Baptism

Another great baptism at church this morning, Andrew this time, another of the young people from the Bible class I help teach, so extra special. I asked him if it was okay to post this, and he was quite happy for me to do so. For those who've not seen any of the past baptism blips, the tank in my church is very deep, and unless you're on the front row you can't see anything, hence the camera feed to the projector so that everyone can see the whole thing. I rather liked the timing of this shot, taken on his way into the water. He was baptised by Marc, our current youth worker, and Tommy, the previous youth worker, as they have worked with him over a lot of years now. My prayers are with him as he grows and matures, that he will live in the knowledge of Christ, and experience God's presence with him in all the daily joys and challenges of life.

This passage was used in the intro to baptism, which we tend to do as there are almost always family and friends, or new people to the church who are at something like this for the first time, and we want them to understand what it is all about. But I thought it fitted well with the fact that today is Orthodox Easter, so in Russia and a variety of other countries, they are marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as the Catholic and Protestant churches marked it last week. The traditional greeting you give is Khristos voskres, or 'Christ is Risen', and the response is 'Voistinu voskres', or 'He is Risen Indeed'. A story is told of when in the 1980s, Billy Graham was allowed into Russia to preach to a crowd in Moscow, part of the rather cosmetic changes going on at the time. I strongly suspect the crowd would have been very carefully selected too. An Orthodox priest was invited along too, and he got up to speak to the crowd before Billy Graham did. In Soviet times, if you wanted to get ahead in life you stayed well away from any church. Now in the run up to this event, the Communists had been telling Billy Graham about how the nation didn't need God, no-one knew anything about religion, or cared about it at all, it was something forgotten and left in the past. The priest started his speech with the simple Easter greeting 'Christ is Risen' and the entire crowd responded with one voice 'He is Risen Indeed', somewhat to the embarrassment of the Communist officials. Jesus wasn't quite as forgotten as they had thought or hoped.

So do you think we should continue sinning so that God will give us even more grace? No! We died to our old sinful lives, so how can we continue living with sin? Did you forget that all of us became part of Christ when we were baptized? We shared his death in our baptism. When we were baptized, we were buried with Christ and shared his death. So, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the wonderful power of the Father, we also can live a new life.

Christ died, and we have been joined with him by dying too. So we will also be joined with him by rising from the dead as he did. We know that our old life died with Christ on the cross so that our sinful selves would have no power over us and we would not be slaves to sin. Anyone who has died is made free from sin's control.

If we died with Christ, we know we will also live with him. Christ was raised from the dead, and we know that he cannot die again. Death has no power over him now. Yes, when Christ died, he died to defeat the power of sin one time-enough for all time. He now has a new life, and his new life is with God. In the same way, you should see yourselves as being dead to the power of sin and alive with God through Christ Jesus.

Romans 6:1-11 (NCV)