Tuesday, March 9

by John Wilkinson

The Third Church annual report, available this week, lists all of our members who have died in the past year. They, along with loved ones we all have lost, constitute the great cloud of witnesses testified to in the book of Hebrews.

Our funeral liturgy includes a prayer adapted from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. It includes these concluding words. “Especially we thank you for your servant _____, whose baptism is complete in death…” Whose baptism is complete in death.

We do not know how we will live. We certainly do not know how we will die. But we know this. In life and in death we belong to God, and baptism, any baptism, every baptism, is not the exchange where that belonging is established, but it is the moment when that belonging is signed and sealed.

So perhaps the water we are considering during Lent can be for us a symbol of baptism. A baptismal font, perhaps, or the river in which Jesus, and millions since, have been baptized.

In Romans, Paul writes that “when we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised…we too might live a new life. For if we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

That is our faith. This is our hope. Remember your baptism, and be grateful.