The Prayer Book Catechism is straightforward in its teaching: “…in baptism, I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”
We did not, the Prayer Book says, become Christians when we “accepted Christ as our personal Savior.” We didn’t become Christians “the hour we first believed,” or when we became convinced we were sinners. Those notions, so prevalent in modern Christianity, are foreign ones to the religion of the Prayer Book.
“In baptism I was made a member of Christ.”
That means you weren’t made a Christian when you decided to be one, but when God decided to make you one. Even if you were baptized as an adult and went through baptismal preparation, even if you chose the time and place of your baptism, nothing you could do would make you a Christian until the priest poured the waters of baptism over your head. Being a Christian is less a matter of believing than it’s a matter of being. God made you a Christian through the sacramental waters of baptism.
We can’t baptize ourselves. Somebody has to baptize us. That doesn’t sound profound, but it tells us something important—even essential—about the Christian religion. The Christians of the first few centuries had a saying quite at one with the Prayer Book: unus Christianus, nullus Christianus. “One Christian is no Christian.” You can’t be a Christian by yourself.
“In baptism I was made a member of Christ.”
If we are members of Christ, part of His body, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, we are also members of each other. Fellow Christians don’t simply “go to the same church” we do—in the waters of baptism we are “born again” into the One Family of Faith.
If you have been baptized, you are a Christian. You may not live the life of a Christian, you may deny every article of Faith in the Creed. But you and I are Christians because it pleased God to make us Christians. Only He knows why. You may have been baptized because your parents wanted you to, or even because everybody else in your family is baptized and it’s just “what we do. We don’t really go to church all that much, but…” The reasons for your baptism don’t affect the reality of God’s sacramental act.
Baptism is the beginning of a Christian’s life. After the priest baptized you, he said to your Godparents and the others present: “Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate,” [that is to say, “born again”] and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits; and with one accord make our prayers unto Him, that this Child may lead the rest of his life according to this beginning.”
Baptism isn’t magic, it doesn’t mean we are “going to Heaven,” but it does mean our footsteps are set on the path of the Lord Jesus, following Him where it pleases Him to lead us. We can always leave the path.
Baptism means God has made you His own in a special way, for a special reason. We are meant to “work out our salvation” with other Christians, as members one of another. And the parish church is essential to the “working out of our salvation.” There we receive the sacraments, offer to God the weekly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and have to “work out our salvation” with people we may not know very well and sometimes may not particularly care for! But “in baptism I was made a member of Christ.” Unus Christianus, nullus Christianus.-Fr Gregory Wilcox
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