RCL Year B (Lent 5) - March 29, 2009

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Episcopal Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year B (Lent 5) - March 29, 2009

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

The image of a “high priest” is uncomfortable for us. We remember the Bible stories of Jesus being challenged by the “High Priest” and the scribes… The High Priest and the scribes wanting to trick him up, giving them a reason to persecute him and bring him down from the popular status that he was starting to gain…

We would immediately think of Jesus as the one who was the furthest thing from a “high priest.” But yet, that’s how the letter to the Hebrews refers to him – “a high priest… designated by God.”

The letter to the Hebrew’s uses these uncomfortable images to explain Jesus, because that is what the people the author was writing to would understand. This unique letter by an unknown author (that was originally attributed to Paul, but later decided that he probably didn’t write it…) was probably the only letter in the New Testament canon that was originally written in Hebrew, and then later translated to Greek.

Some scholars say that it wasn’t even letter at all, but maybe a sermon that was later turned into a letter. A sermon directed at Jewish Christians particularly, who were having trouble relating their Jewish roots to their new enlightenment experienced in Jesus Christ.

But whatever the case… The writing to the Hebrews uses metaphors that could be considered to be problematic… Problematic if we let our immediate thoughts rush into our minds, and let those thoughts dominate the passage of scripture that we have just heard. If we immediately picture the “high priest” as the same “high priest” that we learned about in Sunday School, the image is anything but pleasant.

To call Jesus a “high priest” would almost seem to us to be tottering on the edge of blasphemy. It’s at that time that we need to read on and understand what the writer to the Hebrews is trying to accomplish…

It says in the passage that Christ did not glorify Himself, but was appointed a “high priest” by God. The One who said to him, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” Then the writer goes on to say that Christ is a “priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”

This is the interesting part… The writer relates Jesus to Melchizedek.

Who is Melchizedek anyway? This is what we call “high context language”… The hearers or readers of the original message would know right away that Melchizedek is a priest of the most high God and king of Salem who offers Abraham bread and wine and blesses him… Melchizedek is mentioned twice in Hebrew scripture (once in Genesis and once in the Psalms)

But it just doesn’t seem right does it? Jesus can’t be a priest can he?… Isn’t he from the tribe of Judah? We know that only Levites (or those from the tribe of Levi) are priests, let alone high priests. But the writer to the Hebrews uses the priestly “order of Melchizedek” from the Psalms to justify Jesus’ priesthood.
See, Melchizedek shows up in scripture prior to Israel being divided into tribes and prior to any sacrificial laws laid out for us in Leviticus. Jesus is clearly not of the Levitic priesthood, but he is anointed by God at his baptism and glorified by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

So, let’s plug that into what we know of what a “priest” is… Very simply put, the priests represents God to the people in words and in actions. We know that a priest is fully human, just like the rest of us, struggling through life, living day to day with the same trials and hardships… But this persons task in the midst of all that is to lift before God the needs that are common to us all. We know from scripture that the principal role of a priest is to enter the “sacred space” (or holy of holies) all by himself and bear to God the most important human needs…

So, in fact, Jesus DOES fit this role for us… being fully human and fully divine, he becomes the only mediator that we have between God and humanity. To think of Jesus this way, puts him right in the middle of our nature and our world, doing an important costly work on our behalf. Jesus offers up prayers and supplications with his full humanity… with loud cries and tears to God, and submits to God’s will on our behalf, and becomes for us (those who have faith in him and obey his teachings) – not only becomes a mediator and advocate, but the source of our eternal salvation and everlasting life with God.

If we think of Jesus in this way, then it’s not hard for us to listen to at all… It’s not hard to picture Jesus as a high priest, the priest that intercedes for us, makes sacrifice for us, and lifts prayers to God for us… And Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek, who was a priest of the High Holy God that offered Abraham the nourishment of bread and wine…

Jesus offers us, in his sacrifice – in his death, not only payment for our transgressions… but spiritual nourishment for our journey with his own body and blood that is made present in the bread and the wine that we share in the sacrament of the Eucharist…

Jesus is a priest forever, continuing to this day to teach us, intercede for us, and nourish us on our spiritual journeys…

On our journey through the season of Lent we travel with Jesus to the cross… We go through a season of discipline and introspection… sometimes we even go to God in our own full humanity with loud cries and tears… to God, the only One that is able to save us from our death, wanting him to cleanse us of our sin and make us pure… all while we learn obedience to God’s divine will for our lives… as we are empowered to follow and do God’s work in the world around us.

