On “Living Water”: A Baptismal Practical Theology for a Time of Water Crisis

Abstract

Just as baptism holds within it the possibility and even promise of life, new birth, suffering, and death, so too does its ordinary element of water: in it is the full, embodied, and vulnerable reach of life and death. In the waters of baptism is the promise of new life, but not a life absent suffering, risk, or moral complexity. This essay presents a baptismally-grounded practical theological reflection upon the precarious status of baptism’s central element, water, in a time of extreme weather, economic exploitation, and depleting stores of fresh water.

I was halfway through my first year in ordained ministry when I found myself unexpectedly gripped by a sense of fear and dread during a mostly ordinary 11:00 a.m. worship service. I say mostly ordinary because although we practiced baptisms more Sundays than not in that very large congregation, in this case the candidate for baptism was an adult named John. John now wanted to join the church after a couple of years participating in the young adult ministry. As we had walked through the worship order earlier in the week, we made sure the arrangement of liturgical pieces would accommodate an adult baptism: kneeler pulled out of storage and placed in the center of the chancel, wooden baptismal font carefully moved up the steps and placed alongside the kneeler. We rehearsed the liturgy and talked about how John would be introduced to the congregation. He would not, for example, be carried in the pastor’s arms.

As I was not the officiant for John’s baptism, I took my seat after the hymn beside the choir in the back of the chancel. My mentoring pastor Jane called John forward, who in front of the whole gathered community took the baptismal vows. After the prayer of thanksgiving, John turned to face the back of the chancel. He knelt down, and it was at that moment that a deep sense of dread and foreboding overtook me. I felt that something terrible was about to happen to John, that he would be hurt or was in danger, somehow. It was a fleeting and sub-rational sensation. Soon enough Jane placed her hand with her usual grace into the font, stirring it with extravagance before bringing her hand high, dripping with water, and placing it on John’s head. And then I was standing with the rest of the congregation, welcoming John with smiling tears into the full life of the congregation.

I was embarrassed by my own visceral response to the baptism, so I hesitated to mention it to Jane, my mentor. Several days later, I confessed to her: “I don’t know why, but when John knelt for his baptism, I had this very strange feeling that something awful was about to happen to him.” She looked at me, blinked, and smiled: “I know exactly why.”

Baptism is awash with complex meaning. While baptism promises life and belonging, it also summons the baptized to a way of life replete with moral challenges, and even engrafts them into the suffering and death of Jesus. All of these meanings are attached to a very ordinary element: water.

“Baptized into Death”: A Minor Key

About halfway through, the baptismal prayer in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship sounds a minor key:

We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism.

In it we are buried with Christ in his death .

From it we are raised to share in his resurrection.

Through it we are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit. ¹

Rarely do we linger on this meaning as we carry newly-baptized babies—round-faced, curious, or crying—down the aisles of our sanctuaries. The central theological claims of love, welcome, and nurture undergird the lavish gift of water and Spirit, promising a new life for ourselves, our children, and for the world; a promise that we are no less than “children of God” (Gal 3:26–27). ²

“We are buried with Christ in his death.” This seemingly discordant theme echoes the words of Paul to the Romans: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? . . . For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom 6:3, 5). ³ Surely, the promise of joining in Christ’s resurrection and the triumph of life over death beckon all who would receive the sacrament, but we sometimes ignore this minor key: There is no resurrection without suffering and death. Furthermore, when we are baptized, the World Council of Churches explains, we are joined with Christ in his own baptism, which “led Jesus along the way of the Suffering Servant, made manifest in his sufferings, death, and resurrection.” ⁴ Baptism does not save us from suffering. It might, on some readings, demand it. ⁵

That’s what Jane meant when she said she knew exactly why I felt such a visceral kind of fear as John was baptized: it means we’re going to suffer! Joining ourselves with the life of Christ demands that we align ourselves with the suffering, accompany the dying, and sacrifice our own comfort for the well-being of others. All of that, in a few drops of ordinary water!

