In the church calendar, we are in between the Ascension and Pentecost. It’s the last week of the Easter season, and the first one after Jesus ascended to the Father, leaving his friends with instructions to go into the world, baptize, make disciples. But first, they were to wait in Jerusalem for their own baptism—that promised moment of being baptized not just by water, but by the Spirit of God. This Sunday (Pentecost) is considered a feast day that is particularly appropriate for baptism, reflecting those events of the earliest church—both in the spiritual baptism the disciples received as they were gathered, and in this initiation into their inviting thousands of others into their own baptismal embodiments of trust. A baptism is a moment of naming our belovedness, of choosing into this life of death and resurrection. We see Jesus doing just this at his own baptism—entering the water, leaving behind the life he’d known so far, coming up out of the waters initiated into this new public phase of his life… and the Father speaking the words he needed: “This is my beloved Son.” Each of our baptisms rehearses this one. We receive our own belovedness, choosing to enter into a picture of death and coming-to-life. This week, we’re going to lean in to the ways we see echoes of baptism in our own daily lives. What are the everyday baptisms that remind us, invite us to this new life of living-as-beloved? How might we choose to see, to remember, in little moments like noticing the water washing over our hands under the faucet? Or even in our own tears? How might we keep our eyes open to these moments, name them, celebrate them? In the midst of it all?

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2022-05-30 14:14:32 UTC