The pattern seems to make sense, but not to the point that we lay back and do nothing…

It’s up to us to accept it, and respond… tt’s up to us to take up our own cross and follow Jesus… to let God lead us to places we may not want to go… to think outside of our box and our comfort zone…

But we don’t do it alone… Jesus is there for us, being our “great high priest,” offering to us God’s divine hope and comfort…

RCL Year B (Lent 3) - March 15, 2009

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III

Christ Episcopal Church

Cleveland, NC

RCL Year B (Lent 3) - March 15, 2009

Exodus 20:1-17

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

I wear a silver cross around my neck. It’s not only a symbol of my Christian faith, but it also commemorates the education that I received at The University of the South; School of Theology in Sewanee, TN. A silver “St. Luke’s” cross, that was given to me upon my graduation. Only Sewanee graduates wear such a cross as this. It is a piece of elegant jewelry that was made specifically for us Sewanee alumnae by the famous craftsman James Avery…

How crazy is it, that we have the cross as a symbol? A symbol that unifies our faith… a symbol on which we gaze that recalls God’s love for us. It doesn’t matter if we are Catholic, Russian or Greek Orthodox, Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Church of Christ, or any other of the more than 100 brands of Christian, we all gather united under the cross of Christ. It doesn’t matter how different our theological arguments, or how diverse our worship practices, we are all one body united under the cross of Christ.

How crazy is it, that we have the cross as a symbol of our faith? A cross, on which thousands and thousands of people in ancient Rome were put to death by crucifixion. A cross – an instrument of capitol punishment, at which some people cower in fear and wince at the brutality of treatment of human life.

How crazy is it, that we hold high a cross as a point of reflection and focus? If Jesus were around in the 21st Century, it would be as if we adopted an electric chair to be the icon of our salvation, or a needle used in lethal injection to be the representation of our faith.

But it’s not crazy for us at all, is it?

For us, who proclaim Christ Crucified, the cross represents the power of God. In it, we see the vehicle of our salvation, and the strength of our faith. On the cross, Jesus died for us.

Paul tries to explain this to the Christian church in Corinth who were having problems balancing the influence of Greek philosophy and those that were holding the old Jewish ways. The city of Corinth was a port city with a transient population… this created problems with the constant influx of different peoples.

The plethora of problems resulting from Corinth’s diverse population compels Paul to write to the church in Corinth more than any other church. The issues that Paul addresses in his letters to Corinth include cultural differences, sexual immorality, marital responsibilities, and church practices.

His first letter deals with several of the many of the problems in Corinth. In our reading today, Paul uses the image of Christ Crucified, Christ on a Cross, to explain the basis of faith and he sets it up as a paradox against the world…

Here, in the twenty first century, we have forgotten how cruel and hideous crucifixion really was. We have somewhat glamorized the cross. We have jewelry and ornaments made of silver and brass. They are attractive, but don’t carry with them anything of the real story of the crucifixion. Crucifixion was the most painful public method of death in the first century. The victim was placed on a wooden cross. Nails were sometimes driven into the wrists and ankles of the victim, and then the crosspiece was lifted high and jarred into the upright position, tearing the flesh of the crucified person and racking the body with excruciating pain. Historians remind us that even the Roman soldiers could not get used to the horrifying sight, and often took a stiff drink to numb their senses.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding the movie The Passion of the Christ that Mel Gibson made a few years back. Comments were made about the movie like it was too gory or too violent. But if we stop and think about it, seriously consider how brutal this form of death really was, it may not have been gory or violent enough to capture the true essence of the event…

So, if we think about it in worldly terms, for a non-Christian, it is crazy to hang a device of capitol punishment around our necks to symbolize our faith in God… Paul agrees… In his 1st letter to the church in Corinth, he says that “the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing but to those being saved it is the power of God.”

Foolishness to the self proclaimed wise, educated, Greek philosophers who where gaining influence in the Corinthian church. Foolishness to the world’s wisdom… The gentiles who do not believe in anything that they can’t rationalize.

And a stumbling block to the Jewish converts that were expecting a Davidic messiah to free them from Roman oppression yet were given a man that died a criminal’s death.

