Day 412 - Family Fights - Is Christ Divided?

A sermon* given at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN on Jan. 26, 2014
OT Reading: Isaiah 9:1-4
NT Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is a good example of his letter writing. Any time Paul writes a letter critical of behavior we are assured he is talking about something a real problem in the congregation. If we keep that in mind, it makes it easier to use Paul as a guide for the modern church.

Two types of problems plague our modern church. One of them is “denominationalism.” We slowly get the idea that the way we do things puts us closer to God’s grace than those who walk a different road. Here are some examples. I read a comment in print last week that someone heard Pope Francis say Catholics believe repentance of sin is essential for salvation and penance for sin after confession helps you refine your faith. This writer concluded the Pope was preaching a distorted non-Christian works-righteousness. In a worship service downtown last week a man told me his denomination insists you must be baptized to join their congregation, even if you have been baptized already. Another group, actually an old spinoff of Presbyterians believes we must abandon creeds in preference to the Bible and structure our worship and congregational governance around the practice of the early church in The Acts of the Apostles. There can be no music and the Holy Spirit can only be received through the Scriptures, not by enthusiastic preaching. Some of those folks in these examples take this so seriously that they say if we don’t agree we have a spiritual problem separating us from Christ. There are people among our own group of PC(USA) and PCA Presbyterians who will refuse to collaborate as if the other were Satan incarnate – all because of the way we interpret Scripture to guide Christian living. I remember when I worked in Mississippi as a construction manager for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, my immediate supervisor and his supervisor both were horrified and shot me down when I proposed we team with the recovery group from PCA in the area. You don’t have to look very far to find people so enamored by their denominational practice they will publically criticize or ostracize others as non-Christians.

Our lectionary passage from 1 Corinthians shows it happened 1640 years ago. It reveals Paul struggling with a life and death spiritual problem in the Corinthian congregation. How does it bear on our modern denominational world?

Let me give you a little background history on the church at Corinth. Paul founded the congregation at Corinth in the middle of his ministry. He wrote at least two letters to them and visited at least twice if not three times over problems. 1 Corinthians is probably the second letter written to them.

Corinth was an unusual city. It was destroyed by Rome about 150 BCE and laid in ruins for 100 years until Caesar rebuilt it as a defensive outpost because of its strategic location with two seaports and to be as a Roman Colony for freed slaves. Freed slave overpopulated Rome and getting them out of Rome eliminated potential political trouble. It gave the freedmen an opportunity for entrepreneurial growth and the city grew rapidly into a center of commerce. By the time of Paul it was a thriving city-state dominated by Romans, immigrants from East and West and a strong Greek pagan religious culture. It had no landed aristocracy, but a lot of rags to riches Horatio Alger stories. There was a large number or poor people. The city was known for its religious vices of Greek religion, where Aphrodite, the goddess  of fertility was worshipped with temple prostitutes. Basically it was a typical seaport town where money and vice flowed freely among available transient men and women. Corinth has been called the combined New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas of the ancient world. The Corinthian congregation mirrored its Gentile Greek religious population. Paul cites Jew, Greek and Roman names among its congregation in 1 Corinthians.

Entertainment by eloquent, philosophical scholars appealed to Greek society of Corinth and its pagan heritage. The Greek philosopher used language delicately, eloquently and persuasively to create quite a show for the listener. But Paul was too uncouth, he was short and scrawny and was a poor public speaker He could hold no candle to the eloquent Greek philosophers and the philosophers were appealing. Greek philosophy was strongly dualistic; that is, they believed there is a pure spiritual part of existence and a sinful physical part of existence. Many believed these two parts of the person are at war and the desired goal is to attain the spiritual state that leaves behind the dirty human body. It is easy to distort Christian spirituality and sin into this view.

Besides having this idea about spirituality, most of the church members were formerly members of the religious sects whose practices were abhorrent to Christians, e.g., prostitution, idol feasts, etc. Each of Paul’s letters take the Corinthian congregation to task for accommodating this pagan, spiritual outlook into their Christian.

Paul was not interested in a little friendly discussion about style and order in worship. Paul was dealing with their outright assault on his Apostolic authority and what he saw as total religious failure, heresy. The congregation had fallen victim to its pagan history. He responds like an angry parent who has gotten a note from the teacher about an ill-behaved child, as well as one from his friend, the next door neighbor whose child in the class brought home the same news. Furthermore, Paul’s child has just started arguing with him taking exception to his criticism.

