Today – sunshine and 70 degrees – my wife and I ate lunch overlooking the waters of that great river, the Mississippi. Sometimes hard to believe we live so close to one of the great playgrounds and workhorses of the world. Today we simply enjoyed its beauty. Its waters inspired me to add this post.

I’ve been thinking of Lent out of season. In fact, I just posted on my book’s website, www.waterforyoursoul.com, information on a Lenten preaching series for pastors to use in 2010. If you’re a pastor, I invite you to give this a look. At the site, just click on “For pastor especially” for the PDF on “The Baptismal Plunge with Christ.” I encourage you to print it out and consider using it for midweek services (or Sundays).

 Lent is the time when, with Christ, the church moves from death to life, from ashes to resurrection. Lent is a powerful time of baptismal spirituality, a time of dying to sin and rising to new life. My book on baptismal spirituality, Water for Your Soul: Living in Baptism Every Day, lends itself to a preaching series to take people deeper into the waters of grace and discipleship.

The PDF (above) and one copy of my book are the basics for the series, but there’s flexibility to go different ways with the materials. In any case, Lent is a great time to learn and experience that baptism’s benefits for our spiritual journey keep going and going. I hope you try the series and are blessed.

On the commemoration calendar of the Lutheran church (ELCA), today we remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian. On this date in 1945, he was hanged on Nazi gallows for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

A pastor-teacher in Germany in the 1930s, Bonhoeffer has been my ministry’s inspiration. His writing on grace and baptism in The Cost of Discipleship almost 75 years ago, for example, set me a long and continuing course of lifting up baptismal spirituality, beginning with a master’s thesis at Luther Seminary.

Mindful that Bonhoeffer’s pastoral ministry took place while Hitler consolidated power and went to war, I offer a few of his words that first stirred me (and many others):

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.

Cheap grace means grace as bargain-basement goods, cut-rate forgiveness, cut-rate comfort, cut-rate sacrament; grace as the church’s inexhaustible pantry, from which it is doled out by careless hands without hesitation or limit. It is grace without a price, without costs….

Cheap grace means justification of sin but not of the sinner. Because grace alone does everything, everything can stay in its old ways….

Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ….

[Costly grace] is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live…. Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs the life of God’s Son…. [Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 4, Discipleship, pp. 43-45]

Let that be enough for now, the right note to sound here in Holy Week which is truly about costly grace.

Westerns. Cowboy movies. I grew up on these – in black and white nonetheless. And when the movie involved ranches and rustlers, we sometimes found ourselves watching cattle being branded. Perhaps because I grew up on a farm, the thought of that red-hot brand causing pain never troubled me; we frequently saw worse in real life. But I was deeply impressed by the value of the brand. The brand was about ownership and belonging. The brand kept rustlers from getting the upper hand.

Baptism is, in a sense, a brand on Christians, God putting the divine mark upon us that here is where we belong. We are God’s. Water is poured over us “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and the cross is marked on us.  The water doesn’t sizzle like that a flaming cattle brand, but it marks us all the same. The water may be toweled off us or evaporate in a few minutes, but we are marked – marked with the cross of Christ forever. 

In the world of the first Christians, wealthy Romans who had slaves sometimes branded or marked them to make it clear where they belonged. They were owned, sometimes treated well, but still owned. At least a few of these slaves became Christians, and when they did, they were marked with the cross in their baptism. Suddenly their ownership was different. They belonged to God! No, they didn’t escape their Roman bonds, but they knew themselves greater, more valuable, and in some deep sense, free. Their Roman brand may have been the one the world saw, but they knew themselves loose in God’s new kingdom. They had new dignity. They belonged where there was “no longer slave or free” (Galatians 3:28). The world’s powers, even great the great Roman Empire’s, were not the last word. Baptism’s “branding” was no small thing.