We can only imagine the chaos of Corinth… a city with the long reputation for both quick money and fast living. The hustle and bustle of busy streets, right in the middle of the trade route overlooking two sea ports on the narrow isthmus in Greece. With their educated elite, they had abandoned Paul’s teaching and had started to follow Apollos, an Alexandrian who was rhetorically skillful in his speech.

Paul knew he wasn’t a good speaker. He admitted it several times in scripture. But Paul clings to the root of the message of his Gospel, the cross of Christ… Paul understands the cross…

Paul knows that our sinful ways have already lead to our pain and death. In this life, we have already experienced the alienation and enslavement that are the results of our participation in sin… And from his view, Paul sees the meaning of Christ’s death as a powerful one.

It is a death that encompasses our fear of death and our desperate desire to be free from the horrible consequences of our transgressions. To Paul, it is the only thing that offers us the salvation that we need… the ongoing salvation that Paul knows we experience by the transformation of our lives after God is revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Paul offers us the cross of Christ as a point of ponder this morning. A point from which to look at the demands and foolishness of the world around us. A point from which to see the grace of God…

Paul mentions “foolishness” five times in this passage… “foolishness to those who are perishing” – those who don’t know Christ and Him crucified… “being made foolish the wisdom of the world” – the Greek world that demanded reason and rationalization. “The foolishness of our proclamation,” and “foolishness to Gentiles,” – because to the non-believer, it doesn’t make any sense… and “God’s foolishness” – wiser than the wisest of this world…

The world around us is full of chaos and foolishness... It may not be first century Corinth, but it is still chaos… Chaos trying to fool us into believing a false gospel of self-reliance and status. We become fools who believe that having the best job, the best car, the best house, the best education or the best bank account will somehow save us, or provide us with real security and everlasting peace. We get comfortable with our “personal” lives as we live out this gospel of self reliance.

The world says that we need an enemy and our sins have tricked us into thinking that we can save ourselves, or that if we have enough money, we can hire someone else to save us. It is a vicious trap to fall into… We need a savior… We need Christ crucified…

Paul teaches Corinth, using the absurd image of the cross to them, and teaching them Christ Crucified… what Paul calls a “foolish proclamation” to save those who believe.

The world does not know God through wisdom… but through the foolishness of Christ’s death on a cross… We do NOT experience God through isolation or rationalization, but through a Christian Community that confesses Christ Crucified… The world does not know a savior, but through the actions of a man that was hung on a tree, cursed and despised by society, becoming sin for us… saving us from our sin.

As crazy as it seems, we are ones who worship a God who showed his power and strength by suffering and dying for us… and by his death, we experience new life…

We are all on a journey through the season of Lent… a journey that will ultimately lead to the death of Jesus on a cross, on a trash pile just outside of Jerusalem.

This morning we take some time to ponder for a minute at the foot of the cross, and proclaim Christ Crucified… We stop and ponder for a minute… and put away our different theological arguments, and our diverse worship practices…

Everything that makes us Christian, and everything that makes us Children of the One True living and loving God is hanging on the cross of Christ. To the world, it's crazy, it doesn’t make sense… but to us, it IS the power of God.

RCL Year B (Lent 2) - March 8, 2009

The Rev’d Kenneth H. Saunders III
Christ Episcopal Church
Cleveland, NC

RCL Year B (Lent 2) – March 8, 2009

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:22-30

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

I walked into the grocery store the other day, and I couldn’t help but notice when I walked in, my senses were immediately blasted by the vast array of colors… Have you ever noticed it?

All the cans and boxes with the endless colors… more than you could ever put into a big box of Crayola 120 crayon colors. All these colors in the store were coming from the labels. The labels on cans and boxes… the labels that the manufacturers of the products put on the products to identify them and advertize them… the greens, and blues, the yellows, the reds, and oranges. It was quite an array.

That made me wonder… What if we removed all the labels, and took all the pretty colors away, what would we be left with? How would we know what was in the box? It would be a mystery, right?

We would look at a can of green beans and not know it was green beans… it could be corn, or peas. Without the label, it’s just a generic can that looks like any other can on the shelf.

