Indwelling Christ, indwelling Christians: living as marked.

I want to explore both sides of indwelling: the way Christ dwells in us, and also the less-explored side of indwelling, the way we dwell in Christ. We Christians are marked women and men because of that mutual exchange.

I want to probe two marks on our body. In the Eucharist, we take Christ's body into our own and literally become what we eat. It transforms us. Much of the literature on the indwelling Christ, from both the Finns and the Americans, explores Luther's eucharistic theology to unpack this side of indwelling. Christ dwells in us. (1) But there is another side of indwelling, the way we dwell in Christ. In baptism we are taken up into the body of Christ, making us dwell in that marked body. We transform the world. This "other side of indwelling" is less discussed, and I argue that it has equal, perhaps even primary, importance as we think about that mutual exchange between the body of Christ and the body of believers.

Luther's great 1520 treatise, The Freedom of a Christian, features a cosmic courtroom drama, but it also plays as an intimate bedroom drama. (2) Luther uses boldly erotic imagery from Paul's letter to the Ephesians to express a "one flesh" union between Christ and the church: Christ is the Bridegroom; the church is the bride. Through baptism we dwell in Christ.

Taken together, these two practices, the Lord's Supper and baptism, have personal and corporate dimensions. Through the work of the Spirit of Christ Jesus, they work on each of us individually, enabling and empowering us to reach out of ourselves toward the neighbor and into a world. The Lord's Supper works primarily on the individual: Heavenly food transforms the self of each believer coram hominibus to increasingly love the neighbor. (3) We become what we eat; Christ transforms us. Baptism has a more corporate dimension, gathering scattered believers into an organic whole, where we are marked as the body of Christ in the world. We transform the world.

I want to talk about bodies, real bodies--the marked ones we see pierced and tattooed around us (maybe even our own), your body and my body, Christ's body and the church as the marked body of Christ. Then I discuss the Lord's Supper as one of the marks on Christ's resurrected body. Through this practice we take Christ's body into our own, becoming what we eat. Christ dwells in us. Through the Spirit of the risen Christ we are transformed. This is one side, perhaps the more popular side, of indwelling, and this first form of indwelling has powerful implications for how we live in the world.

Then I talk about baptism as another mark on Christ's resurrected body. Through this practice Christ takes our bodies into his own. We dwell in Christ. Through the Spirit of the risen Christ, we transform the world. This is the other side of indwelling, less discussed, and this second form of indwelling has equally powerful implications for how we live in the world.

I speak primarily as an ethicist, only secondarily as a historian. Both titles make me squirm, and not just a little. I consider myself basically a voyeur: I love watching how people conduct their lives. The discipline of history allows me to watch how people used to conduct their lives. The discipline of ethics permits me to examine how they conduct their lives in the present. What we believe in--or don't believe in--has the power to form and inform, transform and deform who we are and how we are in the world.

OK--on to bodies.

Bodies: reading the marks

Mine first, then you can show me yours. Not the present body, but the one almost thirty years ago pedaling furiously to a lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann was giving in Tubingen, a small university town on the Neckar River in south Germany. It was cold, I was late, and when a car passed a little too close on my left I overcompensated and bumped into an extruding door handle on a parked car, smashing my right knee. I got off my bike to assess the damage. My thick winter tights had not been broken, and I assumed nothing else had either. A few hours later when I returned home, I peeled the tights off and found myself peering into a very clean, very deep cut that revealed an anatomy textbook's view of the inner musculature of the knee. Off to the local emergency room, from which I emerged with a walking cast up to my hip. Now, it is true that German emergency medicine dictates that everything that can be done will be done. At the time, I thought the treatment a bit extreme. But the injury was more serious than I first acknowledged. I am lucky that the wound was not deeper and was grateful to gradually resume, a mere eight weeks later, my usual manically active life, and I am reminded of the whole incident by a crooked four-inch scar wandering up my knee. You wonder how people get into this business? I'm a marked woman.

But then, aren't we all? And couldn't we all tell similar stories as we contemplate the history that is quite literally written on our bodies? So it is with God, who through the incarnation took on a body and became one of us. There are stories etched on our bodies, and there are stories etched onto God's. It is worth thinking about God's body as marked.

