In our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, Pharaoh’s daughter drew Moses out of the water and claimed him as her child. In like manner, God draws us out of the water of baptism and claims us as children of God. It doesn’t matter how old we are when our bodies are presented as “a living sacrifice . . . to God,” whether it is done by our parents when we are infants or by ourselves as accountable adults. It doesn’t matter whether the baptismal water is in a font, a pool, or a river, whether we are anointed or immersed. It is a symbolic act of our offering and God’s accepting, of God’s anointing and our receiving, of our recognizing God’s voice announcing, “You are my child, the beloved; with you I am well pleased,” just as with Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan River (Mt.3:17). In our gospel lesson, Peter proclaims Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Messiah means “anointed one.” In the anointing of our baptism, we too become sons and daughters of the living God, called to incarnate God’s love in this place just as Jesus was in his time, to be God’s agent here and now, God’s hands and feet and voice wherever we go, whatever we do day by day. We are drawn out of the water, blessed to be a blessing in the world. God created us all of a piece, all creation totally interdependent, the unity of the cosmos within the unity of what we perceive as the Trinity of God. We may imagine that we are all separate from one another, from creation, from God, but that doesn’t make it so. Paul’s body metaphor of oneness in our epistle is useful in helping us picture the results of separation, of dismembering, of considering one part of creation more important than another. As children of God, we are called to union with God, with one another, with all creation, to re-member all that we have separated, to replace our image of separateness with the fact of unity, in other words, to reconciliation. As Paul tells us elsewhere, “So if anyone is in Christ [symbolically through the waters of baptism], there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new. All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us .” (II Cor.5:17-19)