Then I get over to the produce, where stuff isn’t in boxes and cans. Still colorful, still vibrant, yet loose, and open… we can tell the difference between bananas, apples, and oranges… but wait… more labels! It’s either a Dole banana, or a Chiquita banana… without the little sticker, you wouldn’t know. And the apples… are they Red Delicious or Fuji? I know that they taste different, but without the label, you wouldn’t really know, would you?

This morning, in Paul’s Letter to the Church in Rome, I think Paul is dealing with a lot of label problems, labels that the Christians in Rome have placed upon themselves in order to identify themselves.

There is a Christian group with the label Jew, or followers of the law, and another Christian group with the label gentile. By now, Rome was full of coverts to the Christian faith, some from Jewish origin, who knew God and have come to a greater understanding of God through Jesus Christ. And then some converts from Greek or Hellenistic origin, who have come to know and love Israel’s God through Jesus Christ.

Paul is trying to persuade everyone he is writing to, that the gospel he is preaching makes sense, to just trust God, and live in right relationship with each other and with God in Christ.

So he set’s it up for them in a message that they would all understand. He uses the ancient tradition of Israel and Israel’s God. He uses the story of Abraham and Sarah, the foundation of a covenant relationship between God and a man.

A man that Paul says was the “father of ALL of us”… the father of many nations. He tells these different Christian groups that because they share the common thread… because they confess Jesus the Christ as Lord and Savior, they are actually sharing in the faith of Abraham.

He is trying to get them to realize that the same God that spoke the world into being out of nothing, that brought forth nations from Sarah’s barren womb, and that and rises the dead to new life, is all about relationship based on faith.

Yes, Abraham had a covenant with God, a contract promise sealed in blood… but first, Paul reminds us, Abraham had faith in God, an overwhelming faith and trust in God that predated Israel’s laws… a faith that made him “righteous” before God. Why? …because Abraham trusted God. Abraham was fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised to do.

I have talked about faith and relationship a lot from the pulpit. It is because that I feel emphatically that faith in God includes both a cognitive belief and a commitment to faithfulness in an ongoing relationship. A relationship that nurtures that faith… a relationship that calls us to be involved in the life and work of God in the world around us… This is where the rubber meats the road…

God said to Moses on the mountain, I AM. Relationship with God is not abstract, it IS a way of being which makes itself evident in the way people live their lives.

This morning, we got on our knees in the beginning of the service and recited the Decalogue, better known as the 10 commandments, where the laws of Moses for Israel are laid out in a very straight forward way.

But Paul is calling us to go a bit further than a life lived by the letter of the law. He is calling us to a life of relationship as we walk with Christ, a new relationship based on faith, and a new life… not one chiseled out in stone, but one formed by conscious and right relationships.

Paul attempts to take all the labels off of what was considered Jew, and living by the letter of the law, or gentile… and points he out that faith has always been the primary basis of a “right” relationship with God.

By this, Paul put both Jewish Christians and Non-Jewish Christians on the same level. If we go into a grocery store, and peal the labels off of all the bananas, then they are just bananas. God grew them, God made them green, and them yellow as they ripened…

If we remove the labels, is it any less of a banana?

I don’t think so. But we have to remember that banana’s are out in the open, all wrapped up in God’s package. However, if we remove a label from a can or a box, we can’t really tell what’s on the inside, can we?

Have you ever been to one of those damaged shipment stores where there were no labels on the cans, except for a few? But they were all in the same case, comingled with other, so you still knew what they were.

That’s where I think relationship in faith comes in, and I think that is what Paul is trying to say to us… Paul is trying to say that we need to have faith, have faith trust God to guide us where God is leading, trust God enough to live in right relationship with each other.

It doesn’t matter what we are labeled, American, European, Hispanic, African, Asian, or Indian… It’s what’s on the inside that counts. It is the stuff that we are made of, by God, in the image of God.

It’s not the can that we put ourselves in, or the label that we are born with, or that we attach. It is the life of faith that we lead… the faith of our father Abraham, our “father in faith,” because we are all connected though the life and grace given to us by God through Jesus Christ.

I sometimes think that our problem is that we don’t trust what’s in the can. We like our can because it’s comfortable, it’s what we know. We like our can so much sometimes, that we want to store other things (our treasures), and make cans for them also.

To think of life outside our can would make us vulnerable to nourishing others with who we really are… with who God created us to be. Living outside our can in right relationship with others and with God, and focusing on divine things, not human things is what Jesus calls us to do… every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day.

