for what we call immersion or submersion, but they're not terribly common at the church that I serve. The font bowl itself would probably hold, I don't know, maybe three gallons of water, but they actually put a little dish in the bottom of it that holds, like, literally a cup, like six or 8oz of water. And that's it. That's what we use for the baptism, curiously.

Does it have a plug so you can empty it from the bottom.

No, that's exactly why they use the dish in the bottom of it, because otherwise you'd have to bail it all out with a sponge or a bucket or something.

Yeah, that would be. Now, is the water, holy water? Is it blessed ahead of time?

No, it's really just the water out of the tap. There's nothing special about it. And so you can be baptized at a church, you can be baptized in a creek, you can be baptized in a pool. It would all be the same.

We don't have any special disposal issues with it then, right?

No, not the way we think about communion. Because I think because water is water, and in our understanding of what water is and where it goes when we're finished using it.

Yeah. Water isn't Jesus himself.

Right. There is a prayer at the time of baptism that speaks about the power of water, especially the power of water in scripture and all these places where it appears. It usually makes reference to things like the flood, crossing of the Red Sea, crossing of the Jordan. Jesus'own know and just the significance of water for sustaining life. It really is as close and intimate an experience of God in terms of God is what keeps us alive. Water is every bit as powerful as communion in that regard. It's not only the things that we drink and the things that we eat. It's also just water itself is so critical to our human bodies and all of creation. So that prayer kind of acknowledges that it sort of ties us to that understanding of water and our own rich history in the hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. But no, the water itself is not blessed. No, not even in the way that we would talk about the prayer that happens at communion. It's just a different kind of understanding. Okay.

Now, as far as, if I look at the use of the means of grace, it says that the baptism should be within the community, so it should be in the sanctuary with all the people not hidden away. There's a church, I've been in the baptismal font, it's for submersion, is back behind a wall in the front of the church, but there's a wall, and so they go back behind there. Interestingly, that church, and this will identify it to anybody who knows about it. There's a towel with Tony Stewart on it, because Tony Stewart was raised in that. So, so it's the Tony Stewart baptismal font to me. But, so that's different from what we believe. But there are times and places where we might baptize people away from that right. So we might baptize people if they are nearing death, if there's trauma.

Yeah, absolutely. There are certainly occasions, particularly when you've got a baby who is born with complications or health issues. Actually, let me put a pin in that, though, to say this. Baptism isn't what saves us. Jesus saves us. And I firmly believe that. And I firmly believe that there is no distinction in God's eyes between the baptized and the unbaptized, whether they are a person of faith, of any faith, or not. But in addition to what we've already said about the significance of baptism in the life of the church, there's also the significance of baptism in the eyes, especially of parents for their children. I can share a story. When I was on my CPE, which is like the chaplaincy training that pastors in our tradition and others frequently do, part of their seminary education, I was chaplain at a hospital for a stint through the summer. And while I was there, there was a woman who was actually currently incarcerated in the local prison system. But because she had been convicted while she was pregnant, she came to deliver baby. And so she had come to the hospital where I was at. She's under guard. I'm chatting with her as she's lying in her hospital bed with one hand handcuffed to the rail. She was pregnant with twins and one of the twins, and she was not terribly far along. I don't recall. This was 20 some years ago, but I'm going to guess that she was maybe halfway through term. I don't even think that far. And so she had learned that one of her twins was developing better than the other, neither of them great. And so there was a chance that one of the twins was very sick and was not going to survive the term. And so she had learned that, and that she was going into sort of a partial delivery, partial labor. And so she was told that if she delivered this one very sick, very premature baby, that her second twin may have a chance of coming to term and surviving. And so she made the very hard decision to basically intentionally have a stillbirth. So in talking with her before she actually went through this procedure, she asked me about having her baby baptized, and we both knew that her baby was not going to be alive for more than a few seconds, if at all, after it was delivered. Theologically speaking, it wasn't really necessary, or even, I'll use the word appropriate for me to baptize her child. But pastorally speaking, it was the right thing to do. And so I did, with the help of one of the nursing staff providing some sterile water and some towels. I was present with her while she birthed this baby. It was only the second birth I'd ever watched, the first having been my older child. And then almost immediately, as soon as the doctors were able to cut the umbilical cord and hand this little, tiny, tiny, tiny infant over, I baptized the baby and passed them over to the mom. And so, yeah, sometimes there are occasions where baptisms happen outside of the worshiping community. There are also, even more rarely, occasions where it's not a pastor who does the baptizing. In our theological tradition, just like holy communion, the strong preference for structure and order in the church is that clergy, pastors, specifically ministers of word and sacrament, are the ones who preside over the sacraments of baptism and communion. But in sort of emergency circumstances, perhaps like the one that I just described, if I as a pastor had not been present, someone else could have performed that baptism, probably not in that specific circumstance with the questionability of the appropriateness. But if a baby was being born that was definitely going to be alive, but perhaps not for more than a few days or a week, depending on circumstances and location, yeah, it would be okay for somebody else to do that baptism.

