“Buried to Rise: How Baptism Saves”
By Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, January 18, 2026
Reading: Colossians 2:8-15
This is week two of our series on the sacrament of baptism. We're all quite familiar with baptism, aren't we? I imagine most of us have been baptized as infants, or some of us might have been baptized later in our lives. If you haven't been baptized, you've probably at least seen several baptisms. People either being immersed in water or having water poured over their heads.
A pastor, a priest, a vicar, a rector, or whoever the clergy is of the day, baptizes in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We look at that and recognize something special is happening, something powerful, something meaningful is happening. But what is it?
Well, that's something that Christians can't even agree on. The initiatory rite, the thing that physically seems to seal your identity as a Christian, Christians disagree on what it is, what it means, and whether or not it does anything. In fact, denominations and churches have split over far less important issues than baptism. In the church, therefore, there is a wide range of opinions on this topic ranging from baptism is everything, baptism is salvation itself, to baptism is just kind of something you do, it's just a symbol of something that's going on in your heart, but it has no actual power. And that range of views exists within what we might call Christianity, and yet they're so far apart from each other, it seems it's quite important for us to know what we mean by this thing, baptism. What does it do, if anything? What does it mean? And what import does it have in our lives?
The symbolic view, the view that's very popular in, for example, Baptist circles and many non-denominational circles, will say that baptism is a symbol of a spiritual reality. It's your way of showing others, showing the world, demonstrating in front of the church that you have made a personal commitment to follow Jesus Christ. And there is some truth in that. It is that physical demonstration of what's going on in your heart. However, to merely call it a symbol misses something powerful about what baptism is said to be from the scriptures.
However, it's forgivable because the Protestant Reformation was founded on these five principles that we hold dear in all our Protestant churches. Five Solas.
First one, we're saved by grace alone. Secondly, we're saved by grace alone through faith alone. We're saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone. That's four. But the fifth one's really difficult to line up with this idea that baptism is merely symbolic. Because if we take seriously the fifth sola. Sola Scriptura, the idea that scripture is the authority for Christian faith and life, then we have a bit of a problem when it comes to baptism as symbol. Because in the Book of 1 Peter, Chapter 3, Peter writes in his epistle that baptism saves. He says:
“… in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight souls, were saved through water, there is also an antitype which now saves us—baptism (not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God).”
Peter in his epistle says that baptism saves. It's not just a symbol. It's not just something that we do to show other people. Baptism itself, according to the Apostle Peter, saves. The question then is how? Is it magic water that washes away all your sins? Is it a birth canal that births you into the church? Is it something you do to earn your salvation? Or is it something else altogether?
I'm wondering if this parable might help you. Imagine a man who's lived all his days without knowing that he has a serious undiagnosed heart condition. He's noticed a few symptoms but never really had them checked out. He feels tired from time to time. Once in a while gets a bit irritable, doesn't know why. He kind of ignores it and goes on with his days as usual. Until one day as he's going about his daily business, he completely collapses, falls to the ground, he's unconscious, has no idea what's happening. Somebody calls 911, an ambulance comes and rushes him to the hospital. As he's about to lose his life, the doctors there perform an amazing intervention. They open up his chest cavity and place an extremely sophisticated piece of technology upon his heart called a pacemaker. And because there is something else regulating his heartbeat that he could not regulate in and of himself. He's being kept alive by something that he didn't do. In fact, he's being kept alive by something that he didn't even ask for.
Somebody who understood more than he did, who knew more than he did, that could do more than he did, intervened and saved his life and gave him potentially a new heart. But here's the thing, if that man goes home and lays in his bed and wakes up every day terrified that his heart is going to fail because he doesn't know there's a pacemaker on it, the pacemaker is saving his life, but he doesn't live in newness of life. He lives as if the surgery had never happened. He lives in fear that he could die at any moment. He doesn't walk in the liberty that was given him, not because the surgery wasn't efficacious, but because he didn't have faith in the pacemaker.
I wonder, friends, if that's an image that we can use to help us understand what baptism does in our lives. It does save, the Bible tells us so, but that doesn't mean we have to throw out the idea that we're saved by grace alone and through faith alone. Because if you don't have faith, if you don't believe in what God has given you, you may end up living a life as if He'd never given it to you at all.
Paul in Colossians wants us to become confident in our relationship with Christ, in our chosen-ness by Christ. So, he uses an image that might be a bit far-fetched to us today but would have been very familiar to the ears of the people this was being read to. He says, “In Him, you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism.” Paul draws an important link here that we need to understand. There's a connection between baptism and the rite of circumcision. And both are a physical sign, a physical seal of a covenant that God is making with God's people.
