Brief synopsis of the readings: In Isaiah we read how God upholds his servant who will “bring true justice to the nations.” This servant “does not cry out or shout aloud.” He “does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame.” Finally, this servant will “open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison, and those who live in darkness from the dungeon.” In Luke’s Gospel we read about those who wonder if John the Baptist was the Christ. John corrected them and told them that he will “baptize you with water” but someone is coming “who will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire.” John then baptized all those gathered, including Jesus. Then “heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily shape, like a dove.” And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you.”

When a Catholic is asked about the importance of his faith he will almost certainly speak about some part of the sacramental system. It may be Eucharist (Christ’s Body and Blood) or Reconciliation (that we are not defined by our worst moments) or something like that. In many ways the seven sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Confirmation, Matrimony, Orders, and Anointing) form the framework of our faith.

And because of this sacraments often become the touchstones of our best moments. We rejoice when our children receive First Communion, we celebrate when two people pledge each other in marriage and we cheer when someone chooses ordination.

But there are times when the importance of sacraments may cause conflict. When I ran a religious education program I lost count of the times I spoke with a teenage girl who mistakenly believed that she needed to be confirmed to be married in the church. Likewise I’ve spent hours with engaged couples who feared that they would not be able to marry because they lived together (when in reality, if they were living together they should get married).

And now let’s talk about Baptism. This sacrament has seen dramatic changes in the last 2000 years and has often been a cause of great conflict. Like Eucharist, Baptism has clear origins in Scripture (fun fact: during the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther believed that only Baptism and Eucharist were valid sacraments because they were the only sacraments found in Scripture).

For the first few hundred years of the Christian Church, Baptism was seen solely as the way a person, or more often a family, were welcomed into the community of the faithful. But within a few hundred years many Christians came to believe that unless a person was baptized he could not enter heaven after death. And they carried it one step further: though it was never an official teaching of the Church, it was often taught that those who died without baptism but also without mortal sin also weren’t saved but went to a place called “limbo,” a place not of pain, but devoid of salvation.

For centuries this caused a great deal of anxiety and placed great pressure on new parents to have their newborns baptized as soon as possible. I dabble in genealogy and in looking at baptism records from the 1800s I’ve seen instances where babies were baptized the day of or the day after their birth.

This was brought home to me in my own family. My grandmother’s younger sister and her husband gave birth to a stillborn child in 1937. The pastor of her church refused to allow the infant to be buried in the parish cemetery because the baby had not been baptized. Happy ending: my great aunt waited until that pastor was replaced and was able to convince the new pastor to transfer her infant’s body to the parish cemetery.

I’m writing all this not to politicize baptism and other sacraments but to discuss the importance of rites of initiation into a community of faith. And virtually all Christians celebrate baptism in the same way, taken from today’s Gospel and the end of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

In today’s Gospel we can safely assume that everyone who John baptized were adults, including Jesus. Some Christians have looked at this and decided that we should not baptize babies, but instead wait until they can maturely and faithfully asked to be baptized. They normally choose this as adolescents or young adults.

And while I completely understand this, let me argue on the wisdom of baptizing babies. Like many I don’t believe in limbo and I don’t believe that only those baptized into a Christian church are saved (imagine God telling an infant that he is being denied salvation because the priest refused to baptize him).

But I find great wisdom in the idea that we welcome a person into the community of faith before the person understands what is going on. Practically, if we wait until someone can maturely and faithfully ask for it, we put great pressure on the adolescent or young adult. If that person was raised in a church he will probably feel some tension to ask for baptism, regardless of his faith journey. If we look over our life of faith it may be difficult to pinpoint the moment our faith became our own, and we shouldn’t be in the business of deciding when that should be.

Infant baptism, on the other hand, allows us to say this: “Before you knew who you were, and before you knew who we were, we knew who you were. Baptizing you allows you to grow into the faith at your own pace, giving you the opportunity to follow your own path. As you grow we, the community of faith, promise to not only to teach but also to model. Our prayer is that we will make a life of faith and discipleship irresistible to you, and while you won’t remember being baptized, you will celebrate it.

And that, Charlie Brown, is what baptism is all about.