Calvin warned us not to place too much emphasis on the water, itself, because baptism “draws us away, not only from the visible element which meets our eyes, but from all other means, that it may fasten our minds upon Christ alone.” ⁶ With all due respect to Calvin, however, the precarious status of this singular, ordinary element in our first sacrament demands our attention in a time of rapid and dramatic climate change. Just as baptism holds within it the possibility and even promise of life, new birth, suffering, and death, so too does its ordinary element of water: in it is the full, embodied, and vulnerable reach of life and death. In this essay, drawing inspiration from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s baptismal prayer, I develop a baptismally grounded theological reflection upon life, death, and moral demand, informed by our relationship to water in a time of extreme weather, economic exploitation, and depleting stores of fresh water.

Water is Life

We give you thanks, Eternal God,

for you nourish and sustain all living things

by the gift of water. ⁷

In 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, accompanied by supporters from more than two hundred other indigenous tribes and non-indigenous allies, gathered at the Oceti Sakowin camp to protest the routing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) underneath the Missouri River. ⁸ The proposed pipeline would run underneath the river at the northeastern-most corner of the Standing Rock reservation, which comprises 2.3 million acres across North and South Dakota. ⁹ The Missouri River is the primary source of fresh water for the reservation, running north to south along its eastern border. Access to fresh water was already compromised by half a century of cost-saving water diversions that threatened the lives and livelihoods of thousands of tribe members. ¹⁰

The gathering at Oceti Sakowin was a “prayer camp,” envisioned and initiated by a group of youth who lit a sacred fire and began each day with a water ceremony and each meal with prayer and a “spirit plate” offered to ancestors. Some youth also ran a two-thousand-mile relay from the camp to Washington D.C. to deliver a petition to the Army Corps of Engineers. ¹¹ There were many such petitions and letters. One, written by middle schooler Anna Lee Rain Yellow Hammer, concluded with this poignant statement, drawing wisdom from a Lakota phrase: “Water to Native American people is the first medicine. Mni Wiconi: water is life.” ¹²

Water is life. The spiritually and emotionally renewing power of water is a recurrent theme in the Christian tradition. Indeed, it is often through water, both sacred and ordinary, that we learn who we are. In this, we share with Jesus, whose own baptism both confers his divine identity and summons him to his life’s work (Matt 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–22; John 1:28–34). Each of the Synoptic gospels retells the story of Jesus’s baptism, sharing some key elements: Jesus is baptized in the River Jordan by John. Either as he emerges from the water or immediately afterwards, the heavens open (or are more dramatically torn open!) and a dove descends, an embodiment of the Holy Spirit. Accompanying the Holy Spirit is the voice of God, announcing for all to hear, that Jesus is God’s own son, the beloved one, in whom God is well pleased. ¹³

In the ordinary waters of the Jordan River, Jesus receives his sacred identity: God’s beloved. So, too, do we: our sacred identity as children of God is confirmed in ordinary water, likely taken from the tap in the sacristy, drawn from the municipal water system. Ordinary water, made sacred, made “living water.” In the gospel of John, Jesus approaches a woman at the common well in Sychar. After transgressively asking her for ordinary drinking water, Jesus begins talking about hydōr zōn, “living water”: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14). Here, Jesus borrows the metaphorical language of “living water” from the Hebrew Bible, in which the term refers to a physical spring or moving stream. ¹⁴ Jesus identifies himself as the source of this living water, which he would later teach flows “from the believer’s heart,” a very embodied image of the life-giving flow of water and Spirit (John 7:37–39). ¹⁵ Water is life.

Water Sustains Life

About seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water. ¹⁶ Most of that—around ninety-seven percent—is in our oceans, meaning that fresh water comprises only about three percent of the water on earth. Much of even that fresh water, furthermore, is “locked up” in glaciers and groundwater, meaning that only about one percent of the water on the planet is “renewable” surface water in lakes and rivers. ¹⁷

Fresh water is essential. Each of us, no matter where we live, depends upon a system of creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, aquifers, and groundwater known as a watershed for access to fresh water. ¹⁸ All activity that happens on the land eventually makes its effects known in the water supply. Agriculture, public sanitation, and physical health depend upon and affect this complex system, which distributes the very precious and vulnerable gift of fresh water.

While a human being can survive for as many as three weeks without food, most of us could survive only a few days without water. Water comprises about sixty to seventy percent of human body weight. Without water, dehydration can set in quickly, affecting energy levels and the body’s capacity to cool itself. Blood becomes thicker and blood pressure may drop. Eventually, the circulatory system stops blood flow to non-vital organs. ¹⁹ When we say that “water is life,” what we say is true in a very real and urgent sense.

