♦ Eastertide 2015 ♦
I was for 10 years rector of an historic parish in New York City where the baptismal font was placed not in the chancel but in the entryway to the church. It was the first thing you saw when you came in, and you had to negotiate your way around it if you wanted to make your way up the aisle. I liked that traditional placement of the font, and I preached about it often. I saw it as a continuing reminder that entrance into the life of the community—entrance into the resurrected life of Christ—was through the living waters of baptism. It was especially effective to have the font in place there during the Easter Vigil, within a few feet of where we ignited the new fire.
But now, on reflection, I realize that I may have oversimplified matters. I regarded that font as our parish’s sacred well, like the well where Jesus encountered the Samaritan woman in John’s gospel. But what signal were we really sending, locating it where we did? How easily the whole thing might be misconstrued by the seeker, the stranger, the uninitiated. Were we trying to bar the entrance, to protect our turf, to create an obstacle that would trip up the undeserving or the uninitiated or the undesirable? What if we encountered Jesus himself standing there at that font? Did the water in our well truly live? What if he asked us for a taste? Would we dare to offer it? How would we explain its bitterness? How explain the fissures and fractures in our common life, our habit of seeing the face of the stranger or even the enemy not just in outsiders, but in our own brothers and sisters in Christ? We church people guard our separate wells pretty fiercely at times, damming up the living spring and hoarding those living waters for ourselves.
What would the reign of God look like if we allowed that dam to break?
I know a woman, a Roman Catholic Sister of the Poor, who worked for years in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, living among the village women whose fate it was to spend almost the complete day traipsing back and forth to the communal well outside the squatter camp, their only source of water. When I first visited her, Sister Monica was serving as a social worker for a local clinic in Mtata. One of her colleagues, a poor Xhosa woman who was being trained as a nurse, had been living in a tiny hut in the squatters’ settlement, dividing her time between work at the clinic (several kilometers away) and caring for her disabled brother. A storm had destroyed her ramshackle hut, and Monica had organized a work group to build a more stable mud brick house, fashioning the bricks from the very ground on which the house would stand. They had put out a large rain barrel to collect the water necessary for their brick-making, and supplemented it in the dry spells—which come all too often to the Eastern Cape—with water carried on their backs and shoulders from that distant well.
I treasure two photographs of the site. One is of the still unfinished house, a view through one of its rough-hewn windows, by which you get a glimpse of the setting sun and the harshly beautiful hills beyond the settlement. But it’s the other, more pedestrian photo that I cherish more. It’s a shot of the rusty rain barrel, full to the brim with water. From the side of the picture you can see Monica’s outstretched hand extended toward it, pointing toward the water, in a joyous, gorgeous gesture of triumph and compassion. I would have liked to take that barrel home with me, to place it near the door of the church in place of the font we already had. For me that rain barrel is what any baptismal font should really look like, the work of many hands, a source of living water, a wellspring of liberation and homecoming, destined for building up and not for tearing down, a fountain from which the resurrected Jesus would have gladly drunk his fill.
May that living water of reconciliation, compassion and service be yours to drink as well in this holy season.