Buried with Him in Baptism

hat do you say about baptism to a Church of Christ that hasn’t been said many, many times before? After all, we’re known in the religious world for being obsessed with baptism.

But of course, the point isn’t to say something new or different, but to emphasize once again the basic biblical truths about baptism . . .that beautiful moment when a person follows Jesus into the water in order to identify with his death, burial, and resurrection in a public way. With the baptism in Churches of Christ, there’s always the risk of over-emphasizing it–focusing on it to the exclusion of the faith and commitment that precede it–and under-emphasizing it–refusing to talk much about it because we feel like it’s been said so many times before.

So tomorrow–as the last three weeks have been–will be in many ways a return to the basics, and attempt to share with our church a faithful view of what Scripture teaches us about what it means to be “buried with [Christ] in baptism.” We’ll focus a little extra on the comparison with circumcision that Paul makes in the Colossians text.