Let's think about the body of Christ. And for once let's not think about it abstractly, as some mystical body that Christians, present and past, call Church, capital C. No, I want to think about Christ's physical body, the one that trod the dusty streets of the Ancient Near East, whose feet got cracked and dirty just like everyone else's. I want to think about Christ's physical body, the one that endured the blows of the Romans, the sting of a crown of thorns, the spit of centurions, the flailing and floggings graphically depicted in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I want to think about Christ's body crucified, tortured to the point of asphyxiation.

I want to think about Christ's body the way Florentine artist Fra Angelico did as he painted frescoes for each of the cells at the Benedictine convent of San Marco in Florence. He painted his way into that body--so much so that it's hallucinogenic. In one of the frescoes, Christ is blindfolded and tied to a column. Around him, hanging in air, without any human person attached to them, are the instruments of his torture: a leather strap coiled to strike, a mace swung back for direct hit, a stick braced beating, two pursed lips--they are attached to no face--pursed, with spit flying from them. Because he cannot see, Christ knows neither the origin nor the agency behind the weapons of suffering. The whole scene is hauntingly like the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib. Though he cannot see, Christ, like them, registers each instrument of torture deeply in his body. And so do we, for the artist has communicated to us how it feels to be so defenseless, not knowing where the next blow will come from, who will deliver it, where it will connect with raw flesh. Fra Angelico paints it all with an extraordinary combination of both compassion and nerve. He had no doubt that the body of Christ bore all kinds of scars. That body was marked.

This is not fun to contemplate, and I suspect that the controversy surrounding Gibson's movie and the fascination with the Fall 2005 exhibit of Fra Angelico's work at New York's Metropolitan Museum are at least partly about our reluctance to believe that God actually has and had a body. We are closet Gnostics--alas! I might like to have cosmetic surgery on my knee and erase that ugly scar, but it's very dangerous to do cosmetic surgery on the crucifixion and erase Jesus' scars, the marks that were on his body. Erase those scars, and we can no longer remember the story of the resurrection. We cannot remember that crucified body. All we are left with is a Gnostic Jesus who does nothing but offer up enigmatic sayings ad nauseam. (Ever wonder why the Gnostic gospels never made it into the canon? They are simply too boring. All Jesus ever does is talk, talk, talk, then take people aside for secret conversation and talk some more.)

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The story of Thomas in John's Gospel will not allow us to forget either the crucifixion or the resurrection. I am indebted here to the work of my late friend and colleague Dr. Robert Smith, who read the Gospel of John backward through the eyes of a Thomas who will not believe it's Jesus unless he can finger those wounds. (4) The gnostic Gospel of Thomas is embarrassed that God would even get wounded, much less have a body. The Thomas of John's Gospel is defiantly convinced that the resurrected Lord is a marked man. He demands proof of that for himself--and for us. Reading John's Gospel through the eyes of Thomas, Smith concluded that Thomas's story is not about his doubt but about Jesus' resurrected body. Thomas insists that he will not believe "unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hands in his side" (Jn 20:25). According to Smith's reading, the real shock is not Thomas's deep need to know, not even his demand for "visible proof"; the real shock is that visible proofs are available. This is not a tale of Thomas's doubt, as later generations of Christians dubbed it. It is about Thomas's conviction that God has a body. It is about resurrected bodies, that they are marked. Thomas needs to know that Jesus was a marked man, and his testimony stands against our temptation to forget that God has a body, erase the crucifixion, and fast-forward to the good parts. As Smith put it, "I try to take my stand with Thomas ... he understands the wounds as central and essential in any estimate of Jesus, in any talk about God, and in any teaching about discipleship." Unless we take the gnostic escape, we have to think about the marks on the body of Christ.

Let's take all of this a step further. Anyone dwelling in that body will be similarly marked. Anyone in whom Christ dwells will be similarly marked. And this kind of indwelling, both as Christ dwells in us and as we dwell in Christ, offers deepest consolation--if we can stand the experience.

How are we to put all of this together? I think we get some help from the folks around us, maybe the folks among us, maybe from our own bodies. How many of you are pierced or tattooed? In my more cynical moments, I can write off these markings as "tramp stamps," small efforts at exhibitionism. Two things shake my cynicism. One is the realization that these markings represent an effort by some to stake out some turf in a world that looks like it's crumbling under their feet. They regard the erosion of foundations of institutions such as family, church, and government with a cynicism born of despair. Perhaps the tattoos and piercings stake claim to the only "still point of the turning world"--their own bodies. (5) We who judge them, often severely, ought ourselves to be judged by their need. Have we given them nothing more stable to hang on to?

