What Child is This?

Thoughts about an Infant Baptism

By Clifton F. Guthrie 

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It took me by surprise that there were twenty-five people in our small Episcopal church on Christmas morning.  Surprise, because although my wife and I had several years back taken up the habit of attending worship on Christmas Day, we had grown accustomed to being almost the only ones there besides the priest.  Often we have had to call around even to find a church holding a service on December 25.  Most churches that I know throw all their energies into the candlelight services the night before and stay closed on the day itself, on the safe assumption that the morning of the Incarnation belongs entirely to stockings and coffee cake.  And with ice on the roads and a midnight vigil only a few hours before, I was truly surprised to see so many people that morning in our small-town church in Maine.  To be honest I was also somewhat concerned: in the absence of the organist, I had agreed to lead the carol singing with my guitar, and I am a very poor guitarist.  I was embarrassed in advance for the missed chord changes and awkward silences that characterize my playing.

The “crowd” that Christmas morning was immediately explained by the fact that there was to be a baptism, the family and sponsors of the child making up the bulk of the congregation.  Christmas Day, despite spotty attendance, is listed in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer as a principal feast in the Church.  It is not one of the four occasions on which baptism is deemed “especially appropriate”: the Easter Vigil, Pentecost, All Saints’, and the Baptism of our Lord (the First Sunday after the Epiphany).  Still, it seemed to me that our priest showed enormous pastoral wisdom when she encouraged baptism on Christmas, not least because it clearly boosted attendance.

Before the liturgy began, the priest invited the couple to introduce their daughter to us.  They had recently adopted her from China, they said.  She had literally been left in a village square with a note pinned to her: her name, her birth date, and her Chinese zodiac sign.  I’m not close enough to the family to know whether anyone at the Chinese adoption agency really knew the full story behind her abandonment.  As a parent myself, however, I can’t imagine that anyone could abandon a child without extreme grief and reluctance.  The adoptive parents assume that she was a victim of the Chinese one-child policy and a culture that values boys more than girls.  Whatever the sad story of her first nine months of life on this earth, she was deeply wanted now by a childless couple in Maine.

His eyes shining as he spoke, the new father told us how long they had waited for a child, how a phone call meant a sudden trip, and then how they had immediately fallen in love with “the most beautiful baby girl on the planet.”  She would be baptized into her Chinese name, but they would call her Katy for short.  The proud grandmother gushed at this point that Christmas day is the anniversary of her own baptism.  I gathered that this was one reason for choosing this day.  So there she was, Katy the baptismal candidate.  Surrounded by her new family and holding a soft toy, she showed every sign of being loved.  On this special day she was dressed in traditional Chinese costume: bright red silk pajamas with matching red slippers.  Her story reminded me just how much our survival in this world depends on the love of others.

The baptismal service began at the front of the church with the parents and sponsors presenting Katy and rejecting evil on her behalf.  Then we moved to the back, watched as the water splashed, heard the thanksgiving over the water, and saw Katy duly baptized and anointed.  It was a strange and powerful thing to see this child whose hold on the world was recently so tenuous being marked with the water of death and new life.  Afterwards, we welcomed her into the family of faith and passed the peace.

As someone who teaches in a seminary, I know I am tempted to idealize the sacraments.  But I’ve come to believe strongly that we need to see them more realistically.  We should ask ourselves hard questions like whether repeated eating of the bread and wine really forms us into a community of reconciliation, and whether baptizing infants really initiates them into a life in Christ.  With the range of religious choices available in our pluralistic culture, certainly there are no guarantees that any American baby baptized in the church will automatically grow up and remain Christian. 

Ritual scholar Ronald Grimes notes in his recent book, Deeply Into the Bone, that the Anglican tradition of having well-chosen godparents at baptism does help ritually to knit the baptized infant into this larger family: “Infant baptism not only admitted a child to a community but also expanded the definition of afamily, solidifying ties among relatives, friends, and allies.”[i]  I am grateful that American Episcopalians have retained the tradition of godparents, but wonder how deeply into the bone this practice sinks anymore.  For example, the priest noted in the service that two of the godparents couldn’t be at the service that morning to participate in the baptism.  At this announcement I remembered with some sadness that one of the couples my wife and I asked to be godparents of our son—a couple whose marriage seemed rock-solid at the time—have since had a rancorous divorce, leaving their jointly-made godparenting promises difficult to fulfill.  The baptismal ritual seems so fragile at these times.  I also noticed that my own ritual promise to be a part of Katy’s new Christian family, to “do all in [my] power to support Katy in her life in Christ,” actually felt rather ambivalent because I know that in our mobile society there is a good chance that I won’t see Katy grow into her toddler years let alone see her grow substantially into her life in Christ.  Given all these realities, I sometimes wonder whether Christian baptism is more ritual fantasy than ritual initiation.

Grimes expresses similar doubts when he questions the claim of Christian pastoral theologians Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley that “[baptismal] water is thicker than blood.”  He remarks in contrast that, “However weakened kinship ties may be in today’s world, the blood of kinship is still thicker than the water of liturgy.”[ii]

I thought about these things as we left the font and returned to our seats.  I picked up the guitar and led the congregation in a rendition of “What Child is This?”  It was hard to think about Jesus when I sang these words.  I was thinking about Katy.  Indeed, what child is this?  Whose child is this?  Well, here’s what we can say for sure: she’s a survivor of abandonment; she’s been adopted into a loving nuclear family and cooed over by grandparents and godparents present and absent; she’s been celebrated on a Christmas morning by a modest crowd bucking the trend of holiday church attendance; and she has been poorly honored by inexpert guitar music.  Despite the latter, perhaps the ritual has more power than I first want to give it credit for.  I like to believe that Katy really has been knit into an extended family of faith.  Like the rest of us who attended that small service in Maine on Christmas, Katy has been marked with the water of Christ’s death and life.  Water that is both fragile and thin, and thicker than blood.

Cliff Guthrie

The Feast of the Holy Family [Jan. 1], 2002

Clifton F. Guthrie is Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Studies at Bangor Theological Seminary.