Easter and baptism

Easter is approaching fast! I announced on March 22 that we will have a special celebration on Easter this year. Here’s some background.

During the years of the early church – generally considered to be from the time of Jesus to the end of the final Roman persecution in the early 300s – it was a common practice to celebrate baptism on Easter Sunday. In fact, for a long time Easter was the only day that baptisms were conducted, and that only after up to a year of teaching new converts about Jesus and what Christian discipleship meant.

After the Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire under Constantine, the Church’s size ballooned dramatically. At the beginning of the fourth century, only about 10 percent of the empire was Christian. By century’s end, only 10 percent wasn’t.

This rapid expansion meant that, while Easter’s central importance to the faith was maintained, no longer could Easter serve as the only day of baptism. There were just too many converts! (Don’t we wish we had that problem?)

Yet baptism and its periodic reaffirmation remain so central to Christian faith and practice that their connection to Easter really should be re-established and maintained.

In Romans 6, Paul wrote,

3Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Baptism was understood by the earliest Christians as personally entering the death and resurrection of Jesus, so it made perfect common sense and theological sense to baptize on Easter, the day Jesus was raised from the dead.

For this Easter, April 12, we shall revive this ancient custom at both the 8:30 service and the 11 o’clock service. If you have never been baptized and would like to be baptized on Easter, please contact me right away so I can meet with you before that date. (I am required by our denomination to counsel persons on the meaning of baptism before conducting it.) Also, if you would like to renew your baptismal vows and reaffirm your baptism, you will be able to do so in a liturgical setting during the service (I don’t need to meet with you before reaffirmation).

Here is a short guide to the UMC’s doctrine on baptism.

Easter is always the most special day is the life of the church – let’s renew our vows together this Easter to be Jesus’s disciples!