Today's musing on baptism comes from David Ford, who was until last year Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. The paragraph below comes from his little book The Shape of Living, which was the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book in 1997.
Baptism is the clearest Christian testimony to the fundamental and inescapable reality of being overwhelmed. It is the basic event of Christian identity. Those of us who are baptized have taken on an identity shaped by the overwhelmings of creation, death, resurrection and the Holy Spirit. We have also entered a community that spans generations and relates us to many who have died, as well as to perhaps two billion people alive today who are identified as Christians. This is being overwhelmed by people; but it does not stop with the Christian community because Jesus Christ faces in love the four billion or so others too.
David F. Ford, The Shape of Living (Canterbury, 2012 [1997]), p.23.
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