Why Don?t Y?all Pass the Bread?...Continued from page 9

Not only dipped, but we are also dyed. I mean by that that baptism is a fountain filled with blood and it changes our color. It gives us a new status and a new standing and a new way of relating because we have not only been dipped, we have been dyed. In the beautiful painting of the cloud of witnesses mural that graces our chapel dome at Beeson Divinity School, one of the great saints is William J. Seymour. He is the only African-American in that panoply of the great saints of the church. William J. Seymour was the leader of the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Under his painting there is a banner that says, “The color line has been washed away in the blood of Jesus.” We have been dyed.

We have been dipped, we have been dyed, and we have been delivered. That is why in the early church after believers were baptized, when they came up out of the water, they then faced in the direction in which the sun went down. That is the west, in the direction of darkness. And the newly baptized Christian would spit in the direction in which the sun went down. He or she was spitting in the face of the devil.

Then, turning to the east, the direction which the sun comes up, the new Christian would say, “I embrace you, O Lord Jesus Christ.” Renouncing the devil and embracing Jesus Christ, that is what baptism means. We have been dipped, we have been dyed, we have been delivered from all of these demons that hang like vampires on our soul, sucking out our very life’s blood.

The aftermath is the one that we are still living today. The story is not over. Our charge is to live out the meaning of the reconciliation that we have in Jesus Christ who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is Jesus Christ who offers us a new way of living because we know him as the one who has come to relativize those distinctions so we can say: There is now in Jesus Christ, neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. We are all one! One! One in Jesus!

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Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.