The other thing that shakes me out of my middle-aged cynicism is the winsome voice of Dame Juliana of Norwich, a fourteenth-century mystic and visionary. She sought similar markings, and perhaps if there had been a tattoo parlor in downtown Norwich she would have been satisfied and gone no further. But Norwich was a busy market town, with mother houses to various religious orders--and a pit to burn heretics in the town square. Julian had to find that "still point" elsewhere. The account of her search, Revelations of Divine Love, (6) registers her heartfelt request to be marked. She desires to share in Christ's sufferings, to literally receive three wounds (and she calls them wounds!): true contrition, natural compassion, and unshakable longing. She wants to experience Christ's passion and death, and for her it is not at all a spectator sport. Juliana wants to be in Christ's body, to suffer as he suffered, weep as he wept, drop into the abyss of a death he conquered. Juliana reaches out for the ultimate in compassion (which literally means to "suffer with" someone or something). Her request is granted, and not just abstractly. Taken up into Christ's passion, she suffers a long and wasting illness that brings her to the brink of death; then she miraculously recovers and lives to tell the tale. She tells of her suffering inside the body of Christ not just once but twice, as she wrote and then, over the course of the next twenty years, rewrote her story. Besides ranking alongside Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as one of the classics in the emerging vernacular, Revelations of Divine Love charts the course of her journey into the body of the dying Christ. What she finds at the center, drawing her forward like a magnet, is love: "Love was his meaning." Talk about dwelling in Christ!

Is this so foreign to us? If you have ever been with a loved one in pain, you know what Juliana is talking about. You want to enter their pain, get inside their head, suffer with them, take the pain away. Think of how much more difficult and yet more necessary this is when dealing with children or animals, who can't speak for themselves, at least not in a language we can understand.

A good friend whose husband was desperately ill told me one day that she wanted to try each of his pills one by one, in order to get inside his body and better experience what he was going through. 'If I can't make it go away," she said in that wonderful spirit of "what-the-hellness" that marks that the territory beyond grief, "at least I can be there with him." Again, love was the magnet, drawing her into a place she never would have gone, never wished to be, never could have been alone.

The desire to suffer with Christ crowds late medieval piety. Juliana of Norwich gives us written record of this longing; St. Francis of Assisi gives us a visual icon. Like Juliana, Francis prayed to receive the wounds of Christ in his own body, and after much prayer and fasting on Mount La Verna he did. These wounds or marks, called the stigmata, were a sign of how profoundly Francis had entered into the body of Christ. So deeply did he dwell in that mystery that he bore on his body the marks Christ bore on his body at the time of his death.

The image of Francis receiving the stigmata was replete throughout medieval piety; it could not have failed to escape Martin Luther's attention. Yet Luther would not have countenanced anything so singular, so virtuoso, or so exotic. He excoriated a spirituality that you had to work toward, and he vilified--and splendidly did he vilify them!--spiritualities of ascent, where the devotee had to work toward a spiritual perfection that imitated the life of Christ. His was a spirituality of descent, portrayed so lyrically in his Christmas hymns:

All praise to you, eternal Lord
Clothed in a garb of flesh and blood,
A manger choosing for a throne
While worlds on worlds are yours alone.
Hallelujah! (7)

Hallelujah, indeed! But Luther shared that late medieval longing to be marked with Christ's suffering and resurrection. He was sure that the Christian holy people would be marked by dwelling in the body of Christ, and he brings that physical dimension into his ecclesiology. In his rich treatise on holiness (now there's a word we don't hear much in Lutheran circles!) On the Councils and the Church, (8) he presents seven "marks" of the church: the preaching and hearing of the word, baptism, the Lord's Supper, forgiveness or the office of the keys, ordination, prayer/praise/catechesis, and the way of the cross of Christian discipleship. Too often we think of these as Christian practices or spiritual disciplines. Or they become characteristics of the church, the way we characterize a certain style of house or kind of tree. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright buildings display distinctive architectural traits: low, horizontal lines, rectangular arrangement, attention to space as well as structure to create a whole environment. There are unique characteristics to his "prairie style."

Should we apply this analogically to the marks of the church? No. When thinking of Luther's "marks of the church" we should not think "traits" or "characteristics" but wounds and scars, tattoos and piercing. After all, if the resurrected body of Christ was still scarred, so will the people be who dwell in it.

