Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

by Rowan Williams

Jesus speaks of the suffering and death that lies ahead of him as a ‘baptism’ he is going to endure (Mark 10.38).

from the very beginning, baptism as a ritual for joining the Christian community was associated with the idea of going down into the darkness of Jesus’ suffering and death, being ‘swamped’ by the reality of what Jesus endured.

The water and the Spirit and the voice: you can see why the early Christians began to associate the event of baptism with exactly that image which St Paul uses for the Christian life – new creation.

To be baptized is to recover the humanity that God first intended.

If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.

baptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need – but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.

Baptism is a ceremony in which we are washed, cleansed and re-created. It is also a ceremony in which we are pushed into the middle of a human situation that may hurt us, and that will not leave us untouched or unsullied.

We are in the middle of two things that seem quite contradictory: in the middle of the heart of God, the ecstatic joy of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and in the middle of a world of threat, suffering, sin and pain.

Christians pray because they have to, because the Spirit is surging up inside them.

Perhaps baptism really ought to have some health warnings attached to it: ‘If you take this step, if you go into these depths, it will be transfiguring, exhilarating, life-giving and very, very dangerous.’

much more a matter of the Church expressing and asking important and readily forgotten questions in our society.

The prophetic church

As baptized people, we are in the business of building bridges.

So the baptized life is a life that gives us the resource and strength to ask awkward but necessary questions of one another and of our world. It is a life that looks towards reconciliation, building bridges, repairing shattered relationships. It is a life that looks towards justice and liberty, the liberty to work together to make human life in society some kind of reflection of the wisdom and order and justice of God.

for the huge majority of Christians throughout the centuries, as well as for many today, the Bible is a book heard more than read.

Bible-reading is an essential part of the Christian life because Christian life is a listening life. Christians are people who expect to be spoken to by God.

But you soon discover that what the Bible is not is a single sequence of instructions, beginning ‘God says to you …’

The reality is that as soon as you think you know what the Bible is, you turn the page and it turns into something different.

Jesus in his teaching does not simply pronounce laws. Jesus tells stories.

So, with the parables, it will not help to focus on details in isolation. You need to let the whole thing work upon you.

Where are you in this?’

The question we are frequently asked by God of scripture.

One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’.

God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour.

And the Bible is not simply saying, ‘Here is a story’, but ‘Here is your story.’

Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, ‘What does God want to tell us?’

Here, in the story of Jesus, is the story in which we see what an unequivocal obedience and love look like. Here is the story where we see a response to God so full of integrity, so whole, that it reflects

perfectly the act of God that draws it out. Here is the story in which the speaking of God and the responding of human beings are bound together inseparably.

So reading the Bible is about listening to God in Jesus – which is what Christians ought to be doing in all circumstances anyway. It is letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside the story of

how God related to the ancient Israelites and the first Christian believers – letting the Holy Spirit bring you inside that story so that you recognize it as your story.

And developing and maturing in the reading of the Bible involves coming to recognize patterns of faithful and unfaithful response to God in the light of Jesus. That is what begins to happen when you make Christ the centre and focus of your prayerful reading.

we need to listen not only to what the Bible is saying, but to what it is saying to those around us and those in the past.

it is one of the crucially important things about the Church now: that we listen to one another reading the Bible.

In Holy

Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company.

Jesus sought out company, and the effect of his presence was to create a celebration, to bind people together.

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His way of welcoming Zacchaeus, and his way of welcoming

us, is to say, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to your home?’

when the risen Christ eats with the disciples it is not just a way of proving he is ‘really’ there; it is a way of saying that what Jesus did in creating a new community during his earthly life, he is doing now with the apostles in his risen life.

Holy Communion makes no sense at all if you do not believe in the

resurrection.

When we say thank you to God we connect our own experience with God as Giver. We say that what has happened to us is somehow rooted in the gift of God. And when Jesus gives thanks at that moment before the breaking and spilling, before the wounds and the blood, it is as if he is connecting the darkest places of human experience with God the Giver; as if he is saying that even in these dark places God continues to give, and therefore we must continue to give thanks.

If in every corner of experience God the Giver is still at work, then in every object we see and handle, in every situation we encounter, God the Giver is present and our reaction is shaped by this.

The Eucharist reminds us of the need for honest repentance –

of the need to confront our capacity to betray and forget the gift we have been given. And that is why the Eucharist is not, in Christian practice, a reward for good behaviour; it is the food we need to prevent ourselves from starving as a result of our own self-enclosure and self-absorption, our pride and our forgetfulness.

We take Holy Communion not because we are doing well, but because we are doing badly.

when we gather as God’s guests at God’s table, the Church becomes what it is meant to be – a community of strangers who have become guests together and are listening together to the invitation of God.

‘With you is the fountain of life’, says the psalm; and it is that fountain that we drink from in Holy Communion.

Growing in prayer

all Christian reflection, all theology worth the name, began as people realized that because of Jesus Christ they could talk to God in a different way.

The new way we talk to God is as Father, and that is the work of the Spirit of Jesus. And of course it is the prayer recorded of Jesus himself, the night before his death (Mark 14.36). So, for the Christian, to pray – before all else – is to let Jesus’ prayer happen in you.