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If you ever find yourself on the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City, stop in to see the baptismal font at St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Not long ago, a small group of tourists went for a visit. We were astonished by what we saw.

The font is off to the left, by the main entrance into the sanctuary. That in itself is appropriate, for baptism is the entry into the Christian life. We are brought into the church when we are baptized, so the people in St. Peter's put the font right by the door.

But this particular baptismal font is unlike anything we had ever seen. It is a large deep pool. It's elevated, about chest high as I remember. A casual visitor might confuse it for a hot tub, large enough for three or four people. But there are no spa jets inside, and the water, as I touched it, was quite chilly.

I asked the pastor of that church, "How do baptisms get done at St. Peter's Lutheran?"

"Just like anywhere else," he replied.

"Do people get dunked in the Lutheran church?"

He answered, "Some do. Others stand outside the font, and water is sprinkled on their heads."

"The most important thing," he added, "is that, however we do the baptism, sprinkling or dunking, we have to use enough water to kill people."

Like a lot of ministers, I have been accused of using a lot of water when I baptize people. Sometimes the benediction is barely over, the baptismal family reassembles for pictures, and the sexton is standing close at hand with a mop. In fact, in my first church after seminary, I tried to be generous with the water whenever it was time to baptize. Once I took a pitcher of water and dumped it on the head of some unsuspecting child. The mother was shocked, and thought I was trying to drown her son.

Theologically speaking, I was.

Paul says, "We die when we are baptized." Whether you remember your baptism or not, you died at the baptismal font. That is one of the keys to what it means to be a Christian.

Most of the time in this church, we baptize little children. We don't often know what to expect. The baby could start screaming (and we've had a couple of those), or the baby could coo and smile. Either way, the cuteness factor is pretty high. We also have the tradition of walking the infant down the aisle and introducing her or him into the household of God. Nobody has ever frowned when that happens. Usually most of us are melting into a brief moment of proxy parenthood.

But Paul reminds us that something deeper is going on. At the moment of baptism, we are so deeply united with Christ that we are "buried" with him. Our entire life up to that point has been finished off, and now something new begins. Christian baptism is not a ceremony on anybody's social calendar. It is not a predictable little ritual at a certain time in a person's life. At its deepest meaning, baptism is the event when we are marked as clearly as a Jewish child being circumcised. Life is going to be different from that day forward.

In one of her short stories, Flannery O'Connor tells about a four--year--old boy named Harry Ashfield. He lives in an apartment with parents who neglect him. Their lives are more concerned with drinking, partying, and recovering from hangovers. A cleaning lady takes young Harry to hear a preacher down by the river. Harry has never heard anything like that preacher. As the preacher stands hip deep in the river, he speaks about Jesus and a kingdom of God where every child is safe. Little Harry starts paying attention.

"Hey, preacher," cries out Mrs. Connin, the cleaning lady. "I'm keeping a boy from town today. I don't think he has ever been baptized."

The preacher says, "Bring him over to me." Turning to Harry, he adds, "Have you ever been baptized?"

Harry asks what that means. The preacher says, "If I baptize you, you'll be able to go to the kingdom of Christ. You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you'll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?"

That sounded pretty good to Harry. He wouldn't have to return to the neglect of his parent's apartment.

"You won't be the same again," the preacher said. "You'll count." And he takes the boy, swings him upside down, and plunges him into the water. The child comes up, gasping for air. Then the preacher says, "You count now."

At the end of the day, Mrs. Connin takes Harry home. Everything is different for him now. He wants no part of his parents' parties. He is no longer comfortable being cooped up in their apartment while they ignore him. All he wants is to go back down to the river, where he can jump in and go looking for the kingdom of Christ.1

Paul says, "The old life dies when we get baptized." All our sins are killed off through Christ's death. All our destructiveness is destroyed. Everything that kept us from the joy and freedom of the gospel is now loosed, and we are free to live in the love of Jesus Christ. Provided, of course, that we let the old life die.

In a book on leadership, Garry Wills writes about Harriet Tubman, the remarkable slave woman who led African slaves to freedom by way of the Underground Railroad. That invisible railroad came through these parts, and some of the whistle stops were in eastern Pennsylvania.

