Caution: Putting a Sunday homily on the Website is tricky business. All the viewer has is a written text. A homily, on the other hand, is "an oral event". It may not have been said or heard the way it was written. In addition, a roughly ten-minute homily is part of a roughly one-hour worship event in which God and God's people communicate with each other by means of ritual, symbol, song, proclamation, prayer. Not everything in these homilies is original. As a homilist, I rely on and at times borrow from other homilists and writers who are not properly mentioned in this format. I am often indebted to them.

13th Sunday Ordinary Time A

Many of us were brought up with the notion that baptism takes away original sin. That is not necessarily wrong, but there is so much more to baptism. That is what Paul draws attention to in language that sounds a bit mysterious to us. “Being baptized into Christ’s death…. so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

All this is to indicate that we as Christians have our identity totally from Christ Jesus, especially from his dying and rising. In baptism we die with Christ to everything that smells of death in our lives, in our world. Christ’s stamp is put on us, we are clothed with Christ Jesus. That takes a life-time to really “take”; it all centers for us around Jesus Christ with whom we are made one for the glory of God and for our ultimate well-being, our true identity.