Lent: : "An Appeal to God"

I PETER 3

21 And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you--not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,  22 who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

Water is clean and fresh and pure in its basic state.  Symbolically, however, in Scripture it is chaos and death.  See the earlier passages from this week about Noah.  Water = judgment and death.  We often divorce this meaning from baptism, but it is so closely tied.  Water cleanses.  Water is a burial.  Multiple layers of meaning and purpose.

Water could or would be terrifying and chaotic to wandering desert nomads.  Think of how water was used in their escape from Egypt. 

In the institution of baptism, we incorporate the cleansing ritual used in several places as well as the chao/judgment from others.  We die to self to rise up in Christ.  We appeal to God, casting off the before and claiming the intent and desire of the new, relying on the forerunner of our faith Jesus sitting at the right hand of God.  Not light stuff.

God help us today to live like baptized people; make us people immersed into a  new life and wonderfully re-created ways of doing things.

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