Water gives life in an emotional sense, as well, offering comfort, renewal, and joy. At the end of a long’s day’s work, a hot bath or shower awakens the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, lowering the body’s stress response and stimulating a sense of relaxation and well-being. ²⁰ For the sick or grieving, a caregiver’s tender touch in washing hair or gently cleansing skin renews and comforts. As the water washes, so too it soothes, awakens, and consoles. Conversely, water can be the site of play and recreation, the place where we are literally re-created. When kids play together in community pools or under neighborhood sprinklers, ordinary games like tag are energized by cold blasts of living water. Bonds within families and chosen families are fortified by lazy afternoons spent paddling in rivers and jumping into lakes. And frenzied moments spent body surfing in ocean waves are complemented by restorative moments floating in calm sea waters.

When I was a child, our extended family would gather at Ocean Isle Beach, in North Carolina, for a reunion. My dad’s mother, Margaret (we grandchildren called her “Bama”), could not contain her joy upon having her son and all three daughters, together with their families, together in one house, for a week at the beach. There, she reveled in her role as matriarch, holding court in the kitchen or at the card table. Her formidable presence was palpable, her joy and frustration immediately apparent.

She, who had grown up playing on the beaches of Hawaii and raised her own children there, seemed to be most fully herself, most at home in her own body, when she could sit in the sand, feel (and taste!) the salt air on her skin, and throw her buoyant form into the whitecaps of the Atlantic breakers. She would often take all the grandkids for after-supper swims. Occasionally, I, the lone girl cousin, would go for an evening swim with Bama and my aunts, four women and a girl resting, playing, and completely at home in the expansive and welcoming ocean. My grandmother, now long since departed, was even known from time to time to remove her swimsuit altogether. The boundary between the water and her own skin entirely permeable, she intimately connected to her surroundings, unembarrassed by her creatureliness and the joy discovered therein. Water is life.

Water is Peril

We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism.

In it we are buried with Christ in his death. ²¹

In as much as the ocean served as a site for play and rest for my family, however, we learned to respect its power and the risks it presented as we paddled out on our inflated floats and body-surfed in the breakers. I recall the moment when my grade-school-age cousins Scott and Brian were swimming, and I saw my Uncle Bud, a beach lifeguard once upon a time, stand up in full alert from his beach chair and sprint out into the breakers. He had watched as Scott and Brian, both strong swimmers, were one moment playing in the waves and the next were pulled under the water’s surface, struggling to keep afloat. In my memory, surely embellished, he plunged his hands directly into the waves and pulled both of my cousins Scott and Brian out of the ocean, each by a single, spindly arm. Water is also peril.

Both the witness of Scripture and the local news attest to the power of water—its scarcity, its abundance, and its excess when floods occur—to alternately sustain and imperil all forms of planetary life. When there is not enough (or too much) water, human beings, animals, crops, marine life, and whole ecosystems are threatened. What shall we say about this “living water” in such circumstances?

Too Little: Drought

Like many regions in the world now, peoples of the ancient Near East feared periods of drought and their devastating effects on agriculture and food security. In the Hebrew Bible, we see writers trying to make sense of seasons of rain and drought by attributing these patterns to God’s pleasure at the people’s righteousness or displeasure at their wickedness (see, for example, Deut 11:13–17; Psalm 107:33–34; and Jeremiah 14). The evocative descriptions of divine blessing and curse give testimony to the writers’ perhaps first-hand knowledge of conditions of ecological fertility and barrenness. Joel Baden identifies vivid examples which follow the lengthy presentation of the Deuteronomic code. ²² As a reward for Israel’s obedience, God promises that “The Lord will open for you his rich storehouse, the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all your undertakings” (Deut 28:12). As punishment for Israel’s disobedience, God threatens that “The sky over your head shall be bronze and the earth under you iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed” (Deut 28:23–24). Baden argues that drought and subsequent famine were often drivers of movement in the Bible, which constitutes a social, political, and ecological phenomenon that we now describe as “climate migration.” ²³

