Ministries Blog

By Rev. John W. Nupp

Have you ever thought about getting a tattoo? Maybe you are way ahead of me and have already submitted to the trend, which has risen in popularity since the 1970s. Do you favor a symbol or a word, something complex or cerebral, visual or visceral? Notwithstanding the considerations of health risks and personal pain (the word itself may have arrived in the English language by way of combining the Tahitian words for “to puncture” and “to cry out”), there is something to be said for making a temporary experience into an enduring statement. As a pastor, I’m drawn to the more wordy choices from our religious world: “Only God can Judge,” or “I am the Disciple Jesus Loved.” With Lent just around the corner, we could start a trend by offering permanent forehead tattoos or a permanent inscription of the words from our Ash Wednesday admonition, “Repent and Believe the Gospel!” 

For thousands of years, people of God have wrestled with the best ways for making permanent declaration of one’s faith. Notwithstanding the health risks and the pain, much of the population has inherited the Jewish practice of circumcision (how do you say “to cry out” in Hebrew?!). Talk about an enduring statement of faith; a daily personal reminder of the covenant! In the Christian tradition, however, this initiation into the Covenant Community takes the form of the Sacrament of Baptism. It is to this Font that we return when we encourage young people to explore and affirm their place in the Covenant Community. Each time a new member is brought into the fold of our local congregations, we reaffirm these promises. Even in our ordination, we come back to the promise of the call that emerges from the waters of our one Baptism in Christ.

Compared to a bold tattoo or the mark of circumcision, even compared to temporary ashes on one’s forehead, the watermark of baptism seems rather wimpy. The very nature of water means that the mark is transitory, leaving barely any trace at all. You may “make a statement” to the congregation that your faith in Christ matters to you if you chose to be baptized as a youth or adult, but you cannot carry that statement on your person like other marks. You cannot really prove to someone that you have been baptized, can you? I mean, you can show a certificate or produce a piece of paper signed by a pastor, but how do you show the world you belong to God, that you believe in God’s love more than anything else?

We look to ordinary people chosen by God to find examples of what this looks like in real life. Do you have a favorite character in the Bible, someone who reminds you just how ordinary the saints of God really were?  Just read through chapter four of Paul’s letter to the Romans as an example. I love the way Pastor Eugene Peterson re-tells the story of Abraham and Sarah’s struggles: “When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.”  (Romans 4: 17-18, The Message) This all happened, the Bible reminds us, before Abraham made any bold moves to mark himself or his clan as belonging to God. He simply listened and believed God, allowing that faith to shape his life.

In Luther’s Preface to the Letter of Romans, we find this expression of the life of faith: “Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence, a belief in the grace of God so assured that one would die a thousand deaths for its sake. This kind of confidence in God’s grace, this sort of knowledge of it, makes us joyful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and all humankind. That is what the Holy Spirit effects through faith.” Are these words about faith the very ones the Spirit used to warm the heart of John Wesley on Aldersgate Street? Could this faith cut through the tough skin of that Oxford-educated, prayerful-yet-unassured servant that Christ died for him and him alone? Could the Spirit who touched a spark among those early Methodists light a fire in us today?

In preparing to meet with a group of pastors recently, I ran across Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work entitled, God in Search of Man, and this insightful quote: “Living is not a private affair of the individual. Living is what one does with God’s time, what one does with God’s world.” Heschel’s philosophy reflects the Biblical worldview that God offers us all a gift to which we respond with our lives. This is the faith of Abraham and Sarah, the faith of the early followers of Jesus, the expression of confidence in God which shaped the Reformation of the Church 500 years ago and launched a renewal movement called Methodism over 200 years ago. How will the same Spirit of faith shape us today and set fire to us through the watermark of our baptism?