I want to look at two of these wounds, marks on the body: the Lord's Supper, through which we take Christ's marked body into our own, allowing him to dwell in each of us, transforming us; and baptism, which incorporates us into that marked body of Christ, inviting us to dwell in it, transforming the world. Christ dwells in us, and we dwell in Christ, and we are marked by taking that body into ours; we are marked by becoming part of that body. Let's look now at each side of indwelling.

Christ dwells in us: The Lord's Supper--you are what you eat!

The Lord's Supper is one of the biggest marks on the body of Christ. Then, as now, disciples are what they eat. (9) Feeding on Christ, we take Christ's wounded body into our own, so that he literally dwells in us. So nourished, we become his marked body in a world that hungers for his presence.

I want to look at the Lord's Supper as a three-course meal within an elaborate ritual of blessing. The Lord's Supper is first and foremost holy food, nourishing us with Christ's body and blood. Second, it is food that is not simply eaten but shared. Third, it defines eucharistic living, a practice of blessing in the midst of a banquet of beggars.

First course: Holy food, holy people. In my part of the world, you are what you eat. Particularly in Berkeley, the "Foodies" rule. Standing in line for coffee, patrons place their orders in paragraphs: "No foam, no fat-soy, double-decaf latte," etc. I am impressed daily with the religious fervor with which people discuss restaurants or recipes. People are justified by diet, not by faith.

So it was in the ancient world. Diet was as determinative to them as genetic code is to us. Food hard-wired people, and classical literature prescribed in mind-numbing detail what you should eat and what you should drink, given particular body types, gender, general physical condition, and activities that occupied one's time. We need only review the dietary codes in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and realize that the Hebrew people were not alone in the ancient world. Diet segregated tribes and classes of people; it separated rich and poor. Different groups of people had access to different kinds of food, and so they participated in very different dietary regimens, some from necessity, some from choice. In a culture obsessed with eating and drinking the right kinds of food, Jesus' approach to food caused a great deal of controversy.

Jesus' dining practices and his table mates alike received censure. Again and again people commented: "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!" (Matt 11:19) The words refer not to any intemperance on Jesus' part but to his choice of company: He ate and drank with the wrong kinds of people. It's the standard description of friendship in the ancient world. According to the Miss Manners of the Ancient Near East, your friends were the people you ate with, and the people you ate with were your friends. Table fellowship signaled life-friendship. Friends not only dined together; they shared their lives. So the familiar snipe made at Jesus adds up like an equation: He eats with them, he drinks with them; therefore, he is their friend. In eating and drinking with outcasts and sinners, all the "wrong" kinds of folk, Jesus signaled his willingness to share his life with them. Jesus' table etiquette gained him notoriety.

Eventually Jesus took his dining practices to the extreme, offering himself as food. This gesture absolutely upset the social order. In John's Gospel he proclaims himself to be "living water," "bread from heaven," "the true vine." These are all titles a local Foodie would understand--but be utterly horrified to find applied to a person. The Last Supper drew all kinds and classes of people together around a common meal with a single menu. Tax collectors and sinners ate alongside rabbis and zealots--and everywhere dirty, stinky fishermen. Yet this common meal hard-wired everyone in ways that today would be like surgically reconfiguring their individual genetic codes. All of these folks, whatever their gender, tribe, or genetic code, would be made one through this supernatural nourishment. Through eating and drinking the body and flood of Christ, the disciples would be essentially altered.

This is still the disturbing truth today. Gradually, as we become what we eat, we turn into the body of Christ in the world. We reach out to the people he reached out to; we teach the people he taught; we dine with the people he dined with. We bring God's blessing into the world. If Christ dwells in us, we find ourselves altered, marked for blessing.

Second course: food is shared, not simply eaten. If this meal were all about eating food, we would swarm the altar, grabbing for chunks of bread for ourselves and fighting for every drop of wine. That is not what happens. The words of institution state this clearly: "The body of Christ, given for you"--not "taken by you." The gap between giving and taking is enormous.

I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, in one of those tiny brick row houses, picturesque but crowded. A neighborhood mom used to summon her hungry family to dinner by calling up and down the alley: "Come and get it!" Appearing out of nowhere, children scrambled in to take what they could. Dining was apparently about "getting it," not "giving it," about taking and not sharing food. For this family, the Lord's Supper would have required remarkable restraint. The words "given for you" sum up the countercultural character of this meal. They free us from the "Mine!" fields of daily life. They liberate me from enslavement to everything I consider rightly mine by dint of hard work, earned compensation, or entitlement. The Lord's Supper shares food that is given for me out of a generosity I cannot begin to fathom, not taken by me as my just due.