We have to understand what circumcision is. Circumcision first appears in the scriptures in Genesis, Chapter 17. God makes a covenant with Abraham and makes him a promise that he will prosper him and the generations after him. God says to Abraham, “It shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised, every male child in your generations, he who is born in your house or bought with money from any foreigner who is not your descendant.” Why? This is a mark between me, God, and you, God's people. I want it to be obvious, physically obvious, visibly obvious that you belong to me and that I have marked you.
So, I give you this tool that you can use to show yourself as having entered my kingdom, that you can show yourself as having become my people. But circumcision was not merely a symbol. It wasn't just something that happened outwardly. Paul explains in Romans, Chapter 2 that it has much more to do with the heart than it does merely the flesh.
He says, “For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision?” Later on, he writes: “… but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter.”
You see, sometimes we have this false idea that the relationship with God that the people of Israel had was all about their works and what they did. But Paul explains in this passage, that they actually have a relationship with God that's similarly built on grace, the condition of your heart. Are you going to live out that sign and that seal that God has placed upon you through covenants? It's one thing to be circumcised, but are you going to live as a circumcised man? It's one thing to be baptized, people of God, but are you going to live as a baptized Christian?
Baptism makes public something that's happening in the spiritual. But we know that that's necessary for many things, don't we? We wouldn't say that the things we do in public, the rituals and covenants that we enact in public are merely symbolic. Neither would we say that they are the be-all and end-all of what they're trying to signify.
So, if I say that baptism is necessary for salvation, I'm not saying that God doesn't do the work in your heart. Rather, I'm saying that everything that exists in the spirit in order to be real to us also has a manifestation in the physical. I would say that baptism is necessary for salvation in the same way that a wedding is necessary for marriage. Or that coronation is necessary for monarchy.
My history teacher used to joke around that there's only one thing that moves faster than the speed of light. You know what that is? The monarchy. The very moment at which Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II passed from this life to the next, her son, who was previously his Royal Highness, Prince Charles, suddenly became His Majesty, King Charles. It didn't take a number of seconds. It didn't take a number of minutes or hours or days or months. Instantly, he became king.
Yet, it is necessary for him to be crowned. Why? Because his kingship is a spiritual reality. It's been passed onto him through the ether without anybody doing anything. But we live in a physical world. We're not just minds and spirits floating around in space. We exist in three dimensions, in time and in space. If something is to be real to us, we have to experience it in the material world. So, there's a grand ceremony and the church is invited, and the church does at that ceremony what it does at every single serious ceremony it performs. It makes physical and material that which is going on in the spiritual realm. And this is why, friends, we can call ourselves the body of Christ because what was the mission of Christ? It was to take God from heaven, the divine logic of the universe and make him manifest on earth. It was to bring heaven to earth and to bring earth to heaven. That's what the incarnation is all about. The Word made flesh dwells among us.
So, what does the church do in its sacraments? It looks into heaven and sees what God is doing. It makes that physical and manifests on the earth so that it's real for everyone here to see and experience. In a wedding ceremony, the church recognizes that two souls are being joined together, that they're being drawn together, that they love each other and desire to be together forever. We acknowledge that spiritual reality and then what do we do? We hold a ceremony to make it official; to make it real, to make it tangible, to make it legal, so that it has substance here on the earth.
In ordination, we look at a minister who's been called by God to word and sacrament and pastoral care, and we look in the heavens and say, this is what God is doing. Now we, the church, are going to make it physical and real and manifest on this earth by conferring on that person the rights and privileges of a minister. This is why we pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Our role as church, our role as the body of Christ is to take the word and make it flesh, make it manifest, make it real in the lives of people.
If we understand that that's what's going on in baptism, we realize that it's necessary for us. We need to experience that. We need to feel the reality of the water upon the head or the dunking under the water. We need to see God's grace being poured out on one another so that we can remember that we can't save ourselves. That like the man on the operating table with the heart that's about to give out, we need an intervention of God that's going to cut through who we are and place something within our being that can bring us back to life.
In Colossians, Paul describes baptism as a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of sins by the circumcision of Christ. A sign, a seal of a covenant God is making with you, a mark that he's placing upon his people so that you might know that you are a child of God. that you are beloved by Him.