Verse 10 makes it clear, “Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.” He did not say. “I appeal to you to listen to me because I started this congregation,” no he said, “I appeal to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” that is the only reason for the existence of the congregation, Jesus Christ.

Paul says, “My friends who visit tell me you are fighting among yourselves over who you owe loyalty for your salvation, some say Apollos, some Paul, some Peter.

Greek has the beauty of having a form of the pronoun “you” as a plural, an accurate translation is “you all.” Paul says, ”It has been reported to me that there are quarrels among you all.  Each one of you all (every one of you) say you belong to Paul, or Apollos or Peter. What may have started with a few now involves every Corinthian in the congregation. Paul is outraged, not at a few of the ringleaders, but everybody. Paul is not angry because there are schisms but because they all have wandered from the Christian message he taught them.

Paul is outraged that they think they can worship with their idol worshipper friends because they have already gotten their spiritual state ironed out and are immune to the sin of the pagan practices. They think Paul preaches about “milk for babies” when they are ready for the headier “food for idols.” They party at the Lord’s Supper and fail to bring enough food to share with the poorer members.

Remember this is the man who persecuted Christians and his past sins though forgiven, still dogged him. He ran a tent making business so he could support his missionary work. Paul is irate that anyone can say Paul is worthy of worship, when he could only find the lowest state of humility to atone for his past sins. He can only sputter in anger, “Has Christ been divided?” Of course not. You know the answer, so did the Corinthians.  He continues the argument for four chapters.

This is the crux of his argument: “You puff up people like Apollos and put down others like Peter and Paul. You have lost the spirit of Christ. You think you are superior because you have some magical “Spirit” through baptism and lord it over the others. You say you have a special understanding no one else has, and speak in tongues at loud gathering so no one understands what is said. Baptism has become a magical ritual for you that imparts some spiritual gift. Paul has to diminish the value of baptism to make his point. “Was I crucified for you all? Were you baptized in the name of Paul, or Apollos or Peter?  Did I come to baptize you all, or to proclaim the Good News to you all? Did I come to do it with eloquent words that only you all understand or do I do it with the power of the Cross that everyone may understand?” Paul uses these outlandish questions to show them their foolishness. Paul is playing for keeps because their very salvation and his apostolic authority is at stake.

The bottom line for Paul is the Kingdom of God may have arrived but they are not on board if they have forgotten or deny the core of Christian belief. That core is: “There is no East or West, no North or South, no rich or poor, no Paul or Peter in the Good News. There is only Jesus Christ who died on the cross and defeated death for us all through his resurrection.” He tells them if they don’t believe that they aren’t on board. If they do believe that and add more, they are a stumbling block and woe to the stumbling block.

Paul’s message to the Corinthians is simple, put nothing between you and your salvation but Jesus Christ. Don’t put rite and ceremony, eloquent speaking, or Apollos, Peter or me there either.

Now that I’ve spent most of this sermon trying to capture Paul’s concern over the distortion of Christian perspective of the Corinthians, I need to emphasize that Paul loved these people. He is reacting like a parent to a child because the core of his effort is to bring the Good News to God’s children.

What does this letter of Paul have to do with us today? Is it a prescription to avoid prostitutes, sexual indiscretion and partying with heathens at their religious services? Yes, but not really. Those sins are a consequence of a deeper spiritual problem. The Corinthians know better but have convinced themselves they can divide the congregation and not destroy the faith. They can deal with sin and not get burned as spiritual persons.  “Woe to them,” Paul says.

We can find dissent and sniping in some congregations today, but most congregations are not split by the kind of divisive, competing spiritual loyalties of the Corinthians, certainly not us.  Many congregations today do face a real, subtle problem of falling victim to thinking about their Christianity in the context of denominationalism. One of my former pastors often told the story of his grandmother who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister from a long line of Presbyterian ministers. A young man accosted her on the street in a town in a nearby state asking if she was born again. She immediately replied without even taking time to think, “Young man, I’m a Presbyterian, I was born right the first time.”