The distance between giving and taking is the difference between an open hand and a clenched fist. That distance creates a space where miracles happen, whether they occur in a soup kitchen or a church sanctuary. Miracles happen wherever food is shared, as the feeding of the five thousand demonstrates. The whole miracle of feeding happens because a small boy broke out of the "Mine!" fields. He shared his minor provisions, then Jesus blessed it and shared it further. Finally, the disciples shared the blessed food with the crowd. Five thousand people ate their fill; twelve baskets of food were left over--all because a young boy did not declare his simple meal "Mine!"

I have always thought that this miracle should be dubbed not "the miraculous feeding" but "the miraculous sharing." It stands as the first recorded soup kitchen in the ancient world. It foreshadows the Last Supper, where Jesus shared himself as bread and wine, presenting his own body as food and his own blood as drink. It also plays up to that wonderful story of the First Breakfast, where the resurrected Christ joins disciples who have returned to their old haunts, the Sea of Galilee, to cook them breakfast. This time he's grilling fish--not to eat, but to share. And at that meal, he directs the disciples to a ministry of sharing food: "Feed my lambs; feed my sheep" (John 21: 15-17). In a very real sense, the Lord's Supper sets in motion a miraculous chain of events that continues to this day, as we share food we have received with others. The meal is not finished until we have reached the hungriest mouth in the world. Shared food nourishes us; sharing food defines our mission. Like the loaves and fishes at the miraculous feeding, the food we share will have no end, for we share in the endless goodness of Christ.

Christ's endless goodness is often depicted as an endless feast, and many descriptions of eternal life depict an eschatological banquet. As a modern parable depicts this feast, it will be open to everyone, regardless of whether they are seated in heaven or hell. In hell the inmates gather around a stupendous banquet with fabulous food and drink. There is only one thing wrong: the utensils the guests use to feed themselves are two feet long. There is no way they can reach their mouths with such elongated forks, and the scene at the table is one of pandemonium, as the guests first complain, then physically fall to blows in their frustration. In heaven the residents gather around the same stupendous banquet at a table groaning with every good thing. The table is set with the same large utensils, but the guests dine with pleasure. The forks and spoons reach easily across the table, and guests feed each other. They can eat the meal because they share it. They don't even think about what they are supposed to do. Eucharistic practice shapes a spirit of eucharistic generosity. Disciples share food because that is simply who they are. These table mates learned generosity from the Lord's Supper. Like a mother duck imprinting her baby ducklings, Jesus' patterned them. Now sharing is what they do; more precisely, sharing is who they are. They practice eucharistic generosity.

Third course: eucharistic living. A good friend of mine lost her husband quite suddenly. In the weeks after his death, she began to lose weight as well. Her concerned friends descended upon her, and we bore casseroles--and questions. Was she sick? Was she depressed? Had she lost the will to live? She shrugged off our questions and made us take our casseroles home. "It's not a big problem: I just hate eating alone," she said. "I mean, what's the point? So if you're going to bring me food, be prepared to stay and share it with me."

The widow taught us all an important lesson, that eating is fundamentally a social act. Someday scientists and dieticians will prove that she is right. Food tastes better in the company of others. Something in the chemistry of eating together enhances a meal. The flavors blend better; the spices are more vivid.

We forget the social dimension of eating in a fast-food, fly-by-dining culture. We drive-through and eat-on-the-run so that we don't have to "waste time" preparing a meal. Many families rarely sit down at a table together to share a meal, given the balance of soccer games and piano lessons and PTA meetings and business trips. The Lord's Supper calls a halt to fast-food dining by inviting us to slow down and to sit down. We flourish in the company of others, for God blesses us in and through our neighbors, the blessings they bring and the food they share.

The message of eucharistic living goes deeper. Fast-food dining fuels fast-food spirituality, as shelf upon shelf of self-help books witness. There is a limit on how much we can help ourselves, however well-read we are. Like the widow, we depend upon our friends for food and companionship. Their presence blesses us in immeasurably, for they are both kindred spirits and the presence of God's Spirit. God blesses us in and through others, using their presence to bear the divine.