Here is a remarkable detail about her. When Harriet Tubman was a teenager, she tried to stop the beating of a fellow worker. Her master hit her on the head, and the blow broke her skull. Harriet lingered near death for weeks. For the rest of her life she suffered from occasional catatonic spells due to the injury. But the injury also set her free.

As Wills notes, "The blow that cracked Tubman's skull struck off her psychic chains. She had already died once; she had nothing to lose."2

Ever notice? Sometimes people can have an experience when they were as good as dead. When they emerge, everything is fresh and new. They are not bound and held captive as they once were. In a very real sense, life begins after something has died.

Paul says that this experience lies at the heart of the Christian life. For a couple of chapters, he has been arguing on behalf of grace. As he continues to remind us, God saves us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are made righteous, not by our own righteous deeds, but by the righteous work of Christ's sacrificial love. In the cross of Jesus, God has forgiven us even before we knew we needed to be forgiven. The grace of God surrounds us. We can't earn it; we can only trust it and welcome its power in our lives.

Not a bad deal, says the critic. We sin and God forgives. If that's true, we can keep sinning and God will keep forgiving. In fact, we can do something really, really bad, and God will let us off the hook.

But Paul says, "No!" Baptized people must not keep sinning, because they have passed out of a life of sin. Look at what happened: The old you was drowned in the baptismal font. Now you are a new creation, raised to live a new life. All the powers that hurt and destroy don't have any dominion over you.

A man was talking to me about his gambling problem. It started small: the football pool, a few lottery tickets. Before he knew it, he was taking grocery money and losing it in the slot machines in Atlantic City. Then it got worse. He confessed, "I lost my job, I lost my house. I lost everything and everybody dear to me. I sank so low that I wanted to lose my life. Then I realized I already had lost that life. Everything was gone, and I couldn't pretend otherwise. That was the day when my life began to turn around."

That may sound harsh. Some of us would like to coast along and get by on our own steam. Sure, we get into a little trouble now and then. Everybody does. Most of the time we merely recalibrate the carburetor, without ever getting a whole new engine. We don't allow any interruptions to affect our schedule, our pocketbook, or what we do after dark. Paul sounds rather blunt when he claims that we cannot live unless the old life has died.

But then again, some people are lifted right out of the dust, because they were willing to let go of the wreckage they once suffered.

I was talking with a woman in the hospital. She was there because she lost her gall bladder. But what she wanted to talk about was losing her life. "I married a man when I was twenty," she said, "and my son was born six months later. Shortly after that, my husband drove off and never came back. I didn't know if I would ever make it." But she did. Forty years later, she says that ending became her beginning. A whole new life began when it looked like she reached the end of the road.

From time to time, we lose jobs. We give up routines. We watch our children grow up and move away. We change addresses. We lose marriages. We mourn loved ones. All of these losses are real, and hurtful - and all of them are also reminders that we cannot completely become Christian until we say, "Good--bye" to the old ways.

Remember that poem by T. S. Eliot? It's an Epiphany poem called "The Gift of the Magi." One of the three Wise Men reflects on seeing the newborn Christ child, and he says, "Were we led all that way for birth or death? There was a birth, certainly ... I shall be glad of another death."3

It is a curious line. In Christ, death looks like birth. When Jesus is born, the whole world is silently, secretly, changed. Because of the child in that manger, because of the things he has said and done, everything is different. So Eliot puts those words on a Magi's lips, confessing that he is "no longer at ease in the old dispensation."

Paul says, "Don't you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life."

Now, look. According to our church calendar, we are scheduled to baptize a little girl in two weeks. She is a precious little child of God. I am sure she is going to smile at you and win you over. She is a precious gift of God who is being raised by her loving parents. Two Sundays from today, a lot of people are going to be thrilled and delighted when she is baptized.

I have only one request to make. After we baptize her, would somebody please tell her what she has gotten herself into?


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1. Flannery O'Connor; "The River," A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 44.

2. Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 41.

3. T. S. Eliot, "The Gift of the Magi," Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964), p. 98.