Some Sundays simply arrive. Whitsunday is not one of them. It had been waiting, so to speak, for one particular soul. With the parish gathered close around the font, Fr. Nicholas baptized a new Christian out of death and into the risen life of Christ, on the very feast that the Church has long kept for exactly this.
Why Pentecost?
It is no accident that we baptize at Whitsunday. From the earliest centuries, the Church reserved two great days for Holy Baptism: the Easter Vigil and the Vigil of Pentecost. The logic is the logic of Scripture itself. When the Holy Ghost fell upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost and Peter stood up to preach, the sermon ended in water. “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38). Three thousand were baptized that day. The Church was born wet.
So the feast of the Spirit is also a feast of the font. By old English tradition the day even takes its name from the occasion — Whitsunday, “White Sunday,” for the white robes the newly baptized once wore. To come to the water on this day is to step into a current much older and stronger than oneself.
Water and the Spirit
Our Lord told Nicodemus that “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Most of us first meet baptism as a symbol — the outward sign of a decision made within. That instinct is right; it is only too small. The water is God’s own act before it is ever ours: the new birth, worked through ordinary water and his extraordinary Word. The font is the womb of the Church. The Fathers said so plainly, and meant it: here, of water and the Spirit, she conceives and bears her children.
A visitor sees a quiet moment with a simple bowl, and the quiet is real. But under that water is a death and a resurrection. The old self is drowned; the new creature is raised. A fresh start, the visitor might think, and so it is. But the life it begins is not one we generate. The resurrection the new creature is raised into is Christ’s own rising from the dead, “that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). To be baptized is to be joined to that, and so to a life death no longer has the power to keep. There are eternal ramifications to a simple bowl.
Sealed and Claimed
After the water comes the hand. The priest lays his hand upon the newly baptized and signs the forehead with the sign of the Cross. It is the mark, in the words of the Prayer Book, that he is henceforth to be “Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.” It is one of the most moving gestures in all our liturgy: a person who an hour ago belonged to himself, now openly claimed and sealed as belonging to Another.
Carrying the Light
Finally, a candle — lit from the great Paschal candle that has burned beside us through all the Great Fifty Days of Easter. The flame is handed over deliberately. The light of the risen Christ, kindled at the Vigil, is now carried out the door in a single pair of hands. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
We do come hoping to be moved, or to leave a little better than we arrived, and thanks be to God, we often are. But that hope sits inside something larger: the light kindled at the font is meant to be carried out the door and spent, person by person, on the feast of the Spirit who lit it.
Pray for our newest brother in Christ — that the grace begun in him at the font would be brought to good effect, and that the rest of us, who renewed our own baptismal vows alongside him, would mean them.
Curious what brings a person to the font? You are welcome to come and see, any Sunday at 10:00 AM. Plan your visit →