Sacraments,  earthly signs of divine mystery,  also shed light on some social questions we wrestle with day by day.

For example, water is the sign of Baptism, and what is more urgent today than the world’s use of this vital element for life? Like the air we breathe, we depend on clean water for drinking, agriculture, sanitation and hygiene.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) says that more than 1 billion people – about one in six people in the world – have no access to clean and safe drinking water, which then is a cause of poverty, conflict, disease and death.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates  that 1.8 million children die every year as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. Women and children, the usual providers of water, spend long hours walking to get water, often from polluted sources. The time they spend prevents them from benefiting from other work or from school.

The feast of the Baptism of Jesus usually ends our celebration of the Christmas season, as it does this year.  Jesus came that we might have life, and among his great signs promising life are signs of food and drink. Can we fulfill  his promise of life by working today to eradicate hunger and the lack of clean water in so many parts of the world? Doesn’t  a cause like that follow from our own baptism? It’s part of the first of the Millenium Development Goals agreed upon by the peoples of the world at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that among the earliest directions for the rite of Baptism in early Christianity–found also in Jewish purification rituals too–is the instruction that people be baptized in “flowing water, ” clean, fresh water.

The signs of our sacraments take us beyond personal salvation; they are signs for our wider world too.