The mother held the baby gently in her arms over the baptismal font.

A smile radiated from her face, as the white-clad baby wailed his arms

wildly as babies tend to do. “Would she cry?” I wondered. It’s always

a 50-50 chance, whether a baby cries or not as the cold blessed water

is poured over their tiny little heads. In my experience, if the baby

enjoys baths, he or she will enjoy the feeling of the holy water at

their baptism. Finally, the moment comes for the actually rite itself.

The baby dangles over Heaven and earth when those lovely words pierce

the sanctuary: “… I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the

Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” When you stop and reflect about this

“routine” you can feel the weight of history. This seemingly innocent

gesture has changed the course of entire civilizations and continents.

It has been repeated billions of times over these last two thousand

years, across cultures and nations. These same words were used over

the heads of construction workers and kings, over emperors and

engineers, babies and men. Baptisms can become so usual and proverbial

we overlook the verbal literal power.

Words have the ability to commandeer and shape reality. It can bring

into being something that did not exist before. An individual man and

woman, for instance, whom stand before God on their wedding day, can

create something entirely new with a few unassuming vocabulary sounds:

“I do.” At that moment, a Christian family is born, endowed with the

very grace of the Trinity itself. Similarly at our baptism, we are

reborn, reconfigured and refreshed. We become sons and daughters of

God. (See 2 Corinthians 6:18)

Today as the Church celebrates when Christ himself was baptized in the

Jordan River we must remember why, otherwise the baptism we do will

lose its meaning. The waters of baptism, like the waters of the flood

during Noah’s time in Genesis come to cleanse our sins away. With

those very same words which Jesus Christ himself commanded to his

followers before he physically left the planet: “Go, therefore and

make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit… and behold, I am with

you always, to the close of the age.” Jesus again saves .(See Matthew

28:20) But unlike us who are sanctified through the waters, Christ

today is the who gives these seemingly unassuming ceremony its

transformative grace.