As we are gathered here, in a community of faith, gathered as people of God, who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, let us focus on living a life of faith in right relationship with each other, and in right relationship with our God.

It’s the only way we can truly take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

RCL Year B (Lent 1) - March 1, 2009

The Rev'd Kenneth H. Saunders III

Christ Episcopal Church

Cleveland, NC

RCL Year B (Lent 1) - March 1, 2009

(Delivered on March 4, 2009 in the context of Evening Prayer)

Focus Text: 1 Peter 3:18-22

I don’t want to disrupt any preconceived notions, or un-teach what you may have been taught about the letters of Peter. But there has been a lot of different scholarship throughout the years that say som different things about the origin or writer of the letters of Peter.

Some say that it may have been a sermon given at a baptism or maybe a liturgy of the early church that was turned into a letter, but that line of thinking has long been abandoned.

The First letter of Peter is a real letter (an Epistle). According to the Oxford commentary on the Bible, "despite 1 Pet 1:1 (where the authors calls himself the apostle Peter), the author is probably not the apostle Peter" that we learn about in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It claims that the cultured Greek of the letter makes it perhaps the most literary composition in the New Testament.

The apostle Peter probably knew some Greek, but the 1st letter of Peter does not look like the product of the unlettered Galilean fisherman (Acts 4:13). It uses a sophisticated vocabulary, and its author appears to have some command of language, using the techniques of Hellenistic rhetoric. The writer is also intimately acquainted with the Old Testament in the Septuegent (or the Greek OT). We should expect the Galilean Peter to have been more familiar with an Aramaic or the Hebrew. (The Oxford Bible Commentary, p. 1263)

Compared to some of Paul’s writings, the letters of Peter are short, and the 1st letter Peter is believed to have been penned in the latter part of the 1st century, written in Peters name to give it authority and a claim to the apostolic faith. Regardless of who wrote it, it is an important letter that, just in today’s reading, gives us a smorgasbord of things that we can focus on, in many different and interesting ways…

Such things like Christ’s atoning death, the nature of his resurrection, the proclamation of the descended Christ, salvation, baptism, the authority of the heavenly Christ, the Apostles Creed, and the role of our conscience in the life of faith… So much that we could be here a year from now and still be talking about the “richness” of the content of this portion of Peter’s letter.

The lectionary repeats every three years, so in my own career, I can look forward to preaching this passage in at least 10 different ways prior to my retirement. All of you know that I can’t go on for an hour or more… some of you are probably thankful! Those of you that know me, know that I believe that a sermon is only about 2 things, it’s about Jesus and it’s about 10 to 15 minutes long. So I won’t belabor the point and try to weave all the wonderful imagery that we find in this portion of the letter into one sermon.

Tonight, I would like to focus on baptism. About who we are as baptized people, about the promises we make at baptism, and about the path we walk after we are baptized, and what that may mean to us…

Lent is an appropriate time to talk about baptism, because since the ancient Christian Church, lent was the period prior to Easter when the catechumens, (those who were not baptized), were trained in the faith, they were “catechized” or taught how to articulate their beliefs. The church still uses lent as a period of focused instruction, either as a time for counseling baptismal candidates, catechizing confirmation aspirants, or with some extra discipline of a program of sorts (like this one) to gain some knowledge and insight about our faith…

By it’s claim, the 1st letter of Peter was written to a suffering church that was in exile… a persecuted church that was dispersed over 5 provinces in Asia Minor. These communities were scared, and needed help understanding that God was with them, protecting them in their hardship, and guiding their paths. Like we sometimes do, they needed a reminder about who were as baptized people…

Peter offers them some direct teaching that sort of looks to us like the Apostles creed in places. In fact, if you put the creed side by side with this passage, this passage looks creedal with it’s statements “suffered, dead, descended, resurrection, ascended, right hand of God, and forgiveness of sins.”

All these are phrases that we see in the Apostle’s creed, the most widely accepted unified Christian statement of faith… accepted across most all denominations, both protestant and Roman Catholic.

As most of you know the Apostles creed is sometimes referred to by us as the baptismal creed, becoming the statement of belief or testimony of the faith, said by us or on our behalf in question and answer form at the service of Holy Baptism. The Apostles Creed carries with it a power in the statement and becomes our vow or pledge and reminds us who we are as Christians and followers of Christ.

