The start of another school year puts me in mind of the importance of new beginnings in Christian faith.

Christian talk is full of the language of new beginnings. Forgiveness, of course, is all about starting over. The apostle Paul says: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). We often talk about God opening doors to new opportunities or different paths. And so forth.

Christian practice, too, is full of the symbols of new beginnings. For example: At Prince of Peace, the baptismal font centrally placed in the worship space reminds us that our baptism says — both with and beyond words — that God has given us, completely from his own free generosity and by his incomparable creative power, a fresh start, a new life.

And it’s not only the fact of a fresh start that the font evokes as we move around it and see it in our peripheral vision, but also the place from which we start — the place of new beginnings. Baptism, Paul said to the Romans, is not just getting wet, but being put, being plunged, into the life and death and resurrection of Jesus (Romans 6:1–11).

This man Jesus and everything he did and said — now twenty centuries in the past, part of a time and culture completely foreign to most of us — is yet not only our contemporary but our very environment, our context, the campus where our new life from God is lived.

And to make “progress” in Christian believing is not to depart from Jesus, our new beginning, as if we could move on to bigger and better things, but precisely to return to Jesus — to return to our baptism into Jesus — over and over again, every day, by God’s grace, as Luther pointed out (Large Catechism).

However feelings and temptations may be whispering to us otherwise, the un-erasable fact of our baptism, this empirical piece of our biography, is there to remind us that God has taken hold of us — has put his name and his claim on us — and gives himself to us in Jesus, no matter how far we stray or how dark the path.

—Maurice Lee