New Beginnings

As another school year begins, students pack up their home lives, purchase books and supplies and say goodbye, for now, to summer.  Teachers finalize rosters and syllabi and set up for the first weeks of class.  It is a busy time and it is easy to get caught up in making sure everything is in perfect order.  We do so much to make ourselves feel ready.  Where can we find God in such a busy time?  

God is in newness.  The Bible is full of stories and images of newness.  Not least of these is the new life we find in Christ through Baptism. In the Lutheran and Episcopal traditions, Baptism is a Sacrament - an outward sign of an inward grace (to paraphrase a common definition).  The literal waters of baptism physically wash the baptized person, reflecting the way God’s grace, although invisible, washes away our sin and makes us new.

I think about the newness of Baptism and the newness of a school year because of our efforts, as humans, to reconcile the tangible and the invisible.  We see beauty in external markers of how we feel inside.  For school, new books, school supplies and dorm essentials present us with physical ways to start afresh.  This tendency and desire to balance internal and external is true in our faith lives, too.

Baptism is the perfect example.   We think of Baptism and all of the stuff that comes along with it - a baptismal font, a tux or white dress, a cake, a church, a minister.  These things range from seemingly essential to obviously trivial, but are any of them absolutely necessary for baptism?  The answer is no.  These items are meant to serve as guideposts for the act of baptism, but when the tangible requirements are not available or possible, God’s grace happens anyway.  

It is when we get caught up in the tangible requirements, no matter how essential (the textbooks, the ministers), that we lose sight of the gift of newness we have been given.  Yes, please buy your textbook for Chemistry 101 and show up to church a little earlier than the sermon on the day of your baptism, but don’t struggle with the tangible things so much that the real gift of the experience is forgotten.

Ready or not, the school year is approaching, and with it comes a new opportunity to learn and to find God in every experience.  May you remember your baptism, or another way God has given you new opportunity, and give thanks for the grace which is given unconditionally.