In her sermon to mark the start of the spring semester Jan. 10, Eastern Mennonite Seminary (EMS) Associate Dean Nancy Heisey asked the audience to recall the deeply personal experience of baptism.
The topic was fitting, both for a new semester and the 105 students engaged in some kind of study at EMS — whether part-time or full-time, taking classes on campus on via distance learning. At a larger event the next day in Lehman Auditorium, EMU’s ninth president Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman was welcomed, and welcomed the campus community in turn, to her first convocation of a new era.
Heisey too begins just her second semester as associate dean, marking a new era of leadership in the seminary.
Thus the subject of baptism is a symbolic topic to begin a kind of spiritual and academic immersion into the new semester, notable also, Heisey said, because several denominations — notably Mennonites, Catholics and Lutherans — are engaged in ongoing discussions about the topic.
“How often have you been in a worship setting when you have invited others, or someone has invited you, to remember your baptism? What was it like? Do you have pictures … What kind of ancient, birthing-related whisper was re-awakened by your chrismation, or the dipping of your tiny naked body into the font?
Her questions covered a variety of baptism experiences, from those who may have been very young and have only seen themselves in photos to the adolescent and adult baptismal experiences most common in the Mennonite faith.
“Did the water trickle down the back of your shirt? Did the minister seem in a hurry to pull you back up out of the water?”
Then she shared the experience of her own baptism in New Mexico as a child, during which no comparison was made to Jesus’s baptism.
“What to make of that?” she asks.
Heisey began her sermon titled “Baptism of the Lord,” with a clip featuring a mother begging for baptism for her sick child from the movie “The Radicals,” (1990) which tells the story of the Anabaptist movement and the couple who led it, Michael and Margaretha Sattler.
In the remembrance of these experiences lies an important spiritual message, she says, before turning to Matthew’s description of Jesus’s baptism (3:13-17) and Isaiah’s remembrance of the event (42:1-9): “a call to the Servant and to the community gathering around him [that] gives an opportunity to come back to the baptism of Jesus.”
She continues:
The EMU website talks about what we believe in peacebuilding, global community, cross-cultural engagement, sustainability and stewardship, faith formation, and service to others. I love all those things, and they were the first reason that I considered coming to teach here.
Then, as a final thought, the web statement adds: EMU is a Christian university, rooted in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition.
For us, however, I claim that the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition is not enough. Remembering our baptism, as presented in the movie ‘The Radicals,’ does matter. From there, though, we have the road of Spirit-filled and impelled discipleship in front of us.