What meaning does your baptism have for you today?

I’ve heard it said that whenever Martin Luther hit a moment of real stress — and the man had plenty — he’d reach up, touch his forehead, trace the sign of the cross, and say out loud, “I am baptized. My God is a jealous God, and He will not let go of what is His. I am baptized.” I love that. What I find almost funny about it is that Luther had zero memory of his own baptism. He was an infant. He wasn’t drawing strength from a memory. He was drawing strength from a fact.

That’s basically what I want to talk about, because I think this might be the one where a good chunk of you — people I love and deeply respect — are going to disagree with me. Is infant baptism biblical? I’m not writing this to convince you you’re wrong. I’ve always believed we can hold different convictions on things like this and still share a table. I just want us all to think a little deeper. And since my own tradition has practiced infant baptism for well over a century and a half, I figure you deserve to know why.

Let me start with a little game. What do Martin Luther, John and Charles Wesley, Mother Teresa, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rosa Parks, Corrie ten Boom, Fred Rogers, Desmond Tutu, and George Washington have in common?

They were all baptized as infants. So was I — one month old, in 1968. I don’t remember it. My parents just told me it happened.

Now, some folks, using their understanding of baptism, would say that means I’m not actually baptized. Not biblically, anyway. Which means, by that logic, neither was Mother Teresa. Neither was Bonhoeffer. Neither was John Wesley. Neither was our first president. That’s a lot of good company to accidentally excommunicate.

I want to tell you a story that still makes me laugh. About twenty years ago I was leading a baptism service at a little church I pastored in Piqua — full immersion, in the pond right out front on 25A, next to the high school. I’d just baptized a woman in her twenties I’d led to Christ a few months before. Afterward, this biker — a woman I knew from the community — walked up to me, beaming, and said, “Pastor Dennis, we love you and this church! And I gotta say, I’m so glad you’re not like most Methodist churches that baptize babies!”

You should’ve seen her face when I smiled and said, “Actually… we do.”

I don’t think she ever came back.

But God has a sense of humor, because just this summer I was at a biker rally in Lima, and guess who was sitting right there in the crowd? Hadn’t seen her in twenty years. And she loved what I had to say. Apparently she’ll listen to a Methodist preacher just fine — she just doesn’t want him talking about babies and water in a Methodist building.

So, did the early church actually practice this? The New Testament never comes right out and says “baptize your infants.” But it never argues against it either, and there are some real clues. On the Day of Pentecost, after Peter’s sermon landed on three thousand people, he told the crowd, “Repent and be baptized… The promise is for you and your children.” That doesn’t nail the case shut, but it sure suggests the Holy Spirit’s promise wasn’t reserved for adults only.

Then there’s the Philippian jailer in Acts 16 — the guy who’s about to take his own life until Paul and Silas stop him, and by the end of the night, “he and his whole household were baptized.” That word “household” in the Greek isn’t vague. It means everybody living under that roof — kids, servants, the works. Same pattern shows up with Cornelius, Lydia, Stephanas. I saw this firsthand a few years ago visiting Christians in Bethlehem, where it’s still common: the head of the household comes to faith, and the whole family gets baptized together. I’ll be honest, my own evangelical wiring makes me a little uneasy with that — I believe deeply in personal faith and personal decision. But I can’t just wave away what the first-century church actually seemed to be doing.

Here’s the deeper question underneath all of this, though: What actually is baptism? Is it something you do, or something God does?

Most of Protestant Christianity in America thinks of baptism as an Ordinance of Faith — something you choose, once you’ve personally decided to follow Jesus. You’re the main character in that story. But nearly 70% of Christians worldwide — Catholics, Orthodox, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Anglicans — understand it as a Sacrament of Grace. And in that version, you are not the main character. God is.

That makes some people nervous. Are we baptizing babies into something they never agreed to? No. Nobody agrees their way into salvation — not a baby, not you, not me. We call that grace-before-faith “prevenient grace” in the Wesleyan tradition. It’s the grace that shows up before we’re capable of asking for it.

I think about circumcision — the old covenant sign, given to eight-day-old boys who had no say in the matter and were never re-circumcised later to “make it more personal.” Paul tells us baptism is the new covenant’s version of that mark, except now — and this still gets me — it’s not limited to boys. Water works on everybody. Paul could write “in Christ there is neither male nor female… for you are all baptized into Christ Jesus” precisely because the covenant sign stopped requiring a body part only half of us have.

Thirty-five years ago I pastored a small church in southwest Ohio, and there was a twelve-year-old boy in that congregation named Jeffrey. Everybody called him the miracle child. He’d been born premature, with disabilities that meant he could never understand or choose salvation the way we usually talk about it. By some people’s theology, Jeffrey shouldn’t have been baptized — he couldn’t consent, couldn’t comprehend. One Sunday, surrounded by his family and his church family, we baptized him anyway. It remains one of the most theologically important moments of my ministry, because it made something click that I’d only understood in my head until then: baptism is God’s work before it’s ever ours. We cannot save Jeffrey. We cannot save a baby. We cannot save ourselves.

So here’s what I keep coming back to. Somewhere near you today, there’s probably a sink, a shower, a rain puddle, something with water in it. Dip a finger in and, like Luther, trace the cross and pray it quietly: “I am baptized.”

Because you are loved. You are His. And in you, He is well pleased.