The United Church describes it like this. It says, in the Basis of Union of 1925, that “baptism in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit is the sacrament by which is signified and sealed our union with Christ and our participation in the blessings of the new covenant.” Those are two really important words. Neither of them are symbols. The baptism signifies and seals.
Think about what happens at the end of a contract. You signify, or in royalty they would take wax and they would seal an imprint, an official marker to make real what is going on in this agreement. If we realize now that baptism unites us with Christ, that it's the seal of God's covenant then we have to ask ourselves, what kind of covenant is this? What are we agreeing to? What kind of relationship have we stepped into? You see, in our descriptions of baptism, we often use all the nice language, don't we? It's regeneration. It's new birth. But that's not the language that Paul uses, is it? Paul doesn't describe baptism as resurrection and regeneration and new birth. Paul describes baptism as death.
In Romans, Chapter 6, he says this:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
One of the problems we have with trying to live our resurrection life is that often we're not willing to die first. We want Jesus to take the wheel, but we want to hang on to it too. We know we need a new heart, but we don't want to lay down on the operating table. We want a sign and seal of God's promise to us, but we don't want to cut off the flesh, our old selves. But this is the sign and seal of baptism. God's telling us when you're baptized, I'm inviting you to a new life, but you have to give up the old one. Your old self with its sin, its shame, its guilt, its trauma, its pain, with all the things you carry on a day-to-day basis. God says, you don't have to have that anymore. It dies with Christ and you are a new creation, a brand new being. All things have passed away. Behold, all things become new.
Baptism is a sign and seal of you being united with Christ in death. But then how does it work? How do I get back up again? How do I live a resurrection life if I just died with Christ? Well, Paul tells us in Colossians, he says, “…through faith in the working of God who raised Jesus from the dead.”
How do we live out the promise of baptism? By faith in the working of God who raised Jesus from the dead. It's still by grace. It's still by faith. But it's signed and sealed and made real in baptism. When you arise from those waters, when that water drips down from your head, this is God saying to you, you are mine. Now live like it.
And sometimes that's hard, isn't it? It's hard to live like we're children of God when there are so many reasons to believe that we're not as great as God has called us to be. Perhaps your upbringing, your childhood, your life experiences have taught you that you're not worth very much at all. Maybe you look at yourself in the mirror day after day and don't like what you see, but in baptism, God says this, I have called you by your name. You are mine. And if you want to enjoy your resurrection life, if you want to enjoy the freedom by which Christ has made you free, you have to do like that man that just had the operation. You have to get up out of bed and walk in your newness of life. Believe that that thing in your chest really will change the rhythm of your heart. Go and live out the gospel that God has given to you.
If you're a parent in this room, it's really important that you make that effort for your children as well. So often when we do infant baptism, we're talking about it as if we're just getting our kids done, right? We do it because, we were baptized and our parents were baptized and our grandparents were baptized and it's really important to our family, so we just want to get it done, because you never know, God might be real or something. After that there's a responsibility. The same way that marriage means nothing if after the wedding the two people don't plan to love each other and live together and do the things that married couples do. The same way that baptism is a great sign and seal of God's covenant with us, but if we don't want to follow Christ, Christ isn't going to force himself into our lives.
The promise that God made you and your descendants and your children is a free gift from God. It's not dependent on your action. It's not even dependent on your faith. It's based on the Word of God. But you have to teach them to know Jesus. You have to teach them how to pray. You have to bring them into a space where they can be raised and nurtured in the knowledge and the love of God so that the grace that God has freely poured out upon them might be made real and manifest in their lives.
If I write you a check for a million dollars, first of all, it will bounce. There's no way I've got anything like that in my banking account. But if I wrote you a check for a million dollars and I had the money, that would be a free gift that I've given you. But if you just leave it in your wallet, you'll be no richer than you were the day before. You have to deposit that check. You have to take hold of and receive the gift that I've given you.
This is how faith relates to the sacrament of baptism, friends. God has given us a free gift. He sent his son to the cross to die for each and every one of our sins. He offers us all eternal life, not just in the next life, but right now you can live life abundantly. Deposit by faith into your heart that promise that God has given to you and live in the freedom with which Christ has made you free.
So, if today you're sitting there and you're a baptized Christian who's struggling with their faith, with a sense of self-worth, if you're wondering what it is that God wants you to do with what's left of your life, I invite you to do what the man in the story needed to do. Have faith in what God has given you. Get up out of that bed of despair. Know that you have been given new life and go and walk in it. That just as you have been buried with Christ, you might also be raised with Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.