It was 4:00 p.m., December 31 and I was making a bank stop. I was about to greet my banker with a “Happy New Year” when he said, “It’s now the new year in this bank.” (He said this because transactions after 3:00 counted on the next day’s business.) “Yes, it is possible to see into the future,” he continued with a gleam in his eye, “and it’s looks very much like the past.” We laughed. So how do we get a new future that’s not just the past all over again?
Ninety-two year old Norman Borlaug who received the Congressional Gold Medal in July knows something of the answer – which is anchored deep in the waters of baptism. Borlaug grew up in northeast Iowa near a little junction in the road called Saude. He went on to a career in science developing disease-resistant high yield wheat that literally saved millions of lives from starvation. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to world peace through food production.
In “A high-yield life,” The Lutheran quotes Texas Senator John Cornyn as saying that “Borlaug views the future through the words of Isaiah: ‘And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose . . . And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.’” Now that’s a real new year! How does Borlaug think this will happen? “My whole philosophy,” he says, “goes to training young people” [in the sciences, too, he means] “who are willing to take risks.”
People who are baptized should be the most ready to understand what he means – and take those risks. The pattern of our baptism itself is risk: letting go of the old and grabbing the new. Dying to sin, rising to new life. How much more breath-taking can it be! At the same time, in our baptism we have been bonded to Christ. We can risk things for this life because we have a security in Christ that’s greater than this life.
I really think Borlaug knows the deep-water baptismal truth: that when we know we are God’s and our identity is secure, risk-taking for a better world is possible and can contribute to a new world of shalom, peace. Then the new year is not the old one all over again – for scientists or bankers or any of us. Happy new year!