Abrahm Lustgarten paints a vivid portrait of how climate change-driven drought in Central America is affecting and will continue to affect northward migration into the United States. In Guatemala, for example, the replenishment of fresh water in renewable surface water and groundwater is expected to decrease by as much as eighty-three percent as the region receives less rain. Lustgarten finds similar patterns in South Asia, Saharan, and sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. By 2070, climate models suggest that the extremely hot and arid regions of the planet, now comprising approximately one percent of the planet’s land surface, will comprise approximately twenty percent of the land’s surface, rendering it mostly uninhabitable. This could displace as many as one third of the earth’s human population. ²⁴

Too Much: Flood

Climate change and particularly the increases in temperature of the earth’s surface mean that precipitation patterns of bioregions will intensify: expanding arid places will become drier, and rainy places will become wetter. Just as too little water imperils whole communities, cultures, and regions, so too does too much. In the last 150 years or so, the global mean sea level has risen about eight to nine inches. In some places along the east and gulf coasts of the United States, especially in the southeast region, the sea level has risen about that amount in the last sixty-five years. Rising sea levels are caused by the warming and expansion of oceans, as well as the climate change-driven melting of glaciers and ice sheets. In the next seventy-five years, researchers anticipate that the global mean sea level could rise anywhere from an additional twelve to sixty inches, or as much as one hundred inches in the most extreme circumstances. ²⁵ As many as 570 global cities could be severely impacted by 2050, including New York, Virginia Beach, and New Orleans in the United States, and major global population centers like Jakarta, Dar es Salaam, and Shanghai. ²⁶ Such increases make flooding more dramatic and dangerous, especially for people with few resources or options should their home be underwater.

Just as biblical writers recounted periods of drought and interpreted drought as punishment from God, so too they wrote about flood, incorporating their theological imagination to interpret its import. The paradigmatic flood narrative recounted in Genesis 6–9 is one such story. Archaeological and comparative literary study suggest that flood stories like the one described in mythic proportions in Genesis likely were inspired by experiences of disastrous localized floods as well as a cultural imagination fed by the diffusion of earlier ancient Near Eastern flood stories. ²⁷ In the Genesis flood myth, the Yahwist and Priestly writers imagine that the whole earth is covered by water, a punishment from a God who is so grieved by humanity’s evil that God regrets ever creating them. God thus seeks to destroy all that God has made, allowing the mythic waters from the heavens to burst through the “firmament,” converging with the waters on the earth’s surface and yielding a catastrophic flood (Gen 1:6-7, 7:11). A privileged few are saved by Noah, described as a good man (Gen 6:9) with direct instruction from God to build an ark large enough to preserve only his family and representative animals so that the earth might be re-populated in a fantastical do-over. ²⁸ The rains come, and the land is flooded for months on end. Upon the receding of the waters, Noah, family, and menagerie depart the ark, charged to repopulate the earth, assured by God’s promise, accompanied by a rainbow, to never again destroy each living creature by flood (Gen 9:12-15).

In the time of Noah,

you destroyed evil by the waters of the flood,

giving righteousness a new beginning. ²⁹

As the flood recedes, we read in Genesis only that “the waters were dried up from the earth, and Noah removed the covering of the ark and looked and saw that the face of the ground was drying” (Gen 8:13). At the end of the story, the writers do not describe the scene that would have greeted Noah and family, focusing instead on God’s promise and the future flourishing of the earth. Earlier in the story, however, the writers are not sparing in describing the violence of the flood: “And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:21–22). Despite children’s stories to the contrary, the Noachic flood, as Bron Taylor describes, is an “ethical and ecological horror story.” ³⁰

We have already had a preview of the catastrophic effects of severe storms and flooding in areas with rising sea levels: Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, 2005. The storm wreaked outsized devastation in the city, revealing deadly vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Katrina flooded the city, as water rose ten to twenty feet above sea level along the coast and twenty-five to twenty-eight feet along the banks of the Mississippi River. The high levels of water meant that eighty percent of the city was under water in the days following the storm. ³¹ The loss was devastating. At least 1,200 people died as a direct result of the storm. Four hundred thousand were permanently displaced. And the financial cost was extensive, totaling as much as $108 billion. ³²

Water is life, it is true. Too much water, or too little, however, threatens life. What is more, the perilous impacts of storms, flooding, and drought are not experienced to the same degree for all people and communities. Inequities in infrastructure, property values, costs of living, access to fresh water, and political and legal representation add complex moral layers to the precarity of water security.