A friend who had visited Calcutta spoke of his experience navigating down a busy street in the downtown area amid a sea of outstretched hands. Beggars lined the sidewalk, and he could not move without someone shoving a hand in his face, asking for a coin, a scrap of food, or a blessing. He was shocked by the level of suffering and need, by the way other pedestrians moved through the crowd without seeing the sea of waving hands in front of them. But he also was jolted by the revelation that we all have hands out for hand-outs. The people in front of him were under no illusion that they could make it on their own. They needed the kindness of strangers in order to survive. But don't we all?

I suspect this was one of Luther's last insights. The friends who had crowded around his bedside awaited nothing less than confirmation that the Reformation had been God's plan. If Luther died in agony, everything would have been a mistake. If he had a good death, they were golden, good for another couple of centuries. Luther surprised them all with a very enigmatic observation: "We are all beggars." We depend on each other more than we know for food, for blessing, for friendship.

This final mark on of the indwelling Christ points to a final banquet when all the children of the world will sit at table to break bread and drink wine together. Eucharistic living nurtures disciples in the meantime, teaching them to move through the world with open hands. As we become what we eat, we give and receive both blessings and bread.

We dwell in Christ: Baptism--journey into the body of Christ

The Lord's Supper marks us as the meal that nourishes individual believers, creating the possibility for Christ to dwell within. Baptism moves in the opposite direction, an ecstatic direction, moving us literally "outside" of ourselves and inviting us more and more deeply into the body of Christ. Luther identifies the final mark on the body of Christ as the way of the cross (via crucis), the journey of discipleship. Baptism begins the journey and offers a compass for the road ahead. Dwelling in Christ, we gain the direction baptism affords, find the community baptism creates, and join the mission baptism embraces.

I have called this "the other side" of indwelling, which takes us on a journey outside our own bodies and into the body of Christ. Baptism invites us to dwell more and more deeply in Christ. This other side of indwelling is a little scarier, a lot more consoling--and also most certainly true. Christ dwells in us, to be sure, but we also dwell in Christ. We live in Christ's body.

This is a truth that holds both beauty and terror. The beauty lies in the fact that we are taken out of ourselves, embraced by something--more accurately Someone--and "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). Dwelling in Christ, we enter his body, we encounter other members of that body to form an organic unity, and we are drawn up into Christ's ongoing ministry to the neighbor and the world.

The terror lies in the fact that because it is Christ's body it bears the wounds that were on Christ's body at the time of his death--and remained there on his resurrected body. The resurrected body did not erase signs of Christ's suffering; it bore the wounds of crucifixion, marks on Jesus' hands and feet, a pierced side, the grisly tattoo around his forehead where the crown of thorns had dug in. If we enter into Christ's resurrected body, we too will be marked women and men, and that is a truth that terrifies.

It is a truth that also offers deepest consolation, as I argue in what follows. In the course of that argument, I look at the direction baptism affords, the community it creates, and the mission it embraces.

The direction baptism affords. I remember trying to do a difficult dive off a three-meter board. My coach had been clear about what to do and when to do it, but there was just a lot to keep track of. I would get to the end of the board and freeze, having forgotten a key piece of what I needed to go forward. By then, of course, I had lost the momentum I needed for the dive. I had to start all over again, circling back to the other end of the board and more instruction from my coach. Each time I had a little more information, a little more encouragement, and a clearer picture of what would happen next. But the only way I was going to get off the board was to start over.

The journey of discipleship is a lot like learning to dive. It feels like it runs in circles, and we move forward only by starting over. We return again and again to the call we received in baptism; we move forward only through returning to its promises. Luther spoke of a daily return to baptism, and this is precisely what he had in mind. Returning to the call orients us to the journey ahead just like a run down a three-meter board orients a diver to the jackknife ahead. The call baptism issues is a simple invitation: "Follow me."

"Follow me." Jesus beckoned his first disciples with the same words, and the invitation was so compelling it did not need elaboration. Along the way, however, the disciples faltered and fell out of step. They longed for the lives they had left behind, even the monotony of fishing and the invariant rhythm of the tides. They missed their friends and family; they murmured against their leader. But again and again, Jesus issued the invitation: "Follow me."

These are the words most frequently attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, a kind of bookend encouragement on the journey of discipleship. Looking at the life of Peter, we find that the words "Follow me" inaugurate his journey of discipleship as he looks up from his nets on the Sea of Galilee (Mk 1:16-20). And a resurrected Jesus speaks these same words to Peter after the First Breakfast: "Follow me" (Jn 21:22). It is worth noting that the only other words Jesus repeats with such frequency are the words "Be not anxious." I suspect that's no coincidence.

