Baptism and some thoughts on the Trinity

I was raised Missouri Synod Lutheran. Now for many of you this will mean nothing, but those of you familiar with MSL, you will understand that the Triune God is a very big deal.

While I sat, every Saturday for two years in confirmation class, Pastor Kirchner would drone on and on that the Triune God was three Gods in One. As I recall, this is the only way he ever explained it. As Missouri Synod Lutherans, our job was to accept, never to question. But question I did. I just didn't get it. It was presented in such a concrete way and to me it was such a ephemeral idea I just couldn't get my mind around it.

For twenty-five more years I would do a tap dance around my belief/understanding of the Triune God and much of the other dogma that is indicative of the conservative branch of the Lutheran church. But then, as I entered my forties I began to adjust my belief system to what suited me. I began to personalize, customize what I believed. And in doing this I have been able to pull into a deeper relationship with the divine... the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So today, while babysitting my grandsons, we found ourselves sitting under a palo verde tree, popping the seeds out of the seed pods on the ground and trying to cool off in the relative shade the tree offered. I had brought water for myself and to share with the boys and after they both had taken a drink I noticed how flushed the little guy's face was. Now Phoenix has very low humidity, so if you get wet the water evaporates very fast. As water evaporates it lowers the temperature. The faster it evaporates the more it cools.

I poured a little water into my hand and rubbed it on Pete's head, then I rubbed some on William's. I wanted to cool them down, but as I looked at their wet hair I was reminded of baptism. So a few minutes later, when I put water on Pete's head again, I said, "I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." Then I did William.

William asked me, "Is da 'oly 'pirit a bad guy, Ama?" ... he has become quite concerned about gad guys lately... and I told him no, the Holy Spirit was that part of God that gets inside us and holds us close so we don't have to be scared.

In the next half hour, I baptised the boys two or three more times, then each one of them baptised me. Each time we said the blessing. Each time we talked some more about the Holy Spirit and asked that what we did in love and trust would be blessed.

Pastor Kirchner would not have approved of what I did. His Triune God was not a flexible deity. He wouldn't have thought I had the authority to do such a thing and would have thought that my doing it was blasphemy. But this is what I know. God was there under the tree with us and He heard me call.

Those boys will be baptised again when they are older. They will be baptised by a minister who does everything by the rule... and it will be good... but what the three of us did today was good, too. God doesn't require fancy rules and ritual, Jesus came to tell us that. And the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside and around us as the wind, or as a flame, or with the refreshing water whether we ask for his presence or not.

I baptised my grandsons today and they baptised me... and something about that was good and holy and precious.