This is just a quick stop to post a beautiful water prayer that Lutheran World Relief mailed as a bookmark. Note the imagery from both the world of nature and the Scriptures. Then pray it – with thanks to LWR for their good sustainable development work around the world. I encourage you to support them. Water…a physical and spiritual blessing…so many ways.

As a pastor I have found one of the great moments of ministry being Easter morning when, as worship begins, I am privileged to say, “Christ is risen!’ And worshipers respond, “He is risen indeed!” My heart thrills to those Easter words – and I hope the same happens for many.

Baptism is another form of that word – the very personal application: this is “for you.” Christ is risen – for you! This happens in a visible way when someone is baptized in an Easter (day or season) service. It happens in the dying to sin and rising to new life of worship’s confession and forgiveness. It also happens in the joyous Easter Sacrament of Holy Communion. All for you.

Our spiritual life as the baptized is anchored in Easter, Jesus Christ’s dying and rising, but it doesn’t end there. Our baptism is Christ-for-us and we receive a spiritual gift that is good for a lifetime and more.

I invite you to see my article in the April 2009 issue of The Lutheran, “Wanted: Sinners Dead And Alive.” Catch a glimpse of what baptism means not only for infants and children but also for adults. Baptismal spirituality is not just for one day but for our whole journey.

Baptismal spirituality is about Christ making us new. Yesterday, the first Sunday in Advent and the first day of the new church year, brought that home to my heart in a couple ways.

Awaking while the world was still dark, I was surprised by a fresh layer of snow on the ground. As daylight arrived, a whole new scene unfolded before us. Some of us were surprised, others almost expecting it. The drab browns and grays of November were gone, replaced by a glistening white that impressed even the winter-haters. But just as the change to snow is not easy, neither is being new in Christ. For one, there is cold and shoveling and layers of clothing; for the other, surprise and shock and accepting this new person we are. Yet how good the new is in our lives. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

My early morning devotion was a Dietrich Bonhoeffer reading* perfect for the beginning of Advent. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Luther…often said that, next to the Word of God, music is the best thing that human beings have… Luther knew that it has dried an infinite number of tears, made the sad happy, stilled desires, raised up the defeated, strengthened the challenged, and that it has also moved many a stubborn heart to tears and driven many a great sinner to repentance before the goodness of God. ‘O sing to the Lord a new song ‘ (Ps. 98:1).” *from I Want to Live These Days with You, p. 349

What God did in baptism – making us new in Christ – God continues daily in ordinary ways.

Forty years later, the Vatican newspaper announces it’s ready to forgive John Lennon and the Beatles for their boast about being “more popular than Jesus.” The paper has realized that these were just working class lads coping with unexpected success.

Truth is, they probably were more popular than Jesus! After all, “popularity” was never a value Jesus seemed attracted to. If he had, he surely wouldn’t have hung around with poor peasants, or worse, sinners and prostitutes. Nope, the Beatles always had it all over Jesus on the popularity scale.

Maybe Christians shouldn’t have become so worked up over this forty years ago. We should have just paid more attention to what Jesus was about – not popularity but mercy, peace, and hungering for righteousness (Matthew 5). Even John Lennon, it seems, wasn’t really dissing Jesus, just his followers – and that goes on all the time. Christians should be used to it, but we don’t take it well.

If Jesus doesn’t give two hoots about popularity, he does care about following. “Follow me,” he said, and he says to us. Which amounts to leaving behind what we were, and becoming someone new. End of the old, beginning of the new. Drowning our self-centeredness, coming to new life where God and others matter most. Following Jesus is, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, is the equivalent of being baptized in St. Paul’s New Testament letters. There’s not too much room for popularity where God’s doing a makeover in people.

But Christians get sidetracked too. It’s time to forgive the exaggerations of the Beatles, that’s true, but it’s an even better time for Christian self-examination. Arguments about popularity go nowhere, following Jesus does. That’s a bit of baptismal spirituality – letting go of ourselves to find our true selves. Jesus wants that. That’s where Lennon’s remark should take us too.

