Baptism is God’s Work
Baptism is God’s work.
In this work we are delivered, raised, united, anointed and joined it says in our baptismal service.
God knows who we are. God knows our abilities and our disabilities. God has spoken us into this world “Let there be (your name)” . God has created us – each of us, unique, a specific combination of skills, experiences, and passions. We are an issuance of the love God has for the world made into a human form though whom God will patiently go about healing and reconciling this world back to the goodness in which it was created.
God has planted compassion, curiosity and the drive for connection within us. The world is hungry for these gifts and we have been called to unwrap, unpack and unselfishly share them. These gifts are that in which the Spirit abides, they are the seeds of a revolution.
A revolution that begins again each day, an uprising against the ways of the world where we try again to love as generously, selflessly and sacrificially as God loves us. Each day a gift of time in which we can use the gifts we have been given. Each day a struggle against our own egos, the wounds we receive from others and ourselves and against the demons of our own making: grudges, resentments, negative self-talk.
We are baptized into Christ, into the ways of God made real in our understanding of space and time. Baptism is the tangible witness of parents, sponsors, families and congregations that whirls together a spiritual vortex where we are immersed in love, bathed in mercy and love is poured over and into us, so that we may learn to trust, proclaim, care and work to make that love real for others. We renounce the ways of the world that keep us from those tasks because our lives are not for our sake, but for the sake of the healing of the world. We say YES! to being part of God’s transformation and restoration of the world.
Baptism is God’s work. Indeed.
Article by the Rev. Paul Sannerud