Water Presents Moral Challenges

Pour out your Holy Spirit. . .

that they may have power to do your will. . . ³³

When the prophet Amos imagines the divine establishment of justice in the world, he reaches for images of water: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 4:24). Abundant, moving, fresh water symbolizes God’s presence among the people, divine provision to meet their needs. It is perhaps ironic, then, that the distribution and use of water—the very symbol of God’s presence and justice—would present such thorny and persistent moral problems. As noted in the outset of this essay, only about one percent of the water on the earth’s surface is accessible and renewable fresh water. As the area of the earth’s surface designated as “extremely hot” and arid grows, so does our obligation to make intelligent, compassionate, strategic, and just decisions about how we use water. We must attend to uses of water that disproportionately tax the water supply, distributions of water that privilege some and disadvantage others, practices that threaten access to safe and clean water, and the possibility that some uses of water are morally bankrupt from the start. It is hard to imagine justice flowing like water when fresh water is, itself, a site of injustice.

Uses of Water

Given that we will use water, we can make more just decisions about that use by considering which uses are least depleting to the water supply. In some cases, what we use eventually goes back into the watershed: water used for cooking or for bathing, for example. Such uses are “nonconsumptive.” In contrast, consumptive withdrawals from the water supply do not return water to the watershed. The primary vehicle for consumptive use of water is agriculture, where water is transformed into other products: grains, produce, and livestock. ³⁴

Hydraulic technologies have made it possible to access more water deep underground to sustain large-scale agriculture operations in increasingly arid climates. ³⁵ The extraction of water from these aquifers, however, is consumptive: groundwater in aquifers is not renewable. ³⁶ Agriculture is consumptive in other ways, as well: the biological and chemical pollution from large scale animal farming operations and chemical-intensive crops endangers the already-depleted water supply. ³⁷

The dependence of the USA on cheap energy also threatens the water supply. Oil spills in oceans and seas (such the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico) have a devastating impact on the delicate marine ecosystem. Fresh water is also vulnerable: oil spills happen in and near fresh water, and the byproducts from other sources of cheap energy (coal, for example) can breach containment systems, polluting lakes and rivers and poisoning communities. ³⁸ The fight at Standing Rock over the routing of the Dakota Access pipeline underneath the Missouri River immediately upstream from the river highlighted concerns from the tribe that pipelines inevitably leak, endangering not only sacred lands, but also the water supply for the entire reservation. In its first year of operation, DAPL leaked five times. ³⁹

Water as Human Right, Water as Commodity

Economic gain, whether through cost savings or through profit, also unduly influences decisions we make about the use of fresh water. As states and municipalities are charged with stewarding an increasingly precious water supply, new challenges can be introduced in the race for economic gain. Political debates about whether fresh water is a human right or a commodity turn on whether access to fresh water should be free, unrestricted, and protected, or whether fresh water is a resource, where questions of price, supply, and demand are in tension with equitable distribution of an increasingly scarce resource. ⁴⁰ In Mexico, for example, Coca-Cola enjoys generous permits in some municipalities to extract hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water per day to produce the soft drink, which in many places costs the same or less than bottled water. At the same time, residents cannot expect to turn on their faucets and access fresh water: in one town, running water was available only once every two days. ⁴¹ In another drought-stricken city, residents awaited trucks carrying water, much of it not fit for human consumption. ⁴²

In the spring of 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan began temporarily drawing public water from the Flint River. ⁴³ They made this decision under the direction of the governor-appointed “emergency manager” of the city’s financial crisis, while they awaited the construction of new pipelines that would bring water from Lake Huron to Flint, in a cost-saving measure bypassing the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. Within four months, boil-water advisories were issued. Within nine months, University of Michigan-Flint researchers found unsafe levels of lead in the water. Absent corrosion control measures, the harsh water from the Flint River had been leaching lead from the pipes into the public water supply. The health hazards of almost any exposure to lead are well-known, affecting the functioning of crucial organs like the heart and kidneys. Children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can cause cognition and behavioral problems. ⁴⁴ The city of Flint issued a lead advisory in September 2015, a full year after residents first started voicing concerns about the quality of the water. Many in Flint still do not drink the water.

