Baptism

St. Paul refuses to let baptism be a mere washing: "so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death," so that "like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4). The Greek word baptisma means immersion, and the immersion is itself the teaching: going under the water is burial, and coming up is resurrection. That is why the Orthodox rite immerses three times — an image at once of the three days in the tomb and of the three Persons in whose name the mystery is given.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem said it to the newly baptized of the fourth century in one unforgettable sentence: "at the self-same moment you were both dying and being born; and that Water of salvation was at once your grave and your mother." Baptism is the new birth Christ named to Nicodemus — "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (John 3:5) — and the Church receives it with full realism: forgiveness of sins, union with Christ's death and resurrection, entry into His Body the Church, and the beginning of the long transfiguration the tradition calls theosis.

The service begins, strictly speaking, before baptism itself, with the prayers for making a catechumen — a person under instruction for baptism (the catechumenate) — including exorcisms, ancient prayers that take the reality of evil seriously and strip its claim from the person. Then comes a piece of liturgical drama the Church has never softened: the candidate — or the sponsor (godparent) answering for an infant — turns to face west, the direction of darkness, and renounces Satan; then turns east to Christ, professes to unite with Him, and confesses the Creed.

The water is blessed with a great prayer that gathers up all the water-stories of Scripture — creation, the flood, the Red Sea, the Jordan — asking God to make this font what those waters were: the place where He saves. The candidate is anointed with the "oil of gladness," then immersed three times, the priest saying that the servant of God is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit — a deliberately passive formula: God, not the priest, is the one acting. The newly baptized is clothed in a white garment, given a cross to wear for life, and led three times around the font in procession — the first steps of a new life, walked in a circle that has no end. Immediately there follows chrismation, and at the next Liturgy — often the same one — the newly baptized, infant or adult, receives Holy Communion. Orthodoxy never divided Christian initiation into stages spread across years: the smallest baby leaves the church a full communicant member of the Body of Christ.

The Creed confesses "one baptism for the remission of sins," and the Church takes the word one seriously: baptism is unrepeatable. A person baptized is baptized forever; sins after baptism are healed by repentance and confession, not by a second font.

Infants have been baptized since the Church's early centuries, on the faith of the Church and the family that will raise them (more here) — Orthodoxy sees no more reason to withhold new birth from a baby than to withhold food. Full triple immersion is the norm the rite assumes; in genuine necessity — a hospital bed, an emergency — the Church has always allowed baptism by pouring, under the principle of pastoral economia. And when Christians baptized in other confessions come to Orthodoxy, some are received by baptism and some by chrismation alone — practice varies among the Orthodox churches, and the question has its own entry (reception-by-baptism-or-chrismation).