When we look around us to see who is doing the serving and who is denied that privilege, or who is present and who is absent from our table, or even how often we break bread together and whether we celebrate the sacrament with joy or hurried obligation, we may feel ourselves judged rather than empowered. This dialectic of judgment and grace is inevitable, however, and consistent with our eschatological vision. Though our journey is well begun in Jesus Christ, we clearly haven't yet made it all the way over to the other side. The sacrament of baptism, long the Rodney Dangerfield of Protestant liturgical practice and understanding, is another key to a creative eschatology in the church's liturgical life. Churches have for too long regarded baptism as an isolated one-time event for individual Christians and, in the process, condemned it to irrelevance.
Baptism deserves better.
To begin with, as is the case with the Eucharistic Prayer of Great Thanksgiving, the Service of Baptismal Covenant, and especially its Prayer Over the Waters, carries an anamnestic quality and function, a re-presenting of God's salvation history in the sacramental action. This prayer ought not be an easily dispensed with elective in our services of Baptismal Covenant. Baptism as an initiatory rite also shapes the present and the future. Once again we find ourselves in the wormhole of paradox, but I hope by now you will agree that this is not such a bad place to be. Indeed, from the standpoint of eschatology it is exactly where we need to be.