Grace and Peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ!

I am writing to you from Bethany Beach, Delaware.  Being able to come out here and decompress, if only for a few days, is such a gift.  Sitting at the water this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about baptism – and not just because we have a baptism this Sunday (everyone get excited!  It is always a great gift to welcome a new member of the family).  Our Gospel reading this Sunday mentions baptism as well: Jesus foreshadows his Passion, saying, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!”  More on that in the homily on Sunday. 

One other thought on baptism: in his final sermon before his assassination, titled, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. details the struggles of the Civil Rights movement and the Poor People’s Campaign.  About halfway through the sermon, King speaks specifically about the encounter with the notorious Bull Connor in Birmingham.  In what amounts to some of his most apocalyptic rhetoric (ask me more about that in person), King writes:

I remember in Birmingham, Alabama … by the hundreds we would move out.  And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”

Bull Connor next would say, “Turn the fire hoses on.”  And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn’t know history.  He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the transphysics we knew about.  And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out.  And we went before the hoses; we had known water.

What King is talking about here is exactly the power of Baptism, or rather, the challenge of it.  In baptism, we, as St. Paul puts it, die to ourselves and are born in Christ.  We are baptized into his death and his resurrection, which means that the whole world is transformed.  King knew the stakes of his baptism.  He had lived it for years.  But he also knew its promise: that he would not be overcome, for Christ had been raised from the dead.  No water could harm him – he’d already known it.  Death was no threat.  In baptism, Christ’s resurrection had annulled all fear of it.  And as King’s life is an ever-present witness to, when the fear of death is taken away, so too is the fear of the Enemy.  And there, exactly there, is where baptism works: it frees us to love our neighbour. 

I can’t wait to see you on Sunday.  Enjoy your forgiveness – and your freedom!

Peace in Christ,
David King, PTS Summer Intern