Yeah, that sort of bridges us over to, can baptisms be done wrong? And there are a couple of places where we get into that. First one is that people who convert to Lutheranism, if you convert from Methodist, you convert from Presbyterian, from not going to, we're not going to redo a baptism. You're baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so that baptism is the baptism. The Latter day Saints, the Mormons are probably the biggest group that might convert to Lutheranism that we would baptize. We wouldn't consider rebaptism because their baptisms in that church are in the name of Jesus Christ alone and their understanding of that is different than ours. And so we would baptize those folks if they convert. But the idea of re baptism brought up in my mind. What if somebody doesn't feel like they recognize the person they were when they were baptized initially, either as a baby or as an adult? How do we address that with those folks?

Yeah, this comes up every once in a while, especially when you've got someone who perhaps was baptized as an infant or at least very young, and they'll say something along the lines of, I know that I was baptized when I was a child, and they're always trying to demure away from, and it's like it didn't mean anything at the time. But they'll say I was baptized when I was an infant, but now I've done this, I'm making a new start. I'm no longer an alcoholic. I'm getting divorced from a terrible relationship. And I'm starting over in life in a new way, whatever it might be. And they'll say, and I want to be baptized again. And that's a tough pastoral conversation to have because in that case, again, it's really inappropriate to baptize someone over again. And my usual response is something like, but what happens the next time? The next time there's this transformational moment in your life? Are you going to want to be baptized again?

And that's kind of a bleed over of this common understanding of common, I would say, misunderstanding of Christianity and Protestantism. That you can be born again again. Right. That you have a second baptism in some ideas.

It also misses the link that exists between baptism and communion, where the promises of baptism communion are so integrally connected that you really can't talk about one or experience one without the other. So I say rather than being re baptized, go up to the altar rail again, take the. It's the fresh start that we get every, you know.

Well, and Luther would say that know commemorates his baptism every time he takes a shower. Right. Yeah, we have that message.

Yeah. That we remember our baptism was the wording you like to use every time we say we're sorry, every time we confess our sins, every time we receive communion, every time we wake up and wash our face and start afresh. Yeah, it's a returning to that first fresh start that we had in baptism because the reality is that we have fresh starts with every breath.

So what about somebody who doesn't know if they were baptized as a child?

Yeah, that's a good one. I'd say if they do know that they grew up in the church, let's say I know that I grew up in a lutheran church or a methodist church, I'd say, well, it was very likely that you were baptized then and.

We'D contact their church to confirm it if we could.

Yeah, if they knew where that church was and what it was named. Yeah, we could certainly call them and ask them. Most churches are pretty good about keeping those records. I remember when my wife and I got married. I forget exactly why, but I contacted the church that she was baptized in, which was a catholic church in Ohio, to find out the date. I think that was it. I think she wanted to know the date of her baptism so that it could go into the records that she was joining my congregation because we were getting married. Yeah. But if somebody says, well, I grew up in a baptist church and I know I wasn't baptized because they would have done that when I was like 14 or 15, and I didn't, then we would baptize. But I guess you're right. If it's a real question mark and we don't have any way to confirm it, I'd probably pastorally err on the side of comforting them by just doing the baptism. Yeah, I think.

Very good.

So we've got the case of the invalid baptism. This is fascinating.

Yeah. So we're looking at 2022 in the ancient times.

There was something going on that year. I can't remember what.