Clearly we latter-day disciples move forward only by moving back. If we dwell in Christ's body, we will need to hear these words again and again. Like hikers consulting their compass in unfamiliar territory, disciples return to baptism to take their bearings. We circle back to baptism, certain we will find there the direction we need.

The journey of discipleship is perilous. Like medieval pilgrimages, the journey may entail suffering, persecution, and death. Pilgrims' garb marked these travelers as easy prey. In similar ways, baptism turns Christians into marked women and men, making us targets for everything and everyone whom evil holds in its thrall.

Yet, while baptism makes us more visible, baptism also gives us the power to stand up to evil. Baptized into the death of Jesus, we rest assured that we are also baptized into his resurrection. The confrontation with powers and principalities will end not at the cross but at the empty tomb. Thus, marked by the sign of the cross, we enter into a deepening relationship with a new community and a mission.

The community baptism creates. Dwelling in Christ's body, we become part of a new community: the community of the children of God. Adoption is the only way to enter this community, and we should understand the baptismal ceremony as a rite marking us for adoption into this new body.

I have two nieces who were adopted from Guatemala into my husband's Irish German Catholic family. They joined us as young girls and are keenly aware that they are adopted. Given Guatemala's more formal standards of social interaction, we talk too much, we wear too little, we gesture too wildly. Given the girls' Mayan ethnicity, we're all the wrong color. Given the girls' dirt poor upbringing, we are very wealthy in comparison. We are terribly informal in contrast to the girls' Guatemalan formality. My husband and I must have been the most egregious examples of all these differences, because we became known simply as "The Locos," as in "When are the Locos coming over for dinner?" And it was a term of deep affection, one we cherish. But it was also true. In their book, we all looked a little crazy. Adoption makes for some wild and crazy cross-cultural and cross-pollinated families. And none of us would trade it.

Baptism adopts us into a crazy, cross-cultural, and cross-pollinated family called the family of the children of God. The Lutheran theology of baptism focuses heavily on forgiveness of sins, because that's the only way large families can get along without killing each other off. But while the theology focuses on forgiveness, the gestures point to adoption. The newly baptized child or infant is lifted up in front of the assembly, and we may think this is an accommodation to back-benchers and balcony dwellers, but in fact the gesture has ancient origins and decisive significance. In the ancient world, lifting up a newborn was a way of claiming paternity. Immediately after its birth an infant was presented to the presumed father of the child, and he could choose to lift up the child or not. With this gesture he claimed paternity of the child, and a child so claimed would rest secure in the family's embrace and inheritance. Unfortunately, not all newborns were claimed. Unclaimed children were routinely set down to die of exposure or to be picked up by others. The public squares of ancient cities had a customary spot, the lactarium, where children were abandoned. They could be picked up by strangers and raised as slaves, servants, or prostitutes. Occasionally they were adopted by childless families as sons and daughters, heirs to the family wealth. (10)

The social reality of children in the ancient world stands as a backdrop for the apostle Paul's letters to the earliest Christian communities. New Christians found themselves adopted by a new family in baptism. They were claimed as "children of God," freed from slavery and abandonment for all eternity. Paul has these ancient practices in mind in his discussion of baptism in his letters to the Galatians and the Romans:

So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an
heir, through God. (Gal 4:7)

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but
you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it
is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children
of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified
with him. (Rom 8:15-17)

An ancient reader would have supplied the gestures behind these texts. They remain in our present-day ceremony, which adopts us into a new family with God as our Father and Mother, Christ as our Brother.

But baptism claims us in two ways. Through baptism God claims us as "children," and God also claims us for the world of the kingdom. We receive an inheritance as joint heirs with Christ, and our work as members of this new family is to carry on in the family business. To put it crassly, baptism entrusts us with the franchise for the God business. We don't just pick up where Jesus left off; we become Christ's body in the world, the ongoing presence of the incarnation. Baptism allows us to dwell in that body, so that we become the crucified and resurrected body at work in the world today. It will mark us, even as it marked Christ's body.

Again, Paul rings the changes on how we are marked by baptism:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus
were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by
baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by
the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Rom
6:3-4)

Paul reminds the community at Rome that as "children of God" they are part of Christ's body. As the body of Christ, they had to suffer as Christ did. But, as the body of Christ was raised up, so they also would be raised up.

