Today we are going to baptize these three gorgeous little ones into the Body of Christ. We are going to welcome them into a living community that takes its name from the Greek word, Christos, the title that was bestowed, nearly two thousand years ago, on Jesus of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jew.
Christos means “anointed one”; specifically, “God’s anointed”, as in, the long-awaited Messiah (which is “God’s anointed” in Hebrew) who is foretold in the Jewish Scriptures. And Christianity is the name that was given to the religious movement that, after his death and resurrection, spread from that tiny corner of the Roman empire throughout the world. Taking root in places that Jesus’ earliest followers could never have imagined; shaping, and being shaped by the peoples it encountered and the times of which it became a part.
One scholar called this process “indigenization”...(read more)
