Reflection -- A New Life in Community

We took up the ancient celebration of Lent this week with Ash Wednesday.  Lent, now a 40-day period of devotional preparation for Easter, began in the early years of the faith community we call the church as a period of time in which new believers prepared for their baptism.  For early Christians, baptism followed a lengthy period of prayer, study, and self examination and was the last step before being fully accepted into the church.  Then, as now, it marked the life-changing transformation from being a citizen of a world that does not know God’s love to becoming a part of the community of faith, the “body of Christ,” those who are “in the world, but not of it.”

The inclusion of this passage from I Peter in today’s lectionary readings reflects those ancient origins of Lent.  The passage calls us to remember the bed-rock foundation for our baptism ¾ Christ’s self-giving that we might be brought to God ¾ and it draws an analogy between the saving of Noah’s family from the flood and the salvation symbolized by our own baptism.  It then concludes by again pointing to the source of our hope in baptism, that we are able to claim renewed relationship with our God with a good conscience because our appeal is through the resurrected Christ.

Noah's ark has often been used as a symbol for Christ’s church.  The church, as the body of Christ, ought to reach out to the world, just as Jesus did.  That is a central part of the Christian calling.  Even so, sharing our faith journey together in community is a refuge from a world that often does not reflect the love of God for each person.  In speaking of the analogy between the salvation of Noah and his family from the flood and what happens in baptism, one commentator says this: 

The analogy underscores how baptism is not a psychological rite of passage, but quite literally the movement from one world to another—as the ark carried Noah’s family through the flood to another world so the believer moves from the sin-fraught context of the current world into the new creation brought by God’s work in Jesus Christ. ¼ In other words, we see the world differently in baptism ¼ because we have, in fact, entered a different world of which the church is the first emerging sign.

Lent is a good time to pause and think about where you are in your own faith journey, whether you are a new believer just thinking about baptism or “an old hand” with many years of experience as part of the faith community gathered in “the ark.” During these days before Easter, recall God’s mercy and steadfast love as expressed in the life of Jesus and what it has meant for you.

revclay

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I Peter 3:18-22

    For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.  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, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

[NRSV]