To live daily in baptism is to be able live in a new world, the new world Jesus Christ gives us. In our baptism we died to sin and rose to new life. Jesus takes us into his new world where the old powers of evil lose their grip.         

A friend opened the February 2008 issue of the Good Housekeeping for me to read, and there on pages 87-88 was a powerful example. It was even more powerful for me because I had a personal connection.         

The story was one of forgiveness where you wouldn’t expect to find it – in a teenage driver’s carelessness resulting in the death of a young husband and father. In the blink of an eye so many lives were changed, among them a young mother and her infant daughter’s. “The best person I ever met” was the way this young mom describes her loss.         

But she decided in the painful weeks that followed that she would not raise her daughter in a world where her anger was the primary focus. So when the teenage driver owned up to her grave mistake, this young widow decided to open the door of her heart to forgiving her. Instead of the driver serving prison time, the driver and the wife of the man whose death she caused began telling their story – together – to other teenage drivers. And each time the tears flow. And, dare it be said, that maybe even some healing occurs. Amazing. Find the magazine; read the story.         

Here is a new world, really it is, where hatred, anger, and grudges do not rule. These old powers have lost their deadly grip. They are replaced by Jesus’ new world where forgiveness lives and peace begins to dwell. Oh, don’t misunderstand, this is not some Camelot where these qualities come easily and then vanish quickly as well. The forgiving may even be like Jesus described it, “Seventy times seven” times, or having to do it more times than you can count. But in the end, the real end, there is a new experience of the kingdom of heaven. People get something of God’s new world. 

That’s baptismal spirituality: the old dies, and in Christ the new arises. The old powers of hate and looking for revenge lose their grip.         

This story of forgiveness touches my own heart. You see, I had the funeral for that wonderful young man. I did, one cold December day. I have seen the incredible pain and sadness his death brought. What a beautifully different day this one: that a Good Housekeeping article would become my own reminder of one more time God keeps his promises. The promises anchored in baptism.          

Baptism means owning up to our mistakes and moving on.

I was presiding over the Sunday communion liturgy, leading the congregation directly into The Lord’s Prayer as usual. That “as usual” was the problem: a guest soloist had been scheduled to sing the prayer at this service. So, with the congregation fully aware that I had messed up (the worship folder verified it), we prayed every word in The Lord’s Prayer. And at the end, I announced, “And now you may be seated as we hear The Lord’s Prayer sung.” By the time the splendid soloist shook the dust of the ceiling beams with “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory” and then descended to a quiet “Amen,” I hoped at least a few people may have forgotten my mistake.

Then our organist reminded me at the ensuing coffee hour. But, he added, the soloist had stepped out when the prayer was due to be sung, so “your mistake” was really fortunate; it gave him an extra moment to get back. Well, fortunate for him but not for me: the congregation didn’t know the soloist’s dilemma, which was private; but they knew my mistake, which was public. “I just love it,” I said to our organist with more than a little sarcasm, “when my mistakes are so transparent.”

There was, of course, no way to deny it: I messed up. The immediate question was: how to lead with the least disruption to the worship of 100 people. So I did what I did – in the judgment of the moment. And then I also had to decide: do I let this flub go and learn from it; or do I wallow in my failing.

To be baptized means to die to sin and rise to new life. A goof leading worship is surely small, even if glaringly obvious. If I make too much of it, beating myself up over this, I make myself and my mistake too much the center. So, own up to it and let it go. I have already died to sin and been raised in Christ. Let it go – and live!

Brad Anderson, the CEO of Best Buy, was recently featured in The Lutheran. “I’m public about the mistakes I make,” he’s said. “Employees need to know they can fail and still be part of the team.” He adds how profoundly important forgiveness is in the business world. Brad Anderson knows how to live baptized. Our mistakes aren’t the only problem: life is about what happens after our mistakes.