Why do we baptize people on just these four days? Why do we do this in the midst of a Sunday liturgy? Why baptize with water and then seal with oil? What do we think we are doing when we gather for baptisms?

We are stepping into a river of signs, stories and sacrament that stretches back to the beginning of creation. We baptize people on these four days because the stories assigned to be read on those days speak of hope waiting to be fulfilled and then the power of the spirit breaking forth.We are told the wonder of a new thing before it springs forth, and then we reenact it.

We administer the rite of Holy Baptism in the context of the Sunday liturgy because that is when the community is gathered. We are the body of Christ. The candidates come to be initiated into that body. We become part of something larger than ourselves each time a new person is presented for baptism. We are joined together by water and by words. We will promise to support them in their vows just before the water washes over them and then our voices shall be the chorus that welcomes them, dripping from their baptism, into the household of God

Listen to the words we will say in the Baptismal Covenant. Here in question and answer form is the distilate of the Christian faith. These few paragraphs, forged in the fire of heated discussion, and tempered by hundreds of years of reflection, state the essence of our understanding. We describe how God acts in the world and we locate Christ in history.

We state what we must do to continue in the process of our own conversion and to participate in the transformation of the world.

These are not glib statements made to be mumbled without understanding. These are serious questions about matters of life and death, issues of ultimate concern. Listen to what we are saying we will do. Listen to what we are saying we will not do. Drink deeply of the rich meaning in these terse phrases. They are living water from the river of our spiritual inheiritance.

Every sacramental rite has outward signs. In baptism we have water and oil and flesh. Living candidates are presented. Water is sanctified by prayer and ceremonial action. Oil blessed by the Bishop is used to mark the candidates as Christ own forever.

Christ was God incarnate. The spirit of the living God come to dwell with us. We too are flesh. We too have something of God within us by nature of our creation. But when we are baptized we share fully in what Christ has already accomplished. He died and rose again.No one had ever doen this before. By doing so Christ conquered sin and death. We share in that through our baptism. No more will our physical mortality be the end of our existance. Do we understand how radically that can change our outlook on life? If we do not fear death, we can embrace every aspect of real life.

Because Christ conquered sin, the weight of our mistakes, the burden of our misdoings, the hardness of heart and the negligence of mind that leaves us pressed down and broken need no longer be allowed to remain lord over us. Our sins have been redeemed. We have only to give them up to be free of them. Our old being washes away and we spring forth as a new thing through the water of baptism.

Listen to the power of the stories about water. Yes, it is ordinary tap water when we pour in into the font. But watch what it becomes for us. We remember that God moved over it and then formed everything that is,culminating in human beings. In baptism we come back to our beginnings, to begin again.

Yes, we have only a few ounces of water but it is enough to recall the whole Red Sea. Faith in God and Godıs faithfulness saved a people from slavery and lead them to a new life. Do we think that this story of journey and liberation is over? Do we not remember some chapter of our own life of faith that has escape from captivity, and Godıs grace running through it at high tide?

And what about these handfulls of water that we will pour over David and Gretchenıs heads. Do we realize that the water John poured on Jesus has cycled through evaporation and rain and the centuries such that it has spread around the whole world? Some of it may actually be physically present in this bowl. Some of it may be in our bodies. But we will stand with Christ when the water pours; and he will be in us and we in him.

Did you know that annointing with oil was the way of acknowledging the identity of a king or a prophet? And do we realize that the bishop who consecrated this oil had been made a bishop by the laying on of hands by three other bishops who had the hands of earlier bishops laid on them, and that we can follow this back, at least symbolically, to the disciples and Jesus' commisioning of them?

When we seal David and Gretchen as Christıs own forever, we use consecrated oil. We stand in the communion of saints and the company of bishops through the centuries. We see kings and prophets and the disciples standing in the distance.

This is continuity we are offered. This is the ground out of which the baptismal rite has grown. Thousands of years of powerful symbols converge in this day. Millions of people through millenia are joined together by these words and these actions. The spirit of God is invoked and new Christians are made. And we are witnesses.

Remember what you see this day. Remember what it means and what you have promised.

The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluable. We are part of the body of Christ, sworn to uphold the life and growth of one another, and charged to tell the world about what we have seen below the surface of simple signs.

Words, water, oil, bread, wine ­ common things. But the whole world is made holy by the presence of God. Today we offer two children. Today we offer ourselves, again. Lord transform what we offer into what you would have it be. Let your glory shine forth from the simple and the ordinary that we might turn and find all things raised up.