Samantha Christopher

Dear Friends in Christ,

I have recently been reading Rowan William’s Becoming Christian. This brief and lovely text is an introduction to the four fundamentals of Christian faith—Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, and Prayer. Consider this lovely quote from the chapter on baptism:

“[Being baptized] is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected—you might even say contaminated—by the mess of humanity. The gathering of baptized people is therefore not a convocation of those who are privileged, elite, and separate, but of those who have accepted what it means to be in the heart of a needy, contaminated, messy world. … So baptism means being with Jesus ‘in the depths’: the depths of human need, including the depths of our own selves in their need—but also in the depths of God’s love; in the depths where the Spirit is re-creating and refreshing human life as God meant it to be.”

Our call in Baptism is not a call to live a separate and isolated life, filled with creature comforts and neighbors in the same socioeconomic status, or to worship in a beautiful church with silk vestments and Bach cantatas, while ignoring the grave disparities that lie just down the road. Rather, it is to work and struggle alongside the mess and brokenness of our world with joy and compassion for others, being careful to not be “voluntourists” who engage in service because it looks good, or we think it will give us brownie points when we are before the Great Judgement Seat of Christ.

Jesus is quite clear in the reading from Luke today that taking up our crosses and following Him is a self-sacrificial action that must be actively chosen every day. God calls us to examine what it means to live in a broken world, hurtling toward sin and death at every available opportunity, and to fight against the forces of evil and destruction that would push us away from God. At our baptisms we agreed to “renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” Today Jesus has us make good on that promise in thought, word and deed.

Your sibling in Christ,

Sam Christopher