Jesus longed for his Church to be united yet there are many issues, trivial and important, which divide it. One of those issues is baptism, which often causes disagreement among Christians.  For there are some churches which believe that children should be baptised, and others which say, “No, no, baptism is for older people who have come to their own place of faith”. Some churches baptise people at a font, with just a small amount of water, while others believe that the candidates should be completely submerged (although stories of Baptist Deacons examining the hair of a recently-baptised person to make sure that every strand has got wet are, as they say, “greatly exaggerated”!) And then there are various understandings of what baptism actually means: some traditions say that it washes a person from sin, gives them salvation or confers the Holy Spirit, while others say that it is nothing more than a public witness to faith, a symbol of something spiritual that has already taken place within a believer. I could go on, and indeed finding out what some ordinary Christians in my own Baptist tradition thought about it was the subject of my Master’s dissertation many years ago.

I’ve just said there are different understandings of baptism, and I’d like to spend a little time thinking how these came into being. We can start with the book of Acts and many of the New Testament letters, and notice that virtually all the Christians in those early days of our faith had started out in life with another religion such as Judaism, belief in the Greek or Roman gods, or something else, and then come to faith in Jesus. They were all what we might call “converts” or “first generation Christians” – their faith wasn’t something that had been handed down from their parents but something they had come to in adult life. In such circumstances – and one might think of the people who came to faith on the Day of Pentecost, or the Ethiopian official to whom Philip explained the book of Isaiah – “believers’ baptism” was clearly going to be the mark of entry into the Christian community.

However things changed as time passed. One was that – surprise, surprise! – Christians had children. Perhaps mindful of stories such as the one about the Philippian jailer, baptised with his entire household immediately after his dramatic conversion, parents must have started saying, “Should our children be baptised, based not on their own faith which has yet to develop, but on ours?” I have no real grounds that they did say that, but it seems plausible, especially if they started making mental connections with the Jewish rite of circumcision. If Jews circumcised their babies as a sign of inclusion within their religious community, shouldn’t Christians follow suit by baptising their babies to show that they are part of the Church?

I think that two other factors influenced this way of thinking. One was that Christianity changed from being the religion of a potentially seditious group of people who refused to worship the Roman Emperor, to being the Empire’s official religion. This basically meant that people who were loyal to Rome must be Christians; that being so, you’d have your children baptised. Here we have the rise of what I call “civic religion” and the blurring of Church and State which I think has been harmful to Christianity in many ways. That’s a topic for another day!

The other factor was the rise of belief in “original sin”, made popular by St Augustine in around 400AD. This holds that Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden is passed down to every successive generation, meaning that children are inherently sinful from the moment they are born and will be cast into hell, or what the Catholic church later called limbo, if they should die. As you can imagine, this was no laughing matter at a time when infant mortality was high and when Christians held a very literal view of hell. However it was believed that the Church could offer a remedy: baptism, which washed away that “original sin” and guaranteed the child’s eternal safety. We could go into this belief – which I incidentally think is one of the reasons why many Christians have a negative view of sex – but this isn’t the time to do so. I do hope that you can see how it made terrified and loving parents say, “I don’t my baby to go to hell, so I’ll get it baptised as quickly as possible”. So for all these reasons and, I’m sure, many more, infant or child baptism became normalised in the churches for many centuries. Indeed, even today, an “emergency Catholic baptism” can be carried out by anyone, not just a priest, if there’s fear that a sickly baby may not survive.

I’d like to turn now to believers’ baptism, often but not always by full immersion: I once baptised an arthritic lady who simply couldn’t get down the steps into the baptistry and had to be sprinkled with water instead, prompting some onlookers to question whether she was “really baptised” – she was! It’s clear that believers’ baptism was the norm in the earliest days of the Church; what isn’t so clear is how the practice arose. Yes, we have the story of John baptising people in the River Jordan, but that merely begs the question of where he had got it from! There is evidence that some converts to Judaism got baptised, but this mostly comes from after the time of Jesus, so it’s possible that the Jewish community was following what Christians were already doing, rather than the other way round. There’s also evidence that baptism was practised by the Qumran community which wrote the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. But, although scholars have often linked John the Baptist with this group of people, we can’t know for certain that he ever met or even knew about them.

Nevertheless, believers’ baptism does seem to have been the usual practise of the early Church and, as we heard a few weeks ago, Jesus before his return to heaven gave his disciples the instruction to go into “all the world”, teaching and baptising – which is quite strange as he never baptised anyone, nor asked them to be baptised. This command or mandate almost sounds like a bit of an afterthought on Jesus’ part – until, perhaps, we remember that the motley group of Jesus’ followers only really became the Church ten or so days later, at Pentecost. On that day no less than 3000 new believers were baptised and I want to ask, “How on earth did they do it?”

Let’s now return to child baptism which for many centuries was the normal across Europe, as it still is in many churches from Catholic and Orthodox to Anglican and even Presbyterian. I suspect that many people still held that lurking fear that, if their child were to die unbaptised, its soul would go to limbo. I think, too, that most folk linked their citizenship with Christianity– “I’m British, so of course I’m a Christian!” In this context having one’s child baptised was regarded as a naming ceremony and a welcome into society as much as a religious rite. Indeed, I suspect that folk might have looked on you askance if you decided not to bring your child for christening – for weren’t you failing in your Christian duty, wasn’t baptism the right thing for everyone to do?

Things are different today. Although we may feel sad that Britain is less religious than it once was, I’m actually quite pleased that infant baptism is no longer “the done thing”. I suspect that the vast majority of parents, like Rohan and Raveena, who bring their children for baptism today are sincere Christians who want to see those children following Jesus for themselves when they are older; and that’s no bad thing. It means that clergy don’t have to visit the homes of people who never set foot in church and try to explain what baptism is all about; it means that ministers don’t need to quash superstitious ideas that a child who’s not baptised won’t “thrive” or “do well”; it means that a christening is primarily a religious, rather than a social, occasion.

There is so much I could say about baptism, which I think is still too often misunderstood. My time has gone, but I do want to make a couple of quick points before I close. One is that baptism, however we view it, is a sign that someone is beginning a journey: in technical language it’s an “initiation rite”. The person being baptised may be a child at the start of their life, who will be nurtured by loving parents into an teenage or adult believer who will declare their faith through confirmation. Or they may be an older person who wants to make a public declaration of their new-found faith. But, for both, baptism is a starting point. I think that’s reinforced both by the events of Pentecost and the story of the Philippian jailer: baptism took place straight after conversion, there was no hanging around nor even preparation.

And there’s something more: baptism is a sign of welcome into the Church, the community of faith. That’s why it should never be carried out in a private ceremony on a Sunday afternoon but always within an ordinary service: the members of a church need to see the person being baptised, need to greet them, need to make a commitment to them. As we christen Eliyana this morning, we’re all saying, “We will love you as one of our own, we will support your parents as much as we are able, you’re one of us now”. That, I think, is rather beautiful.

If you think about it, the Church does some pretty strange things. We eat a morsel of bread, drink a tiny sip of wine, and call it a meal. We splash water on a baby’s head, or ask an adult to momentarily dunk themselves under water, and rejoice. Onlookers may be puzzled or even giggle, but that doesn’t worry us. For we know that we are doing things which are powerfully symbolic and deeply profound, showing that we are serious about obeying and following Jesus, our Lord.