Each year, on the Sunday after the Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord. This year, we will have much to celebrate as we welcome two young Christians into the household of God. It will be a joyous morning, and I hope you will come!
But what is baptism for? What does it do? The Catechism in the back of the Prayer Book tells us that “Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ's Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.” (BCP p. 858) Like all sacraments, it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The outward and visible sign in Baptism, of course, is the water in which we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The inward and spiritual grace is “union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God's family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the Holy Spirit.” (BCP p. 858)
Baptism is about inclusion in the household of God, to be sure. It’s about God accepting us and about our accepting Christ as our Lord and Savior. But there are also things to be rejected: the powers of death, the forces that draw us from the love of God, all those things that corrupt the creatures of God. In baptism, we say no to death and yes to life, passing by God’s grace through death to life in Jesus’ cross and resurrection. This no and yes is the ground of our Christian lives.
The 20th century Episcopal lay theologian William Stringfellow wrote that “the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in this truth of the resurrection….What matters is that whatever one does is done in honor of one’s own life, given to one by God and restored to one in Christ, and in honor of the life into which all humans and all things are called. The only thing that really matters to live in Christ instead of death.” (Instead of Death, p. 112) In the end, this radical re-orientation from death to life is what this Sunday is about. It’s also what every Sunday, and every day of our lives as Christians, is about. Won’t you join me in this holy adventure?
Yours in Christ, and Christ alone,
Kara+