In the living room of my grandmother's rambling house, after a large Sunday dinner, the family and its friends gathered. Lifting a silver bowl filled with water, the preacher said some words, made some promises, and then baptized me -- made me Christian. There is much about this originating faith event that I would have done differently. (Baptism properly belongs in a church, not in a living room.) Yet God manages to work wonders despite the ineptitude of the church. And part of the point of becoming a Christian is that it is something done to us, for us, before it is anything done by us. What we might have done differently, had it been our action alone, is not as important as what Christ and his church does for us in baptism. As an infant, I was the passive recipient of this work in my behalf. Someone had to hold me, had to administer the water of baptism, had to tell me the story of Jesus and what he had done, had to speak the promises of what he would do, had to live the faith before me so that I might assume the faith for myself. In other words, by water and the Word, it was all gift, grace.

Thus I began as a Christian by water and the Word. Thus the whole world began (Gen. 1). Brooding over the primordial waters, God speaks, and a new world springs forth. My world as a Christian began in baptism, that strange, deep, formative, and indicative rite of the Christ and his church. It is up to God, in each generation, to make the church, to call by water and the Word a new people into being, or there is no church.

Jesus' baptism in the Jordan by John was the beginning of his ministry. When Jesus was baptized, the heavens opened and there was a voice, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22b). It is a scene reminiscent of the Spirit of God brooding over the primal waters of Creation, creating a new world, then pronouncing it all "very good" (Gen. 1). Luke follows this dramatic baptismal descent of the Spirit with an unexciting genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:23-38), taking Jesus' paternity all the way back to Adam. I suppose this is Luke's way of reiterating the gifted quality of the Beloved. True, he is a gift from heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit, yet he is also the bequest of the ages, of a gaggle of ordinary folk like Peleg, Eber, Shelah, Noah, and Adam. He is here as gift of God from above, and also of Israel from below. God calls, but we must respond.

In my baptism, I was the product of a human family, a people who had clung to the promised land of upcountry South Carolina for five generations, scratching out a living in cotton and cows until my nativity into a new generation who would rather live off of schools, churches, and hospitals than work the land. It was a human family, with all the goodness and badness of most any family.

Yet I was, as signified that day in my baptism, also a gift of God. Heaven was mixed up in who I was, and was to be. In my beginning was also some divine condescension enmeshed in my humanity; some incarnation. From that day on, in ways that I am still discovering, you could not explain me without reference to my baptism, to the water, the promises, the story, the hands laid upon my head. Criticize what you will about the mode of my baptism -- whether or not it should have occurred so early, or if there should have been instruction, or a different location, or more informed intention -- you at least must admit that it worked. Here I am telling the story of the story that was told to me, the story that I did not devise on my own, the story that I am still learning to tell -- a story named discipleship.

As soon as Luke is done with Jesus' genealogy, the story of Jesus' ministry begins. "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit to the wilderness" (Luke 4:1). Now his work commences. Ministry is a gift of baptism. This gift of water and the Word, this act of a descending Holy Spirit, is also an assignment. First the baptismal gifts. Then the baptismal vocation. "Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and... He began to teach in their synagogues" (Luke 4:14-15).

Yet if you know the story, you know that between his baptism and his ministry in Galilee there is his temptation (Luke 4:1-13). In the wilderness, during his forty days there, the devil offers Jesus some tempting, even noble, alternatives -- stones to bread, political power, miracles -- all good in themselves. Jesus rejects them all. Somehow these good works do not fit the ministry to which Jesus has been called. Right at the start of Jesus' work, Luke reminds us that ministry is, from the beginning, a choice between God's work and our own. Vocation and temptation seem to go together. If we lack clarity about our proper work, the devil is quite willing to tell us what to do.

Therefore this book's exploration of ordained leadership assumes the originating baptismal call, then moves to the peculiar nature of the clerical vocation, expending much effort to gain clarity about that vocation and its duties. Ministry is always both gift and assignment. All this reflection upon the ordained life is carried out against the background assumption, instilled in us by Luke 4:1-12, that among pastors it is always possible to get things wrong, that temptations abound, and the devil is ever eager to substitute his work for God's.