One cannot ignore the racial and class dimensions of the crisis. The population of Flint is around 57% Black, and more than 35% of the city lives below the poverty line. ⁴⁵ A very similar story unfolded last year in Jackson, Mississippi, also a predominantly Black and lower-income community. ⁴⁶ In the case of Flint, a Michigan Civil Rights Commission found that systemic racism had played an important role in the multiple failures to protect the citizens of the city, that “vestiges of segregation and discrimination found in Flint made it a unique target. The lack of political clout left the residents with nowhere to turn, no way to have their voices heard.” ⁴⁷

These stories—from Standing Rock to Mexico, from Flint to Jackson—demonstrate how easily the possibility of economic gain, whether by cutting costs or boosting profits, impedes the flow of the waters of justice. Like the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel, we might ask: “Where do you get that living water?” (John 4:11b).

Baptism in Living Water

In Flint, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Moore of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church began turning an apprehensive eye toward the baptismal pool. His concern was that the water might be harmful, and that it should not be used for baptism. “Moore noted how he is still thinking in crisis mode when it comes to baptizing, and so what he would teach others is: do not be foolishly spiritual. Do not pray over the water and put the people in it anyway; be conscious. . . . attending to physical, material realities—such as avoiding toxic water.” ⁴⁸ The waters of baptism in Flint, which should be “living water,” carried the threat of harm, even death.

These waters also, however, carry the promise of a community, of being Christ’s body in the world, and the challenge to protect living water, everywhere. Together with Flint religious leaders, Kristen Daley Mosier and Andrew Wymer constructed a “baptismal ethic of solidarity,” the call to which “begins the moment we emerge from the baptismal pool or font having received the cleansing waters of new life and the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is renewed with each baptism we witness.” ⁴⁹

In a time of water conflict, commodification, and crises, the sacrament of baptism summons us to attend to the precarity and health of its central element: water. Most of us are baptized with the most ordinary of water, straight from the tap, claiming for ourselves or our children God’s promises of belonging and new life; accepting on behalf of ourselves or our children the demands that baptism will introduce into our lives, to the point of suffering, or even death. All of this, in a few drops of water: The ordinary stuff with which we daily wash our hands, bathe our children, water our gardens, cook our food, and play. It is also, however, this ordinary stuff that pours forth from the skies; seeps into the earth; traverses across rocks, plains, and fields, and sometimes threatens to overwhelm entire communities. Too much or too little water threatens bodies, homes, and habitats. Too much or too little water places families and entire communities in stress. In this ordinary thing, which is a surprisingly precious commodity, resides a whole ecosystem of moral challenges: ensuring that all have enough, that none are made more vulnerable, and that it is preserved as “living water,” neither a commodity for profit nor a tool for industry. Water is life. Water is peril. Water presents moral challenges.

Each of the stories of Jesus’s baptism in the Synoptic gospels share one more common feature: Jesus’s establishment as God’s beloved is followed immediately by an experience of suffering and testing in the wilderness (Matt 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). ⁵⁰ His identity as God’s own beloved does not protect him from suffering, from testing, or from the work of justice in the world. Indeed, Jesus’s baptism ushers him directly into a perilous and morally complex journey.

Jesus’s baptism is the font of our own. Touched by living water, we too receive a sacred identity, a holy responsibility, and a calling to a complex life in which we risk suffering. This mysterious and spiritual reality is why, as described at the beginning of this essay, I felt in my bones the risk that church member John was taking in being baptized. Our baptisms initiate us into new life, and that new life is not without suffering and moral complexity. Indeed, the very water that trickles down our foreheads demands our attention, care, and protection. And in the work of protecting living water for all, our hearts might very well be broken. We will grieve the ecological and human losses associated with the water crisis. In such suffering, our baptisms mirror that of Jesus. Unlike Jesus in the wilderness, however, we do not enter into this work or this suffering alone, but with the whole body of Christ. In baptism, we are joined to the whole communion of saints. As Rev. Dr. Moore put it, “Hey, water brought us together.” ⁵¹