It was Friday, and Sunday loomed large on the horizon and I still had a serious problem. It was too late to switch to another text and preach from the Old Testament of the Epistle reading for the day. There wasn t time to do the research. And I really did not want to pick a fight with Matthew and Mark and Jesus about the appropriateness of baptizing someone who had not sinned. If it did, as always, it was God s doing and not mine.
Some days are diamond, some days are stone, as the songwriter said.
In my mind, that day was a big old rock. The book was entitled Baptism in the New Testament . Now, the writings of German theologians quite often are difficult for me to understand, sometimes because of linguistic problems in the translation, and sometimes just because their logic escapes me. Not so in this circumstance. This little book was a Godsend.