In the creed, as in the verses of 1st Peter, we follow Jesus’ through his life, passion, death, resurrection and ascension, while maintaining a duel focus on what affect that has on us as his followers. It is almost as if these verses in 1st Peter answer the questions that a young catechumen would ask during a process of faith exploration… “Who was Jesus, and what does he mean to me?”

Peter outlines it with a cause and effect: Jesus suffered – so we are made righteous before God… Jesus was put to death – so we are saved from our sins… Jesus was resurrected – so we must do good… Jesus ascended into heaven – so we (and all things) are subject to him… It is the claim of the church in the creedal statements. It is the catechism that we are taught, or should be taught, at confirmation. It makes a claim on us like baptism itself! (G. Oliver Wagner – Feasting the Word)

Just as God saved Noah and his family, and all created life on this planet, he saves you and me though baptism, a ritual bath… not necessarily removing any dirt from our bodies, but washing away the sins from our soul, appealing to God for us to have a fresh start and a new life in Jesus Christ.

Baptism is our entrance, it is our rebirth into the body of Christ, the church. It is our entrance into a journey with the faithful… part of that journey is the journey that we will take with Christ during Lent to his suffering and passion. The journey that leads where we don’t like to follow… a journey of self discovery and ridicule, through the wilderness places of our lives, filled with wild beasts and demons…

We will probably never be able to understand what the Church that Peter was writing to was going through, or experience the persecution that it faced or the fear that it felt. We all live in a place in America where it is ok to proclaim what we believe, it’s almost “mainstream”… So if it’s ok, then why don’t we do it more?

Why don’t we do well at articulating what we know about the God that we love? Is it because we feel that we are in some kind of Christian Diaspora, or not connected to others through Christ because we worship with a dignified pageantry?? Or is it because we embrace the apostolic teachings through our tradition of education, not thinking that education is bad for our soul. Or is it because we use more or less water than other churches do when they baptize? Why do we look for our differences rather than our connectedness???

Regardless of what your means of measurement, or how you look at it, as Christians, we are all connected. Because of our baptism, we all make up the body of Christ… and as Episcopalians, we stand at our baptism or confirmation or at another’s baptism, we acclaim the words of our faith in the Apostles creed... These are the words of our faith that aren’t challenged by other Christian bodies. It’s what we believe, and it’s where it all starts…

So how fitting it is to start our ecumenical Lenten program with the first Sunday’s epistle that focuses on our baptism and our affirmation of faith. In my preparation for tonight, I stumbled across an affirmation of faith that was based on 1 Peter 3:18-22. I would like to share with you… This was written by G. Oliver Wagner.

Washed in the saving waters of baptism,
we give thanks for the ark of the church.
Joined to the faithful of all times and places,
we proclaim the suffering of Christ for the sins of all.
We rejoice and trust that:
the righteousness of Christ brings us to God,
the death of Christ proclaims God’s love,
the resurrection of Christ awakens our spirits,
and the ascension of Christ enthrones him as Lord.
Therefore, with a good conscious and obedient lives,
we proclaim our faith in Jesus Christ –
even if for that faith we must suffer. So be it!

When our Lord Jesus Christ was baptized in the Jordon by John, as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and heard a voice that came from heaven, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And when you were baptized in with the waters of salvation, the same water that delivered Noah and his family and all the animals of creation, the same water that parted in the Red Sea so that Israel could cross on dry land to escape slavery at the hands of an Egyptian tyrant – God continued in you the work of “the well beloved Son” in the world.

He gives us, in our baptism, the assurance of salvation, and passes the torch of responsibility to each and every one of us to go out and do the good work that Christ has given us to do… the mission of the church – to reconcile the world to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. In a way, with our baptism, the heavens are once again torn apart, and that barrier, that which separates us from God, is lifted…

So that all things and the whole of creation can be reunited with God. Jesus is the link, and we are his body in the world connected to him at our baptism, building up the kingdom and reconciling the world to God… It is our purpose… it is our faith… We proclaim Jesus Christ… so the world might know him and be reconciled to God through Him.

The letter of 1st Peter, here at the beginning of Lent, sets us on a journey that begins with our own baptism and points us to the cross… We travel through this season examining ourselves, but holding fast to who we are in our life of faith as baptized members of the body of Christ, the church. The Christ that the creeds confess and the Christ that reconciles the world to God.