Baptismal Liturgies

In many Orthodox churches, baptisms are done privately and almost secretly:  after the morning Divine Liturgy at which the entire church community was present had concluded and all the people had left, a few people remained behind—or perhaps, if they had not been at the Liturgy, came to church deliberately late to attend the private family baptism to which they had been invited.  If Liturgy began at 9.30 am and concluded at 11.00 am and if the people had all dispersed after the post-Liturgy coffee hour, then a baptism would be held in the now empty church around 1.00 or 2.00 pm.   

The family of the person to be baptized (usually a baby) then gathered together in the nave around the baptismal font, together with some invited family friends and the baby’s sponsors.  The priest would be there, of course, along with (perhaps) a cantor to sing the responses.  (I have seen situations where the priest served alone and sang his own responses.)  The baptism was served separately from the Divine Liturgy and did not culminate in the newly-baptized receiving Holy Communion.  That act would wait until next Sunday, assuming the family returned to the Church at all at the following Sunday.

In some churches (you know who you are) Orthodox worship in general and baptism in particular is intended primarily to enforce an ethnic identity:  it is understood that all good Greeks/ Russians/ Romanians, Serbs/ fill-in-the-blank are baptized and so the baby is brought to church to be baptized because that is deemed essential to its Greek/ Russian/ Romanian/ Serbian identity. 

Note:  weekly attendance, while desirable, is not deemed essential to ethnic identity, just baptism.  In some of these places it is tacitly understood that ethnic identity is paramount and that subsequent church attendance, though of course laudatory, is not expected.  Happy to baptize you!  See you again when you come to be married!  One thinks of the scene in the movie My Big, Fat Greek Wedding in which the non-Orthodox partner in the relationship (a “xeno” or foreigner—i.e. a non-Greek) got baptized and then happily commented to his fiancée, “I’m Greek now!”

Happily there are many churches in which ethnic identity, while valued, is subordinated to the Gospel and where the true significance baptism is understood.  But even in those communities baptism usually takes place in a private family ceremony on a Sunday afternoon after everyone in church has departed.

Such a practice is utterly foreign to the practice and spirit of the early church and would have made St. John Chrysostom (a spirited preacher who knew no compromise) seriously apoplectic.  We quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann in his seminal Of Water and the Spirit:  A Liturgical Study of Baptism:  “If even our brief study of the baptismal liturgy reveals the cosmical, ecclesiological and eschatological dimensions of our faith and of ‘spirituality’, how can all this be truly ‘experienced’ in our private and thoroughly trimmed ‘Christenings’ which weaken and contradict virtually every precept, every teaching of the Fathers, the spirit as well as the letter of the liturgical tradition itself?”  In other words, serving baptism apart from the main Divine Liturgy as a private Christening of the baby reduces, impoverishes, and denies the entire spirit of baptism.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  As Schmemann suggested (boldly for 1974 when the book was first published) one might return to the universal practice of the Fathers and the early church and incorporate baptism into the morning Liturgy.  Baptism would then culminate as it should, with the communion of the newly-baptized.  Orthodox theology declares that union with Christ—i.e. baptism—consists of a triple immersion, an anointing with chrism, and one’s first reception of Holy Communion. 

We see this in one of the baptismal prayers:  in the Chrismation prayer the priest prays as follows.  “As the same Master, compassionate King of kings, grant also unto him/her the seal of the gift of Your holy and almighty and venerable Spirit and participation in the holy Body and precious Blood of Your Christ”.  Note:  the baptismal immersion culminates not just in the act of chrismation of the candidate but with their reception of the Eucharist.  In other words, the text presupposes that the baptism/ chrismation is accomplished within the Divine Liturgy at which the newly-baptized will receive their first Communion.

In an extended footnote at the end of his book Schmemann offered a liturgical suggestion for how this baptismal Liturgy might be served, with the baptism/ chrismation taking the place of the initial Great Litany and Antiphons.  In his day, such a restoration (and such historical common sense) was rare and might have been thought scandalously radical.  He delicately suggested that because “it might present practical difficulties” (i.e. an unexpectedly longer service for those not used to it) it might be served on Saturdays.  But, he went on, “the day should be announced to the entire parish so that as many members as possible may attend.”

Schmemann’s book is now fifty years old and it is, I suggest, high time that his suggested restoration become widespread, if not the norm.  What is at stake is the ecclesial significance of baptism—that is, of discipleship to Christ.  When baptisms are held privately with just the family and a selection of friends from the parish attending, the Church thereby proclaims that baptism has to do with family and that baptism make the baby into a family member.  In fact, baptism is about transcending family and family loyalties, and indeed all merely human loyalties.  Baptism does not unite one to a family, a clan, a tribe, or an ethnic group.  It unites one to Christ, to His ecclesial Body the Church, a community in which there is no Jew or Greek, no Serb or Romanian, no Smith or Jones.  In the Church such differences, divisions, and distinctions have no place.  Whatever the intention, private baptisms replace Church with family and thereby lose much ecclesial significance.

The addition of another member to the local church community is not a matter of indifference to that community, but is of great if not supreme importance.  That is why in the Divine Liturgy the local congregation prays for the catechumens in its midst, the deacon bidding the people to pray that the Lord would unite the catechumens to His holy, catholic, and apostolic Church—i.e. to the local congregation in which alone the catechumens are united to Christ.  In the prayer the priest prays that in due time God would “make them worthy of the washing of rebirth, the remission of sins and the robe of incorruption”—i.e. that God would grant them those gifts through holy baptism.  

That prayer in the Liturgy, offered for the catechumens, assumes that the local congregation would be present to see the catechumens baptized (i.e. that they would be baptized during the Liturgy).  The baptism of the catechumens at the Sunday Liturgy represents the culmination of the catechumens’ long journey on their way home.  The congregation sustained their catechumens throughout that long journey, and it was unthinkable that they would not be there to see that journey completed.

This ecclesial significance of baptism is rooted in the Church’s eschatological nature.  Families belong to this age, as do clans, tribes, and nations.  They come into being through physical biology, for they are biologically born into a specific family.  But the Church belongs not to this age, but to the age to come.  One may be born a Greek or an American or a Serb, but no one is born a Christian.  One becomes a Christian through being born again—i.e. through baptism.  That is why Tertullian, a Christian writer from North Africa, famously wrote that Christians were made, not born.  One can be born a Greek or a Russian, but to become a Christian, one needs a second birth, emerging not through the amniotic waters of one’s mother, but through the sacramental waters of the baptismal font.

This means that baptism should be performed in a way that gives full expression to its ecclesial character, emphasizing that the newly-baptized belong to the wider church, not just to a specific family.  Private baptisms by their very nature declare that baptism has to do with entering a family.  That is why in the early church baptisms were never done privately, but as part of the main Sunday Liturgy.  It is to this patristic norm that we should now return.