It’s funny because we can laugh at our ideas about what predestination means, but it was really a divisive issue for both, one went away mad, the other disgusted. Each had used a “measuring stick” to show how to get into the Kingdom but not the other.  Some do it when they say you have to be baptized again to be a member of their congregation. Some do it when they say if you are an elected official unless you vote a certain way you can’t participate in the Lord’s Supper.  Other’s do it when they tell a person that they can’t really get through the pearly gates until they accept some idea of dogma such as infant baptism even though the person professes and proclaims the essential tenet of Christian faith (Jesus is Lord and he defeated death so that I may live). Basically we all do it when we start thinking of our denomination in terms of an “-ism.”

Paul ended his message to the Corinthian with the words, “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, (repeat) but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Let’s never forget our humility as brothers and sisters in Christ even when we all realize we have a different take on how to practice true Christian faith. Foolishness is for those who are perishing.

* note: The following commentaries provided the historical situation at Corinth and nature of the Corinthian congregation:
Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, William B. Eerdemans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI., 1987;  and William E. Orr and James Arthur Walther, 1 Corinthians, The Anchor Bible, 1976

Day 405 - What Are You Looking For?

A sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN January 19, 2014

OT Reading: Isaiah 49: 1- 6
NT reading: John 1:29-42

Do you ever envy those folks who always seem to know exactly what they are doing and why? I’m thinking about the people who seem to be on a mission and things always seem to work out for them. And there are the other people we may envy, the ones who always seem to know what and how to say something. Never nonplussed, shy or nervous talking to someone, they always say the right thing.

It can leave you wondering if you are thinking or working hard enough. Most of us at one time or another wonder what are we supposed to do with our life. We may fret over where we are going, and are we going to leave a mark on the world.

Haven’t we watched friends or young family members approaching graduation from high school struggling to figure out the answer to that question. Because we love them and worry about them, we might even try to help them along to a solution by asking them the question, “What are you looking for?” Who among us has ever been a little restless with the uncertainty or indecision at some point in our life, struggling with the same question, “What am I looking for?” We call it the quest for self actualization, it seems to be the mark of our age. People pay a lot of money for help with the answer when it is already under our nose.

The Revelation of Jesus by John the Baptist

The Gospel of John is preoccupied with two questions, “What am I looking for?” and “How do I talk or testify about my faith?”  The first 18 verses laid out the shape of the whole Christian landscape. The evangelist says the essence of Jesus is the Word, the sound and signs of speaking. He introduces John the Baptist who is looking for and proclaiming the coming of the Light of the Messiah. He was effective because the religious leaders of the Temple sent emissaries to him with the question, “Who are you?” They wondered is he a prophet, perhaps Elijah himself, or even the Messiah? John the Baptist could have said, “Yes, I’m Elijah,” to bring more attention to him like some broadcast evangelists do today.

The temple leaders’ question, “Who are you?” shows how easily people confused the proclaimer with the one proclaimed. He was in a difficult spot. The evangelist who wrote John’s Gospel goes out of the way to discourage thinking of John the Baptist in any role other than messenger of the coming Good News. That might be why he omits any account of the baptism of Jesus. The evangelist makes sure everyone hears this message from John the Baptist, “Someone greater than I is coming and I am not worthy even to untie his sandals.”

But, when Jesus does appear at the Jordan River (v29), John recognizes him. When we dig into the actual Greek we realize John the Baptist speaks in prophetic language of revelation to the crowds, “Look! Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. I saw the Spirit of God descend upon him like a dove. And the one who sent me to baptize (we know he means the Lord) told me the one on whom that dove rests brings the baptism of the Holy Spirit, this is the Son of God.”

The Call of Ministry

The next day, Jesus returns again, walking toward John by the Jordan River. John repeats his prophetic cry to two of his own disciples that are standing with him (v36), “Look!” Here is the lamb of God.” Does Jesus stop and embrace John, or acknowledge him?  No he walks on, ignoring John. But John’s two disciples, Andrew and the unnamed (beloved?) disciple, follow Jesus who turns around and asks them, “What are you looking for?”

