40 Days of Baptism: 27

I love this evocative paragraph from Michael Jinkins, which was sent to me this week by Doug Gay, and so I have found way to include it.

We are soaked to the skin in the death of Christ. Our union with Christ drips from us. We never "get over" this immersion; this drowning in Christ's death marks us daily; it marks us out, "names" us to the world and to one another as "children of God"; we are shipwrecked, run aground on the death of Christ; we trail wet footprints of this drenching wherever we go; we never dry off. Baptism is the continental divide, the absolute division in the topography of Christian existence: "we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life" Romans 6.4). And in this way, baptism is set as a seal upon our hearts for a love strong as death, and as the sign of our paradoxical existence in Christ, our lostness to ourselves, which is also our salvation because it consists in our being called to die in Christ.

Michael Jinkins, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context (Oxford, 1999), p.23.