Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2009

Series: Duties of the Laity in the ACNA, Part 4

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“To present their children and those they have led to the Lord for baptism and confirmation”

We come this morning to the fourth of the ten duties of the laity as outlined for us in the canons of the Anglican Church in North America. You’ll remember that the first of these ten duties is that we “worship God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, every Lord’s Day in a Church unless reasonably prevented.” The second is that we “engage regularly in the reading and study of Holy Scripture and the Doctrine of the Church as found in Article I of the Constitution.” The third, which we looked at more closely last week, is that every member is “To observe their baptismal vows, to lead an upright and sober life, and not give scandal to the Church.” And now the fourth duty: that every member is “To present their children and those they have led to the Lord for baptism and confirmation.”

This may seem like one of the most straight forward and easy to digest of the ten duties, especially in a tradition church like ours, and especially since most of you parents have already brought your children to baptism and confirmation. I’m preaching to the choir today. But of course its always good for us to know why we do what we do, and to do things in the church not simply because this is always the way we’ve done them, but because we’re convinced that this is what God in His Word would have us to do.

It’s also important for us to talk about the reasons for bringing our children to baptism and confirmation in light of the increasing pressure on parents today, not only from within many corners of the Church, but even from outside, from our ever-increasingly pluralistic, anti-dogmatic, anti-patriarchal society, not to do something as awful as baptizing our children.

You see, in our day and age many people see the practice of baptizing of our children as taking advantage of their innocence and vulnerability to impose upon them our own belief system so that they’re sort of fated from the beginning to have a completely biased outlook on life and to perpetuate the sort of rigid exclusivism and intolerance they view so many Christians as representing today. How unfair! How undemocratic! Why not allow our children to grow up without any ready-made commitments and to decide for themselves, when they’re old enough, what faith they want to belong to… if any? I mean, aren’t baptism and confirmation just a kind of mind-control that was done to us and now we’re doing to our children? A lot of Christian parents are under pressure from our culture to think just that way.

Well, the simple answer to the question of why shouldn’t we just allow our children to find their own spiritual way is that God has designed things differently. God has designed from the very beginning to save whole families, to bring whole families into a saving relationship with Himself. We call that kind of relationship a covenant. And for the earliest times God has been bringing not just individual believers into covenant with Himself, but individual believers and their children.

Think about the story of Noah and his family. The Scripture says that Noah was a just man, blameless in his generation. And that’s sayings something, because the whole world had gone to hell in a hand-basket. Talk about pressure to conform. Here was righteous Noah in the midst of society that had completely corrupted itself to the point that there was nothing left worth saving, and God was compelled to destroy it with a flood. “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Gen. 6:8). Noah did. It doesn’t say anything about his family. It doesn’t say anything about their righteousness, or even their faith. But when the ark sailed was Noah alone with the animals? No. God said to Noah, “Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall go into the ark – you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you” (vv. 17, 18). You see, God could have chosen to deal with Noah as a bare individual and saved him alone, but God has always desired to bring the families of his faithful people into covenant with Himself as well.

In Genesis 17 God made a covenant of salvation with Abraham. Abraham was a true believer. It says that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteous. And God gave Abraham the rite of circumcision as the sign of his faith and the sign of being in covenant with God. But God said his covenant was not only for Abraham, but for his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, and beyond before any of them were even born. And each of them would be given the sign of the covenant at the tender age of eight days old, before of course any of them could make a conscious decision.

Well, when we get to the New Testament we hear the Apostle Peter preach his great Pentecost sermon and call his adult hearers to “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:38-39). You see, God’s basic modus operandi does not change when we get to the New Testament; He still desires the children of his believing people to be brought into His covenant of salvation.

And this is a sacred responsibility He has entrusted to believing parents. You see, the reality is our children do not belong to us. God has purchased us for Himself by the blood of His son, and in that transaction He has purchased our children as well. They belong to Him. But He has entrusted us with the stewardship of our children. Just as God chose us to give them physical birth, so God has now laid upon us the responsibility as stewards to bring them to spiritual birth – to bring them to baptism, and to give them up to their adoption as sons and daughters of God. That is our sacred duty as stewards of our children. And we remember that the Scripture says it is required of stewards that they be found faithful (1 Cor. 4:2).

But the stewardship of our children doesn’t stop with baptism, any more than our responsibility to raise our children ends with their physical birth. That would be ludicrous. Child Protective Services would come and take our children away from us. Unfortunately a lot of Christian parents, especially in traditional churches, feel they’ve done their duty once they’ve brought their children to baptism, and either don’t realize they have a continual stewardship role to play with their children, or don’t take it all that seriously.

