Rachel Held Evans is quoted by Starlette Thomas’s new book, Take Me to the Water, about the oddity of baptism. It marks just how odd Christianity truly is.

In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity: We are people who stand totally exposed before death and evil and declare them powerless against love. There’s nothing normal about that. (Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday)

Our call as a disciple of Christ is simple: death. Ours is a lifelong funeral procession. We are people of the cross. It’s a cross we take up daily to follow Christ.

Utter foolishness.

And in this utter foolishness is an abundance of life that can’t be imagined in any other context. Jesus doesn’t call us to market a product palatable to the world. He calls us to follow him.

Utter foolishness.

The life to live is a life of death. The waters of baptism call us to daily repentance and the way to new life. This is the way of radical love. It is a love that will refuse to hate. A love that will refuse to cast blame. A love that is beyond making a good meme to share. A love that will sit in the darkest rooms in the hardest of places and say to someone else, “I am with you.”

It doesn’t make sense. It is just life.