by mark on December 14, 2011
The theme of the third week of Advent centers on the messengers of God. The Day of the Lord is at hand; God is coming soon to his people and he seldom shows up on the earth entirely unannounced. Before the first Advent of Christ, God the Father called a messenger which he would send before his Son to prepare Israel to receive their Messiah. This man’s name is John the Baptist. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.”[1] John was sent to preach “the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.”[2] God himself was about to draw near to his people, to literally show up in the midst of his nation, and his people were not yet ready to receive him. John was sent to prepare Israel to meet their God. This has always been the essential role of the biblical prophet: to announce the coming of God and to prepare the human race to receive him when he arrives. [click to continue…]
by mark on November 28, 2011
“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death.” In the epistle today St. Paul gives us what at first appears to be a very strange explanation of Christian baptism. Most of the church’s teaching on the matter tends to center on the cleansing symbolism of the act and the reality of the new life shown forth when the person being baptized is drawn out of the depths of the water. But St. Paul highlights a theme that we often overlook in the administration of the sacrament: before baptism shows forth the new life of the Christian, it first shows forth his death. The first time I ever had this aspect of baptismal symbolism explained to me, I thought it to be a very strange rite of entry into the Christian Church. The sacramental action, considered plainly, is a bit unsettling. Christ through his church, in the person of the priest, takes hold of the initiate and holds them under water until the old, sinful man is dead; that is to say the minister of God begins by drowning the church’s new member. [click to continue…]
