To Be New Again

This season of Lent is a time of baptismal renewal,  preparing our hearts to celebrate new life at Easter.

It is the season of the church year where we ask ourselves:  Do you intend to continue in the covenant God made with you in holy baptism: to live among God’s faithful people, to hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper, to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed, to serve all people, following the example of  Jesus, and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth?

Mostly we ask ourselves:  what do all those words mean in my life? How am I actually living them out (or not)?

Martin Luther used to recommend we keep these questions before us daily. For Luther, baptism “signifies that the old creature in us . . . is to be drowned and die through daily . . . repentance, and . . . that daily a new person is to come forth and arise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”  Each day we begin again, inviting a new person to come forth, to welcome the opportunity to bear witness to faithfulness, compassion,  service and right relationship.

My friend Pastor Dan Erlander used to call this “living wet”.

The poem below was recently shared with me. It celebrates this central invitation to allow God to makes us new again, reborn each day, baptized child of God.

Baptism, James Autry

There is something about this,

about putting people under the water

and raising them up

in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,

 something that makes the people cry, that makes them want to want

  everything to be all right

,that makes them want to leave this place and be better,

 to immerse themselves in their lives

and somehow be washed clean of all the things they think they should not have done

and should not still want to do.

That’s it.

Not the other stuff,

the star in the east,

the treasures in heaven,

or any of the old stories.

Not even life after death

.It is only to be new again.

 Live wet, my friends.  Pastor Annette