Baptism in a 3D World
On one hand folk “church hop and shop” in a way that wasn’t always the
case, so there are often people who come out of a “believer baptism” traditions
who have become Lutheran and their kids get baptized on a parallel track to
first communion or confirmation.
On the other hand, there are people who wanted their kids to “decide
for themselves” about religion when they were old enough.
I believe this idea is a little fanciful—we don’t do that with
languages, “I won’t teach my child English, when she turns 18 she can decided
what language she wants to use.” And make no mistake religion is a language,
and if we don’t teach a vocabulary, syntax, and grammar, they aren’t going to
magically become excellent religious speakers, instead they’ll just grunt in
unintelligible ways.
We’re putting the weight that a whole community normally holds onto the
backs of these kids. That said, there are instances where folk come to me
inarticulate, wounded, and hungry for the faith, and I get the joy of sharing
the bedrock beliefs of the faith and baptizing them into it.
Demographic
Shift—In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he names several divisions that are
made inconsequential by Baptism; because there is a unity in Christ our other
identities lose their cosmic importance. At the same time, those identities are
still with us, in fact they are still part of who we are. So, how do we honor
folk in their myriad of identities—naming the whole person as a Child of God?
Or to put it another way,
Baptismal identity eclipses all other identities for the sake of relationship,
not as a form of erasure. Our baptismal identity allows us to love our
neighbor and be one as Christ is one, and part of our baptismal calling
involves being curious about our siblings in Christ, so that we can honor their
whole person.
Our synod’s way of talking about all of this is that the world
wants us to go beyond divisions by being “color blind” to not see other people
as anything except a mirror of ourselves—erasure; but the Christian way
of unity is being “love struck” by other people, interested and engaged with
the ways they are different from you as well as the ways they are the same--relationship.
When we say in Christ there is no slave or free, that does not mean the
unique challenges of those life stations are not cared for within the church.
In fact, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, admonishing that community for
ignoring that the slaves had to bag lunch their Eucharistic meal, is an
instructive example of being love struck, not color blind.
Decentralization—I’ve
moved 18 times in my life, 11 of the moves were as a child. Due to changing
family circumstances, the number of people seeking post-high school education,
and shifting expectations of jobs, my experience, while a little extreme, is
not as uncommon as it once was. And there are consequences for this kind of
thing. On one hand, finding home wherever you move has a broadening effect on
one’s imagination and compassion; on the other hand, there is also a certain
loss of community and stability. And we are seeing that playing out in the
Church.
There was a time when a family were members of a congregation for many
years, maybe even multiple generations. By the time a child was brought to be
baptized, the congregation had seen the parents go through confirmation as kids
themselves, they got married in the congregation, everyone knew about the
pregnancy, there was a celebration after the baptism in the church fellowship
hall.
Not so in a decentralized world. Now the atypical is the norm. The new
family has been receiving Holy Communion for a year before the minister finds
out the sixth grader has never been baptized. A family comes in from out of
state to have their child baptized, because they have no meaningful connection
to a congregation in the place they’d moved to—because finding a congregation
takes work, and when you’re pregnant and working a full-time job, you have
enough work to do without adding that. People in their 40s have a conversation
with their parents and find out they were never baptized and rectify that
situation as an adult.
This does shift our spirituality, makes it harder to be members of the
body of Christ. The promises the congregation makes at baptism feels different
when we know the kiddo is getting on a plane in the morning and going overseas.
Likewise, receiving the eucharist before experiencing the entrance rite to the
church can be strange—a pastoral audible for sure.
That said, there may be a breaking open of baptism with all this. Any
shibboleth or gate-keeping impulse we may have had as church-folk is now
foreign to us and we are excited to graciously give what we have received,
adoption into the family of God. A shift from a programmatic finger wag “This
is what you do at this age” to a “look at this gift we can offer you” has some appeal.
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