The View From The Vicarage: Guest Reflection by Linnae Peterson
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage”. So goes the jump rope rhyme from my childhood. As most anyone can tell you, that is not how life always goes. Mary had her baby “out of order”, so did Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth, whose babies came long after they were expected.
There is a debate among the clergy and theologians in the Episcopal Church at the moment about whether people must be baptized before they are allowed to take communion. We often get trapped in our desire for order. First, we must learn about God, then repent of how we have lived, then be baptized, then confirmed, then receive communion.
Somehow God doesn’t seem to work that way. Peter showed up to Cornelius’s house to begin the process by telling them about Jesus and God jumps the gun by filling them with the Holy Spirit. If you look you can see all sorts of ways that God doesn’t stop to follow the logical order of thing, or at least our order of things. The sacraments take us to a different level. In them we touch eternity, an eternity that is beyond the timeline in which we live. To say that God’s actions in a person’s life are bound by time is to tie God to our linear life.
None of this denies the importance of either baptism or the eucharist. Both are an important, and I would say critical part of our life in Christ. However, when and how they come into our lives is at the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
Throughout the history of Christianity, we have had times when society, or circumstances have pushed us to understand that God works in different ways in different times. Baptism shifted from a rite for adults when we set up a long period of catechesis before baptism. As the generations and composition of the church changed, we baptized infants. As the church grew, we instituted confirmation. Then we decided that only those confirmed could be admitted to the Table. [Recently] we…came to look at baptism as the important rite of admission.
Now our society and churches have changed. For those who are drawn by the Holy Spirit into our churches, they are often drawn to eucharist and then to catechesis and then to baptism. Our logic tells us that this is the wrong order of things, yet it seems to be the way God is working in many lives. Like Gamaliel, I for one don’t what to get in God’s way.