John Sartelle, in the pamphlet on infant baptism we have in the rack on the back wall, tells the story of an incredible scene he witnessed while down in Mexico. He says,

“I stood in the great cathedral in Mexico City. Though it was not a Sunday, the huge building was filled with people. Two seemingly endless lines stretched along the main aisle of the spacious sanctuary. From them issued a nonstop chorus of noise, for each line consisted of couples carrying their infants. Hundreds of babies contested to see which could cry the loudest! As the infant chorus echoed from the cathedral walls, a couple would briefly stand before the bishop at the head of each aisle. The bishop would say a few words and sprinkle water on the baby. Then the couple would move quickly away, making room for the next proud father and mother. So the process continued through the day as visitors, sight-seers, parishioners, and couples came and left.”

Now my first reaction to that story is: don’t you wish we had that problem? Don’t you wish we had people lined up to the street to have their children baptized? But the problem really was that, in that culture, for so many of those parents that was probably the last time they ever brought their children to church, except maybe seven or eight years later for their first communion, and even later for their wedding, and perhaps for their funeral, with a few Christmases and Easters thrown in for good measure. I don’t know that; but that would be my guess.

But this is not what God has designed for His people. When God told Abraham to bring his children into the covenant by circumcision, that wasn’t the end of the story. In the very next chapter God said this about Abraham:

“For I have chosen him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord.” (Gen. 18:19).

Abraham’s spiritual stewardship of his children only began when he placed the sign and seal of God’s grace upon them. His duty to teach them the way of the Lord and to guide them into covenant faithfulness would continue until they came to the place that they were responsible for themselves and their own households. And then the process would continue. But the same is true of us who are the spiritual descendants of Abraham through faith in Christ. As the canon states, we Christian parents have the duty to bring our children to baptism and to confirmation where, in a very real sense, they take on their covenantal responsibilities for themselves. But we’re not to bring them to confirmation only after twelve or thirteen years of spiritual absenteeism in terms of our stewardship of their souls. Confirmation ought to mark the end of their childhood training in the faith, not the beginning of it. We Christian parents ought to teach our children the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and all other thing which a Christian ought to know and believe to his soul’s health, as the baptismal office charges us to do, so when they come to the point that they need to confirmed, it is really only a matter of confirming them in what they’ve already become – faithful children of their heavenly Father.

This is a Christian parent’s sacred duty. But it’s not just the parent’s duty. It’s really the duty of the whole covenant community, the church. You’ve heard that “It takes a village” to raise our children. Well, in reality, it takes a church. The church is more than a village. The church is a family. It’s the family of God. It’s a family that extends beyond these walls to all places through all time, and even beyond time and space into heaven itself. And I love that part in the baptismal service where we speak of the child as being “grafted into the body of Christ’s Church,” because what we’re saying there is that whole Church universal and triumphant, and of course the local congregation more particularly, is taking the child into its care and making a commitment to nurture the child and to minister to him or her to the point that when they are brought to Confirmation they themselves become a part of the ministering community. And the whole thing goes round again.

You see, Confirmation is not just about our children taking their baptismal vows for themselves. That’s a very important part of it, but it’s more than that. Confirmation is actually an ordination service. I always like to say it’s the priesting of the priesthood of all believers, or the ordination of the layperson. That’s why the bishop lays hands on the person. It’s the sign of the conferring of the Holy Spirit for the work of ministry. That’s what we see throughout the New Testament. Our teenage sons and daughters are being ordained to be ministers in the church at their confirmations, and to serve the church with the gifts that the Holy Spirit has uniquely endowed each of them with. That’s really what’s going on in Confirmation.

And you see, it’s then that we parents, and we the congregation, have brought our children the whole way – or almost the whole way – to what God has intended for His children: that they become not just recipients of His grace, but that they become ministers of His grace. I would suggest that our spiritual stewardship of our children doesn’t quite end with their confirmation. Teenagers still need a little guidance and motivation sometimes to actually do their work of ministry. And that’s okay.

But you see “[God] gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers [and I don’t think St. Paul would be too upset if we added parents to the list], for the equipping of the saints to do the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man” (Eph. 4:11-13).

The equipping of the saints, from the time they’re infants to the time they’re teenagers and beyond, is our sacred duty as pastor, parents, and people. Ant that’s what this fourth duty calls us to. And just as we’ve seen with regard to the previous duties, that doing our duty is just another way of participating in the gospel, here its about bringing our children in the participation of the gospel. What a great privilege that is! So let us do our duty to our children with joy and gladness. +