Baptism

These are the questions that were asked at my baptism:

These are not easy questions.

Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin? 

Have you looked at your heart and considered the darkness there? Have you spent time with your spirit and seen the parts of it that you'd rather no one else saw? Have you thought back through your history and reckoned with the pain that you have brought to others, intentionally and unintentionally? Because that's the work that you need to do in order to say that you're renouncing the spiritual forces of wickedness and rejecting the evil powers of this world and repenting of your sin. You have to know and acknowledge that racism exists and that you are racist and you have to decide that you don't want to be that way anymore. You have to know and acknowledge that sexism exists and that you've been effected by it and you have to reject it. You have to know and acknowledge that homophobia exists and that you've participated in it and you have to choose to fight against it. You have to know and acknowledge all the ways that you fear people who are different from you in mind, body, and spirit, and you have to investigate all the ways that fear has harmed others and you have to put it away from yourself. You have to recognize that we have idolized money and comfort and that we have welcomed the evil, dehumanizing powers of this world into our hearts in order to obtain and maintain our money and our comfort.

Greed. Hate. Apathy. Fear. Grasping desire. Do you renounce them?

Racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Transphobia. Ableism. Ageism. Colorism. Xenophobia. Nationalism. Consumerism. Do you reject them?

And do you repent?

That's the hard one, the one that requires work from you. You probably know much of the personal pain you've caused in your life, how deep it goes, how much you meant it. Have you acknowledged it? Have you apologized for it? Have you endeavored to become someone who would never do something like that again? Have you tried to understand those who you've hurt? Have you tried to make amends? Have you done the most that you can to heal what you've broken?

And as you've done your soul-searching, you've probably become aware that the evil powers of this world have had a hold on you and that you need to turn away from them. Are you grieved by the times that you made a black joke, or a Mexican joke, or a Jewish joke? Do you mourn the times someone said something horrible and you stayed silent? Is your heart broken by the wrongs you overlooked? Are you deeply troubled by the way you've used and misused the world around you, the people, the environment? Do you actively choose to live life differently, to speak kindly and to speak out, to consume carefully and gently?

Do you, in fact, repent of your sins?

Because until you've done these things, until you have looked at the evil in your heart and the evil in the world and the evil in your history and said, "This should not be," and reject it from your heart and guard against it in your world and mourn it in your history, you carry evil with you and big or small, it will break us all into pieces. Before you claim to follow Christ, you have to hear in your spirit and enact in your life the first sermon he ever preached: Repent.

Otherwise, you will find yourself standing on stolen land, blocking the way of a peacemaker with all of the evil in your heart on your face for everyone to see. Or worse, your children will.

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? 

Do you think we can do this? Do you think that we can actually fight this? Do you think that we can make society better for everyone who lives in it, not just for the wealthy or those in power? Do you think that we can learn to undo the damage we've done to the planet? Do you think that we can make our homes, schools, places of worship, community spaces, workspaces safe for everyone? Do you think that goodness and kindness and gentleness and love will change anything?

Or do you think that the best thing we can do is look out for us and ours just try to survive this?

I will admit that I have found the continual process of renouncing, rejecting, and repenting to be exhausting and heartbreaking. I have spent so much time and energy digging out the evil in my life that the idea of resisting it in the world around me is more than I can bear. There's too much poverty, too much pain, and too many systems set up to keep people in poverty and pain that resistance seems laughable. We are drowning under the weight of our disregard for our fellow human and our shared world. How can you resist when you can barely breathe?

This is why we need to be given freedom. This is why we need to be given power.

And honestly, at this point, I don't really care where you find freedom and power, as long as it's not in evil, injustice, or oppression. Does being in nature renew your spirit, give you life, make you feel connected to those around you, create a tenderness in your heart that fuels the fire in your protest? That's beautiful. Come join us.

Have you found deep meaning in your encounters with the people around you and the people who life has given the least to? Does joy shared between people bring light to your darkness and energy to your work against injustice? God, I'm so glad. Let's do this.

Do you gather in community with other people who understand the spiritual world the same way you do and do your prayers bring peace to your heart and enliven your soul? Do you sing songs together, or share meaningful words, or remind yourselves of who you are with rituals, and do those things renew you and prepare you for the fight ahead of us? Amen amen, my friend. May we journey together?

Have you realized how bad it's gotten? Are you tired of watching people get hurt? That's more than enough. Be free. Be strong. Come on.

As a Christian, I believe that the God of the Universe came down to Earth and lived and died so that we can be free from the evil that surrounds us. I believe that God is with us still, empowering us to fight for ourselves and to free others. I believe that we have not been abandoned, though it looks like that sometimes. Evil is great, but a light shone into the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. And so I am free from the things that have bound me, and I will be sustained in this fight, and good will endure while evil exhausts itself.

Professing that is one thing. Accepting it, believing it, bringing it into your heart and allowing it to do the work it needs to do, is another.

Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races? 

Here's the thing: I couldn't care less about the church right now. It is a human organization that has failed us again and again and baptized evil and welcomed it onto the membership roles. For a group of people whose first step together should be repentance, the church is horrible at it. It is awful at accountability. The church allows us to be comfortable and cowardly, to create theological justifications for slavery and sexism and homophobia and war and the prosperity that grows out of them. The church has disgusted me and I'm perpetually one step away from walking out the door and never looking back. The church hurts people and the church is apathetic about that.

The church needs to remember its baptism.

The church needs to answer these questions again.

Because if Jesus is our savior, no one else is.

If Jesus is our Lord, no one else is.

If we put our whole trust in his grace, we cannot put our trust in anything else.

No president, no party, no slogan, is worthy of our trust and our service. Jesus is. Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors and our enemies and ourselves. Jesus, who told us to care for the least of these like our lives depended on it. Jesus, who'd rather be nailed to a cross than take a human life. Jesus, who cared for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. Jesus is the one we should be following. Jesus is the one who will change us and empower us and through us change and empower others so that the world may know peace. God, it's hard to trust that.

These are not easy questions. Reject, accept, promise. We are asked to do astounding, impossible things in these questions.

But that doesn't mean we should stop answering them.