Let’s use our imagination here. John the Baptist is standing with two of his more trusted or reliable disciples (they are the only ones mentioned). Jesus walks by and recruits them! The Baptist might naturally be a little miffed at Jesus for recruiting his disciples but we find out in 3:29-30, that John understands the situation with humility, “My joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

The Ministry Begins

This exchange with John’s disciples describes the actual beginning of the ministry of Jesus. Let’s take it apart to see how it unfolds because it is a model for effective ministry. First we hear John the Baptist proclaim the identity of Jesus to his disciples. Next, the listeners respond to Jesus by following him and he asked them the question, “What are you looking for?” How do they reply? “Where are you staying ?” What is the response of Jesus? “Come and see.”

Right here is a short and sweet lesson on effective ministry. It consists of a proclamation, or testimony that compels a response to follow and learn more. We hear the question of Jesus, “What are you looking for?” and a response, “Where are you staying (or tell us more)?” Finally we hear an invitation to “Come and see!”

This is a truly the example of Christian vocation and attitude. There is no fire and brimstone preaching, no loud sermons, just the testimony of John the Baptist to his disciples about the Word. We can substitute “us” for John the Baptist and “our friends” for “disciples.” We testify about the Word to our friends and invite the interested ones to “come and see.”

What would you say are the most important things that happened in this ministry narrative? The first is a proclamation of the identity of Jesus, and the second is the invitation of hospitality to the people who responded to the proclamation. We can overlook a third thing of importance, the reaction by John the Baptist over the loss of his disciples. He did not object that Jesus was stealing his disciples, nor did he try to out-preach Jesus to win them back, rather he adopted a humble attitude that acknowledged that he must diminish as Jesus increases in stature and his ministry increases.

This narrative is the prototype of effective ministry but I’ve left out the last step of ministry. After Andrew spent time and discovered who Jesus is, immediately he goes to his brother, Simon Peter, tells him, “We have found the Messiah,” and brings him to meet Jesus. Now, two thousand years after starting with Andrew and the other disciple, here we are with 3 billion or so Christians…

All started by a simple question , …“What are you looking for?”

That ought to be the question on the tip of every Christians’ tongue if we believe our Christian vocation is to follow that model of ministry proclaiming the Good News and teaching those who hear to do the same. Our vocation is to proclaim the Good News.

Of course, the challenge we all face is not “What are you looking for?” but “How do I do it?” We face barriers. Some say, “I’m not comfortable ‘preaching’ or publically proclaiming my faith. I don’t know what to say.”

We get all tangled up in those words, “testimony” and “preaching.” We think testimony literally must be standing up and telling people how you came to understand your Christian faith.  But that idea of testimony has two pitfalls. The first trap comes when we believe giving the testimony is more important that having the testimony heard. This is my main complaint with our street preachers. The other pitfall is to think testimony always means giving a sermon or speech.

Isn’t the most powerful testimony no more than sharing one’s experiences of simply living one’s life with a Christian focus? This is why I regularly return to the lesson Jesus taught the temple lawyer who sought to entrap Jesus. When asked what is the greatest commandment Jesus responded “To love the Lord with all your heart, mind soul and strength and the second is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Jesus really acknowledged those two commandments define his and our vocation. When we live in conformity to them we are giving the world the most powerful testimony about the Good News. No fancy speech is necessary.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, Jesus has a single message, “My life is a testimony to the glory of God and I invite you to live the same way that I do.” Christian life really is the best testimony of faith that we have.  When we walk out the front door of this sanctuary we carry a sign that says, “Look at me, I’m a Christian. I invite you to live the same way I do.”

It isn’t always easy at first. We are not perfect. We get mad and say hurtful things. We argue when we should forgive. We are hesitant to help someone we think might be freeloading. We value our possessions and our status. No one likes to be embarrassed or humiliated. We all do it. When we stumble we ask for forgiveness knowing that too is part of the actual act of proclaiming what we believe. Being a Christian is the hard work of practice, practice, practice remembering that a Christian is always in the testifying mode.

John the Evangelist tells us there is another part of ministry after testimony, the first commandment. It is that second commandment: hospitality.

Hospitality has always been something special to Christians. Jesus was criticized for his hospitality. He entertained thieves, the physical and spiritual unclean, prostitutes, tax collectors and the like. In the first centuries hospitality practiced the way Jesus understood it set Christians apart.

In the Roman era, power was the great virtue. One way to power is through those you know. Such hospitality is a strategy of discrimination. Only invite to your home those that you can curry favor and help you get power. You’ve heard the expression, “It is all in who you know.”

