Baptismal Vows

One of my favorite parts of Easter Vigil, besides the great music and the fire, is the renewing of baptismal vows. We do this other times of year too – basically whenever there's a baptism, but apparently we do it on Easter Vigil whether or not anyone is baptized that night. It's always a deeply meaningful experience for me – I think renewing baptismal vows on All Saint's last year was part of what finally pulled me back into the church.

In a way, this is odd, because I'm not overall very concerned with vows. I get frustrated in stories where the hero has decide between his honor, often in the form of keeping a vow, or following his heart for love or compassion or justice: to me the answer is obvious in those cases – the vow needs to go. One of the regular guest preachers at my church once mentioned in a sermon that sometimes there just isn't enough to us to fully act with integrity. Despite our best intentions, we can outgrow our vows or become something we never planned to be and wind up in a situation where keeping our vow imprisons us and possibly those around us. I actually love stories where that happens – don't give me the shiny hero that always keeps his word and avoids even the appearance of impropriety or the slightest hint of temptation; give me the failed ascetic who's broken all of his vows but one, whose honor is in tatters, but who is true to his love (yes, I am thinking of a particular story here). Even with marriage vows, I believe that one ought to go into them with the intention of permanence and shouldn't flee as soon as things get rough, but I also believe that it's possible for people to make honest mistakes or to change dramatically enough that the best thing for both partners is to separate and make something new from their individual lives. (Children, of course, complicate this even further, and I don't pretend to know the answers or to be able to judge when the partners of a marriage have or have not tried hard enough to stay together.)

And yet, and yet...something in the baptismal vows stirs me. The belief part not so much. It's important and all, but it's the familiar Apostle's Creed, not so different from the Nicene Creed we say every week. No, it's the active promises that make my heart swell and cast a solemn calm over my mind. To continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers; to persevere in resisting evil and, whenever I fall into sin, to repent and return to the Lord; to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving my neighbor as myself; to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. These aren't simple things to do – half the time I don't even know what it really means to love my neighbor as myself, and it's often not clear how to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ to people who know the Church as an institution of exclusion and condemnation. More often than not, it's a struggle for me to even remember to try – it's not that I find it too hard; I don't even get to that point – it's that I'm self-centered and caught up in whatever's going on with me and I simply forget that God is my life. So there's a lot of work to be done there.

But standing at Easter Vigil, with dear friends on either side of me, and all of us in the church proclaiming that same intention, I can believe that there's hope. That the life of Christ is possible, that the kingdom of God can exist here on earth, and, perhaps most importantly, that it doesn't depend on our feeble human efforts – I will, with God's help.