Dear Friends,

We are now well into autumn. There are many who claim it to be their favourite season. I suspect, however, that they are easily outnumbered by those who prefer spring, since, although autumn can be very beautiful, its beauty is that of a last hurrah before death. And yet in this good world created by our good God, we cannot have life without death, just as, in this part of the world, we cannot have spring without autumn. Another way of putting this is to say that change, which is always a kind of death, is necessary for life.

God is always calling us to life, but it is a life that always includes death, for it is a life that always calls us to be changed for the better. God calls us and accepts us as we are, not matter who we are or what we have done. But then he calls us to change, to be better than we are. This is what repentance and forgiveness are all about. God’s call to us is first a call to accept that we are, each one of us, his beloved children, in spite of what we know ourselves to have done or what others may reckon us to be. If we have truly come to know this amazing love that God has for us, God’s love has a way of awakening the love that is within us, the love he gave us at our creation. As love has a way of begetting love, we then want to love God in return by offering ourselves to him and asking him to teach us to follow his ways. Repentance is thus not just our coming to appreciate the wrong in our ways, but the offering of ourselves to God that he may recreate us, that he may give us, so to speak, new life. The power that comes from God’s forgiving love, a love that flows out to us whenever we sincerely turn to him in trust and in sorrow for what we have done wrong, is what we call forgiveness. This forgiving love is the source of new life.

Baptism is the Church’s way of symbolizing this wondrous action of God, an action that is most clearly signified when a baptism takes place in a river, lake, or pool. In such a setting the person to be baptized can be dipped all the way under the water. For a moment that person is, as it were, dying by drowning. When the person emerges from the water and takes fresh air into his or her lungs, it is as if he or she has come to life again. In forgiving us God puts to death the person we are ashamed of being and brings to life a new person. Baptism only happens once in a Christian’s life, but it is a sign of what God will do for us throughout our lives whenever we turn to him in faith.

Forgiveness brings us joy and strength, yet we know that change is not as simple as coming up out of water for air. Old habits are hard to put aside; we are often addicted to them. Life can often seem like a game of snakes and ladders in which a change for the better is followed by a change for the worse. A Christian’s journey is not always to the higher ground; we can fall away from the right path and change for the worse. And it is far from easy to get used to the loss in death of someone we love. This is why we have to keep constantly turning to God for help, for the life-giving oxygen we need to be the hopeful, Easter people he has called us to be. The good news is that if we keep turning to God, if we keep him in our sights as we journey through life, he will keep us engaged in his transforming work, work that changes us for the better and at the same time helps us to change the world. In this process he helps us to see that the killing frosts of November are but his way of preparing a new and better garden in the spring.

Yours in Christ,