The Tradition You Left

Faris has not been back to that building in nineteen years, and he could still walk you to the exact spot.

Down the side aisle, past the second radiator, through a door that was always heavier than it looked. He was twenty-two. There were maybe forty people. Somebody's aunt sang something on her own beforehand and the sound in that room was terrible and it did not matter at all.

He went in. He came up. Somebody put a towel round him and gripped his shoulders hard and said well done, son, and meant it entirely.

And then, over about eleven years, he left. Not in a storm. There was no scandal and there is nothing to tell. Things shifted, and he shifted, and one Sunday he simply did not go, and then another, and eventually he found somewhere else and stayed there and has been happy.

But there is a thought that has visited him, on and off, for nineteen years, and it always arrives the same way. It comes when he is doing something ordinary. Filling a kettle. Rinsing a cup.

Did that count, given where it happened?

He would never say it out loud in either building. It would sound like an insult to the first room and an anxiety to the second, and it is honestly neither. It is just a question that got into him and has never been answered, and he has carried it the way you carry a stone in a coat pocket you never wear.

You may have your own version of that door.

Maybe you left. Maybe the place itself closed, or changed, or the man who did it turned out to be somebody else, or you simply grew in a direction that took you out of the room. And ever since, in some low back corner, a question has been sitting with its coat on.

If the room is behind me, is the water behind me too?

Count the ones in the sentence

There is a line in Ephesians where Paul is listing the things that hold the whole thing together, and he counts them, and the counting is the point.

One Lord, one faith, one baptism.Ephesians 4:5

Read the arithmetic. Not one per room. Not one per tradition, not one per style, not one that gets reissued when a person moves. One.

And notice what he does not attach to it. There is no clause about the building. No clause about who was standing in the water with you, or what they went on to do, or whether the congregation is still meeting. He does not say one baptism per house. He puts the number at one and hangs it beside one Lord, and nobody has ever worried that changing churches gave them a different Lord.

And what happened in that room belongs to Him and not to the room. The written word puts the baptism in the same short list as the one Lord and the one faith, with nothing about a venue anywhere in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who settles that in a man at a kitchen tap nineteen years later.

Now, this site is not going to tell you what that room got wrong, and I want you to notice that I am not doing it, because it is the easiest sentence in the world to write and it would cost you something.

That building held forty people who came out on a weeknight for you. Somebody's aunt sang. A man gripped your shoulders and said well done, son. Whatever else was true of the place, and I do not know and it is not mine to say, that was true of it, and it was not nothing.

And you are not required to prosecute the room you came from in order to be settled about the water. The word says one baptism and stops there, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold real distance from a place and real gratitude for it at the same time, which nobody manages by deciding to.

Nothing here is going to make you choose a side

I also want to be plain about what this article will not do, because you have probably been handed the argument before.

I am not going to adjudicate whether it should have been a font or a river. I am not going to tell you that infants do or do not qualify, or that the words used over you were the right words or the wrong ones. Sincere people have divided over every one of those for centuries, and you did not arrive here to be enrolled on a side. You arrived carrying a question about your own life.

So there is no test in this article you could fail.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The word gives one baptism without a footnote of conditions, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing you a grade, which is what makes this a settling and not another examination.

What the water was never holding up

Here is the part that actually undoes the knot, and it is not about buildings at all.

Faris has been assuming that the baptism was propped up by something around it. The rightness of the room. The soundness of the man. The continuity of his own membership. Take one of the props away, the reasoning goes, and the whole thing leans.

But look at what the act is described as. Buried with Him. Raised with Him. The two verbs both have the same subject, and the subject is not the building and it is not Faris.

And the thing holding your baptism up has not moved. The word says buried with him by baptism into death and raised up by the glory of the Father, which puts the weight on Him at both ends, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than an argument in a man rinsing a cup.

And He is not somebody who lets go. The word says being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that confidence, which no amount of re-examining nineteen years of memory produces.