A small chapel at the Jesuit University in San Salvador, El Salvador, captures Paul's spirit. Around the sanctuary hang fourteen Stations of the Cross, but instead of featuring scenes from the passion of Christ, the Stations display drawings of the Salvadoran people, who were brutalized, tortured, and raped during the civil war. The pictures commemorate Christians who carry on Christ's witness in the world, suffering as he suffered, lifted up in resurrection as he was lifted up. So anointed, we embrace Christ's mission--and it is a mission for the world.

The mission baptism embraces. Baptism incorporates all of us into the body of Christ. We dwell in Christ. This is the other side of indwelling; we are not simply representatives of Christ in the world. We are his body, his hands and feet. As members of that body, we literally re-member that body in the world: bone on bone, sinew on sinew. Isn't this what Jesus commanded at his Last Supper when he said: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Lk 22:19); "Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Cor 11:25)? Indeed, we may be the body of Christ that people first encounter, the body they long to touch.

Think of the body of Christ for a moment as a human body. Think of the marks that were on it at the time of his death: marks in his feet and hands where nails were pounded, a mark in his side where a spear pierced him, marks of the scourging he had received, bruises and cuts where he had been beaten. Thomas would not believe he was in the presence of the resurrected Christ until he touched that body. He wanted hands-on proof.

In our own generation of seekers there are thousands like Thomas. They will not believe until they too can touch that body. Because we dwell in Christ, we can offer the hands-on proof of the resurrection these seekers demand. Through baptism, we remember that body, becoming that body in the world: We are Christ's hands.

I am the only pianist in the family. This is not because of my singular talent but because of a rather poignant misunderstanding. Piano lessons were offered to my younger sister, who declined protesting, "My fingers don't know the right keys." She feared her hands lacked the special intelligence that would send them scurrying gracefully across the keyboard. The truth is that none of us knows the right keys. That's why we circle back to baptism to listen again to the phrasing, learn the fingering, catch the tone of a difficult passage. Baptism is where we receive instruction from our older brother Jesus, who assures us that, despite all mistakes, we too are children of God. God will not abandon nor dismiss us because God did not abandon his Son Jesus. So we continue as Christ's hands in the world and pray as the psalmist prayed: "O prosper the work of our hands" (Ps 90:17). As Christ's hands in the world we join the family business, extending those family values into the world.

The resurrected body was a marked body, marked by Christ's passion and resurrection. Through the Lord's Supper Christ dwells in us--we bear Christ's wounded body in our own. Through Baptism we dwell in Christ--we are borne in Christ's wounded body. Through the work of the Spirit of Christ Jesus, each of these marks on the body of Christ works on us, enabling and empowering us to reach out of ourselves toward the neighbor and into a world.

The Lord's Supper works primarily on the individual, as heavenly food transforms each believer coram hominibus to increasingly love the neighbor. We become what we eat. Baptism has a more corporate dimension, gathering scattered believers into an organic whole, where we are marked as the body of Christ in the world. We are that body people long to touch.

Let us scatter to serve.

A version of this article was presented at the Leadership Conference "Christ in Us": Wellsprings of Lutheran Spirituality," Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, February 20-22, 2006.

Martha Ellen Stortz

Professor of Historical Theology and Ethics

Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary/Graduate Theological Union [e-mail]

1. See Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998). This interpretation informs the work of others, such as Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Public Church: For the Life of the World (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004).

2. Martin Luther, "The Freedom of a Christian (1520)," in Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 585-629.

3. Mark Totten calls this gradual transformation "a person's proper righteousness [that] goes on to complete alien righteousness," dubbing it a "broader" sense of justification. See his fine exploration of the indwelling Christ and its implications for ethics, "Luther on Unio cum Christo: Toward a Model for Integrating Faith and Ethics," Journal of Religious Ethics 31:3 (2003), 443-62, esp. 456.

4. Robert H. Smith, "Wounded Lord: Reading John through the Eyes of Thomas, A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel from a Fresh Angle." Unpublished ms., 2006.

5. The line is an internal rhyme from T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton," in his Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 15, 18.

6. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 3ff.

7. "All praise to you, Eternal Lord," Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1979), #48.

8. Martin Luther, "On the Councils and the Church, 1539," in Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, 539-75.

9. In the following material on the Lord's Supper and baptism, I draw from my book, A World According to God (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

10. Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. pp. 47-62; Martha Ellen Stortz, "'Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent?': Augustine on Childhood," in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 78-102.