Friday • 11/26/2021
Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week After Pentecost (Proper 29)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 140; Psalm 142; Isaiah 24:14–23; 1 Peter 3:13–4:6; Matthew 20:17–28

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

Our baptism

And baptism…now saves you…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ… — 1 Peter 3:21. Peter regales in the comprehensiveness of Christ’s work, and he sees Christ’s work being crystallized and brought into our lives at baptism.

As believers in Christ, we live with liminality, that is, we live in the “betweenness” of darkness and light, of an old world that is fading and a new world that has only partially begun in Christ. We live simultaneously with the joy of knowing that we are “select” of God for salvation and sanctification, and with the challenge of being “strangers” in a world that requires of us submission and suffering (see the DDD for this past Monday).

In our baptism, God provides a profound marker of our identity as “select strangers.” Peter explores that wonderful truth in today’s passage.

Comparing our situation to Noah’s, Peter sweeps us up into God’s great meta-narrative of his reclamation of the world. Our baptism plunges us symbolically into a death-by-drowning that we, along with the rest of the world, fully deserve, but from which we have been gloriously and graciously rescued. The symbolism is dense.

United with Christ. Noah’s family floated above the drowning waters because the one righteous man (Genesis 6:9) brought them into the boat he had constructed. Similarly, Christ has gathered into the boat he is building (the church) those who by faith have become his own family members. United to him in his boat, we “are saved” amid the impending judgment that presently swirls around us and that will one day be executed with a worldwide conflagration (this time of fire rather than water—see 2 Peter 3:6–7,10).

Dying and rising with Christ. Union with the living and righteous builder of the boat is one aspect of baptism’s symbolism. Another aspect of its symbolism is the way it pictures the death Christ has died in our place and the resurrection he has thereby won for us.

Literal and Symbolic. Literally, Christ died. In fact, he even referred to his death ahead of time as “the baptism with which I am to be baptized” (Luke 12:50; Mark 10: 38). He died, Peter says, suffering for our sins, “the just for the unjust, in order to bring [us] to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Symbolically, we likewise die in baptism. We die when we are plunged into the waters of baptism, or have those waters poured over or sprinkled onto our heads.

Literally, Christ rose, having accomplished all that was necessary for our consciences to be cleansed (1 Peter 3:21), for us to be released from the prison of death (1 Peter 3:19), and for us to be presented to God in the heavenly courts (1 Peter 1:7,9). Symbolically we rise when we come up out of the waters of baptism or emerge from the pouring or sprinkling of baptismal waters.

Literally, Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father, receiving there the Holy Spirit as the Father’s gift to pour out upon the church. Symbolically, we are marked on our foreheads with oil that we may live in the power and the joy of the gift of that same Holy Spirit.

Christ descends into death in ignobility, and with all the shame and cursedness of our sinfulness. He rises into resurrection life in glory, and takes his rightful place “at the right hand of God with angels and authorities and powers subject to him” (1 Peter 3:22). Our baptism unites us with Christ in such a way that our enduring of the (normally) little deaths of being counted strangers, submitters, and sufferers—it all becomes a matter of “sharing Christ’s sufferings” (1 Peter 4:13; and note the striking parallel of Paul’s language of “the sharing of his sufferings” at Philippians 3:10). And our baptism unites us with Christ in such a way that his resurrection becomes our life in the Spirit now, and a promise that one day our bodies will be raised from the dead like his was.

For all these reasons (and more, though a brief devotional does not allow for a full discussion) our baptism becomes the place where heaven and earth touch. In baptism, Christ sweeps us up into this resurrected life, for “baptism…now saves you.”

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

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