Last night’s St. David the King young adult Bible study went well. We had a great crowd, 14 in all, just able squeeze around the large table in the Spiritual Reading Room.

Our series looks at the Old Testament and Gospel readings that we’ll hear on Sundays, because they’re thematically related. In the interest of time, I leave out the Second Reading because it is often not thematically related: it’s usually just sequentially chosen from the epistles.

But upon reading the Second Reading for this coming Sunday (2 Timothy 2:8-13), I immediately saw a connection:

This saying is trustworthy:
If we have died with him
we shall also live with him. (verse 11)

The imagery of dying and rising (or living) with Christ is embodied in the sacrament of baptism, and baptism is prefigured in the Old Testament reading, in Naaman’s plunging into the Jordan to be cleansed of his leprosy.

It’s a shame that I don’t include the Second Reading, since it would also introduce a different form of Scripture (that is, the epistle). But there’s always the next series.