A Little Fishy

Titus 1:1-9

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior;

To Titus, my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you- if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. (ESV)

The congregation I serve will be baptizing seven adults and four children on Sunday. Of that group only two are related to each other. Some of the adults are being baptized because their parents neglected to have them baptized as children, some because they were brought up in a church that rejected baptism as a gift of God to all persons, some because they have recently been converted to Christ. It is an exciting day in the life of the church when so many people are being brought, wet with baptism, into the life and death of Christ.

In the ancient church the majority of the faithful were baptized as adults. Until recently the majority of those baptized by the contemporary church were infants and small children. That is beginning to change. The forms that my parish used to document information for baptismal records requested, "Child's Name." for the person being baptized. This is at least confusing to the increasing numbers of adults who are being baptized by the church in these latter days (despite the fact that we are all baptized into the community to become God's children), so the form was changed. Our mission is not different in these days than in ancient times; to preach and baptize. We are called to lead people into the water of life. Jesus Christ is our Savior as He was the Savior of the ancient faithful.

In the ancient times, congregational security was important to the Christian churches. No, the TSA did not stand at the doors of the church gatherings with metal detectors, wanding suspicious looking matrons. But the ancient faithful did have to be concerned about the possibility that government agents would infiltrate their fellowships. Such infiltrators could be deadly. The Roman government occasionally carried out fits of bloody persecution against the ancient Christians. To support congregational security Christians adopted symbols that were recognizable to the faithful, but innocuous or meaningless to those who were not. The most enduring of those signs was, of course, the fish. The Greek word for fish was Ichthus (we have the scientific term for the study of fish, that comes from it: ichthyology). The letters of the word formed an anagram, which gave the first letters of this phrase: "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior." Oh, that's why all those SUVs have fish stuck on the back of them!

The baptized are placed into the life and death of Christ in such a way that God's Son becomes for them a Savior. The fish spawns little fish through the water of baptism. If we are becoming fish in baptism, then to neglect it or to speak against it is tantamount to extracting fish from the water. Death ensues. The orthodox church still proclaims the benefits and blessings of happy baptism so that those who are spawned in the water of life might always live by it and in it. That way we are all a little fishy.

Tertullian

"Happy is our sacrament of water, because, by washing away the sins of our early blindness, we are set free and admitted into eternal life! A treatise on this matter will not be superfluous; instructing not only such as are just becoming formed in the faith, but also those who, content with having simply believed, without full examination of the grounds of the traditions, carry in their minds, through ignorance, an untried though apparent faith. The consequence is that a viper of the Cainite heresy, lately conversant in this quarter, has carried away a great number with her most venomous doctrine, making it her first aim to destroy baptism. This is quite in accordance with nature; for vipers and asps and basilisks themselves generally inhabit arid and waterless places. But we, little fish, after the example of our "Ichthus" Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor do we have safety in any other way than by permanently abiding in water; so that most monstrous creature, who had no right to teach even sound doctrine (1Ti 2:11-12), knew full well how to kill the little fishes, by taking them away from the water!"

Tertullian, On Baptism, 1