A GOOD CLEANSING

                I visited another church last Sunday in order to hear my brother, Gilbert, preach.  He was filling in for the pastor who was gone.  I went because the thought had occurred to me, ‘at our age this may be my last chance to hear him preach a sermon.’  It did not surprise me when he started by saying, “this may be the last sermon that I preach.”

                In the the sermon he spoke about his granddaughter, Haley.  She is a recently married young woman now but when she was about four or five years old, he said, she loved to go out after a good rain and play in the mud.  Not just tromp around in puddles, but get down in the mud, scoop up handfuls of it, roll it into shapes and play with it.  Before long, her clothes were muddy, it was on her legs and face, and even in her hair. Then her mother would come out with a big towel, wrap it around her, carry her in and put her in the bathtub.  Soon she was clean all over and ready for the next adventure.

                When Saul came into Damascus after being blinded by the heavenly vision of Jesus, he was met by a man named Ananias who said to him, “Get up and be baptized, and wash away your sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16).  Saul was dirtied by twisted thinking, hateful passions, and destructive actions. He needed a good cleansing and he found it in his baptism.  He experienced what John described in 1 John 1:7, “If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”

                Don’t we all need a good cleansing?  Paul thought so.  He said in Romans 3:23, “All have sinned – all are dirty – and fall short of the glory of God.”  In our baptism we are connected with the cleansing blood of Jesus.  But what then?  The next time it rained, Haley found another mud puddle and so it is with us – we are soon dirtied again with sin.  Fortunately, there is another connection with the cleansing blood of Jesus.  Paul identified it for us when he wrote these words about the Lord’s Supper: “The cup which we drink, is it not a sharing in (a participation in) the blood of Christ?” (1 Cor 10:16).  Why would he say this?  It may be because Jesus himself, at the last supper, said: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sin” (Matt 26:28). At this table we can hear Jesus saying to us: you are forgiven, you are clean.