This Sunday was one of my favorite Sundays of the Christian year. It's deep. It's powerful. It's rich.We held a baptismal remembrance service. I just love sacramental spirituality. Getting in touch with our baptism is getting in touch with our core identity. Our identity is not wrapped up in success, achievement, pleasing people, or accumulation. We are God's beloved! The same voice that said at Jesus' baptism, "this is my beloved," rings at our baptisms too. If we truly lived out of our belovedness, and saw others as beloved by God as well, the world would be changed.
We shared this hymn I wrote years ago for my son's baptism, and it occurred to me that I have never shared the text on the blog. So here it is. It can easily be sung to SLANE, which many know as the tune associated with "Be Thou My Vision."
"Water and Spirit"
Baptismal Hymn by Stephen P. West
Suggested tune: SLANE
Originally published in “Alive Now”
Set to music, with publisher’s notes, on the GBOD Worship Website.
Water and Spirit are joined in this place,
Visible sign of a spiritual grace,
True act of God, not earned but received,
Love we have known before we were conceived.
Eternal streams of your life water flow,
Creative power one day we will know.
First from the womb, and now from the bowl,
Clean us and wash us by making us whole.
Children of God we forever will be,
Marked with the sign of the flood and
Elder and child are born from above,
Graced with the freedom that leads us to love.
“Water and Spirit” by Stephen P. West, copyright 2006 Stephen P. West, all rights reserved.
