A Daily Gift
Many things come to my mind when I read this passage from Peter. During many years I had the opportunity and grace to be part of a team in the Diocese of Lund in the Church of Sweden. Our task was to help the parishes to focus on baptism and to find ways (old and new) to speak of baptism among the parishioners. One goal was to “increase what the consciousness of our baptism means to our faith”. We found that we often tend to think of baptism as something that happened to us once (often when we were babies) and that we seldom think of being baptized as a daily gift.
Here Peter points out to us this daily gift and that our baptism is inseparable from Christ’s suffering and death and his resurrection. Peter also reminds us of the ark built by Noah that was saved through water. This is a prefiguration of our baptism! Baptism saves us from eternal death. We are through baptism, concrete or figuratively, drowned with Christ into his death. And in the same way we are lifted out of the water and incorporated in his resurrection. Every day we live in this pattern: from darkness to light, from death to life, from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. This is what Martin Luther had in mind when he, in times of doubt and trouble, repeated to himself: I am baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
As a prayer I would like to share a verse from a hymn written by the Swedish bishop Jonas Jonson (my translation, and without Jonson’s rhymes):
If your faith withers, worn down by doubt and fall from grace, words failing and your prayer is getting cold. Then your heart will remind you that you were baptized into his death, to a life abounding.
Karin Sundmark
from Sweden