signs to preach with them—ample, deep pools of water; good hearty loaves; rich red wine or grape juice.
DESIGN PICS
new life, is a lifetime’s growth in costly discipleship. But this bap- tismal reality is sweetest mercy because it sets us free from our own demons, and the world’s, to live in the love making all things new.
hunger for justice to those who are fed,” we remember the logic of prac- ticing communion.
Dahill: Yes, it opens up into sacra- mental living—life. Lutherans confess real presence:
that Jesus is fully present to save us in sacramental experience, his real body and blood poured out into ours in the eucharist, our bodies and blood united with his in our baptism. We are joined to Jesus’ incarna- tion physically and personally, communally and ecologically in baptism, drawn with him through his death and resurrection. Easter is the great flowering of baptismal life for the whole body of Christ, set free from the power of sin and shame and fear and death through Jesus’ resurrection.
Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that being baptized is not cheap, not easy: having our old self stripped, learning to live a whole
Scharen: Unfortunately, some- times sacraments feel less like “love making all things new” and more like “lackluster going through the motions.” I remember baptisms at one large congregation I belonged to years ago. The baptisms would always begin: “It’s always nice to celebrate the sacrament of baptism again.” I cringed as the pastor performed a perfunctory baptism with a lightly wetted hand.
It is true: God works our redemp- tion just as well here as with pow- erfully and beautifully enacted ritual. But we humans who need the enacted, sensory preaching in word and water miss out. Luther suggested that baptism is
“being dipped into the water, which covers us completely, and being drawn out again.” We need to expe- rience the full drowning of our sin and rising to new life in Christ that sets us free from “our demons and the world’s,” as you put it so well. We do well to trust the power of God’s word by setting out strong
Dahill: Yes, for these are gifts meant to be entered, savored, embodied. Congregations actively wel- coming seekers into baptism and eucharist—into this sacramental life—can help us here. They suggest we Lutherans can no longer take for granted that those we meet or invite to our congregations are already baptized, already Christian. But the surprise is that as we invite them into the miracle of Christian baptism, we are evangelized too. To treat baptism as a mere for-
mality, or a private family affair disconnected from any real com- munity, impoverishes us all. But to hear the living God calling me by name; to experience being drowned to sin and death and raised to new life in community, dripping wet and reborn; to be anointed with the Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever—this draws each new child of God into a body alive in the world with the grace poured out here. “Eucharist” means thanksgiv- ing in Greek: Jesus’ thanks over the bread and wine he blessed and the church’s expanding waves of thanks for his body and blood poured out, the promise of all creation redeemed in him.
At Easter all the baptized give thanks for the gift of our lives restored and given to the world. With sacramental vision we see “heaven and earth … filled with [God’s] glory”—and treat it accord- ingly. We see in so-called enemies the very loneliest and most desper- ate of God’s children. We see in the flesh—our own flesh and the flesh of the poor and the flesh of the earth itself—the beloved Christ who rises to fill it all.
Thanks be to God indeed. April 2012 19
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