Roman catholic priest in California is discovered, and they'd actually uncovered priests in other cities that had done this too. But this one's the one that made the news. And I'll share a link to this in the notes, an NPR article on it. So priest baptize people with one word incorrect. And you would think that that would know, like, say, jesus instead of Jesus Christ or the patriarch instead of father or something like. But no, instead of saying, I baptize you, he said, we baptize you. And the Roman Catholic Church, probably the cardinal, maybe the bishop of that area, invalidated all the baptisms, and they estimate that that was maybe a thousand baptisms that invalidated because of that. I would imagine that that's just crazy. And so, first of all, would this happen in the ELCA?

No, I can't imagine. How would you even track those people down to tell them that their baptism wasn't. Can't either. I can't fathom. So, no, I can't think that this could happen in the ElCA. I just don't think that we're got. Because our understanding of grace even. We talked about this, I think in our communion episode a little bit, that even if the priest messes up the words or drops the bread partway through, that, the efficacy of the priest does not undermine the efficacy of the sacrament. Something like that. I think that would be true in this case also. Now, that being said, we sometimes get into conversations about as people, rightly so, question the use of patriarchal language, even in baptism, with an understanding of God. And we name God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. When I was in seminary, people had asked the question, is it valid to baptize in the name of the creator, redeemer, and sanctifier, or the God who made us the God who saves us and the God who sustains us. Or something sustains us. Yeah. The short answer, because of the ecumenical relationships that we have with some other faith traditions, is no, because they don't recognize those baptisms. They specify that baptisms have to be done in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so if we're going to remain in good standing with those other traditions, we do that as well. Even if, and I don't think the Lutheran Church has ever said we might consider other wording, but even if we might consider other know, I think that we would not do that. There is an alternative in the liturgy that we use. You can ask, or you can say, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Or so. And so the person's name is baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And I tend to choose that second route simply because I think that it takes the emphasis off of me as the pastor involved in the baptism and puts it on God. Takes it off of the personal choice, too. It's not the parents doing this. It's God. Yeah.

Now, I don't want to delay us getting to why everybody listens to the show, which the catechism questions, but the one last thing on this. So the folks that had their baptisms invalidated by the Roman Catholic Church, would we consider giving them a fresh baptism?

I should say, truthfully, I have no idea. But as I've been thinking about this because we were talking about this a little before we started the show, I suspect that, again, both pastorally for them as real, living, breathing people, and even sort of theologically, as far as our understanding of the church goes and those ecumenical relationships, if the catholic church that we are aligned with does not recognize their previous baptisms, then perhaps we would seek to baptize those people. But I guess maybe we could offer.

To affirm their baptism.

Well, yeah. And I guess I'm wondering what effect does this statement that their baptism is invalidated by their denomination? What effect does it have on them personally? And that's where the pastoral part of the conversation comes into play. Like, are they traumatized by this? And they're like, oh, my goodness, I need to be re baptized. That is a different kind of conversation than. I don't care what you say about my baptism. It was valid. Yeah. But again, structurally, as far as what the Elca would say, I have not a clue how to handle that one. Yeah.

Well, all right, so now catechism question.

Yes. You've all been waiting for.

Yes. So last week's question was, when Luther told his parents he was going to become a monk, they were a angry they wasted all that money on his college education b angry he wasted his life and his talent c angry he wouldn't be able to take care of them in their old age and d all of the above. And the answer is all the above.

They were not pleased for this episode's question, based on that reference that Ben made about Jesus commanding us to baptize all nations. We've got this question that Jesus in Matthew 28 20. So there's your cliff notes. Cheat. If you wanted to look this up before answering, you could.

You might need to.

Yeah. RSV or Jesus promised his followers, a I will be back next Tuesday. I'll be back yes. B, I will miss you c, I will make you financially better off or D, I will be with you always.

And there's not an all the above.

There is not. So it's one of those four answers back next Tuesday. I'll miss you, make you financial good. Or off. Or be with you. Yeah. All right.

Send your answers in. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fote. You can reach us at [email protected] also our [email protected], or on the socials. We're at Main Street Lutherans on Facebook, Instagram threads and now YouTube. The show is hosted and produced by Folk Media Productions. Until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.