Hospitality is more challenging than testimony. Jesus said it is easiest to love your friends. We may not be as discriminating as Roman, but how many of us turn down an opportunity or contact to help us get something done?

Often we rely on our contacts for the noblest of reasons and depth of compassion. That is what friendship is about. We find the child’s indiscriminant hospitality inside that second commandment to love others as we love our self. Children usually invite a new-found friend over to play at their house just to play. They usually don’t go through all the scheming and thinking about is this a good person to know or not, they simply invite someone over because the like them. We do need to teach our children to be careful with hospitality so they do not endanger themselves, but how careful are we to display Christ’s hospitality as adults?

Many Christian writers say the modern church is losing the habit of hospitality because we are too uncomfortable with the religious invitation, not to our Christian friends attending church somewhere else but to others. I’m thinking about people who have stopped attending church because they were bored or had their feelings hurt, who are alienated against the church because we have excluded them, who feel an emptiness and hunger and are looking at our smiling faces wondering, “Where are you going?”

I challenge us all to let our life be real ministry - the testimony of our belief. Listen for people asking, “Where are you going?” You may not hear those words, but only find an inquisitive conversation or smile that gives the idea a person is interested. Keep those three words at the tip of your tongue so you can use them, “Come and see!”  That is really what ministry and Christian vocation is all about. Amen.

Day 398 - To Fulfill All Righteousness

A Sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN

OT reading: Isaiah 43:1 - 4

NT reading: Matthew 3: 13 - 17

Do you ever wonder about the childhood of Jesus? The recognized Scriptures ("the Canon") are silent with the exception of Luke’s account of Mary and Joseph losing Jesus and finding him in the temple talking with the elders. Mark begins with adult Jesus walking up to John the Baptist who baptized him. John gives us much the same account as Mark, except he is not very clear that John baptizes Jesus. Luke just tells us "Jesus was baptized.” In this passage from Matthew, Jesus speaks for the first time in Matthew's account and it is the most detailed description of his baptism.

It is a passage rich with meaning. Matthew intimates Jesus is aware of the necessity of his baptism and makes it clear we are dealing with the human Jesus, not the God Jesus. This is important because the essential parts of human salvation are represented in the humanity of Jesus; namely, his righteousness that resisted temptation is all human forms, and his death and resurrection.

All the synoptic Gospels agree that the heavens opened and the Holy spirit like a dove descended on Jesus as a voice said, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Luke suggests everyone heard this. The Gospel of John says John the Baptist testifies to hearing the words. Matthew and Mark indicate very clearly this was a voice heard only by Jesus. The words “The heaven’s opening up” are a Semitic construction for a revelation communicated by God which is why this is one of the epiphany Sundays.

We might to ask, “What do Matthew (and Mark) tell us spiritually about the baptism of Jesus?”  “How is the act of baptism an important part of our own spiritual lives?”

In Matthew John the Baptist argues with Jesus about baptizing him until Jesus tells him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” “To fulfill all righteousness” does not mean to achieve fully moral behavior; it means to achieve the complete will of God for humanity. (God is always acting on humanity, never the other way around.)

These words of Jesus telegraph to the listening Jews God’s interaction with Abram before the time that his faith was tested with Isaac and before he was told to circumcise his children and certainly before the Law existed. God reckoned Abram righteous solely because of his obedience in following God’s command to leave his native land and go to Canaan. Genesis 15:5-6 says, “(God) brought (Abram) outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And Abram believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned (it to him) Abram as righteousness.”

The physical act of the baptism of Jesus also recalls our OT reading, Isaiah 43:2-3, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; … For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Matthew’s words tell us God did something special here. “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” is the revelation to a fully spiritually awakened Jesus. It is the epiphany of his divine identity and vocation.

Matthew suggests the baptism of Jesus culminated his spiritual maturity (Luke: at age 30). It flowered fully at his self-recognition of his divinity and humanity. The importance of the gift of the Holy Spirit in the baptism of Jesus is its presence in each gospel, and his very next actions, going into the desert and experiencing the temptations, and beginning of his ministry afterwards. both support the importance of this baptism as the epiphany of Jesus.

Scriptures such as Acts 8:14-17, where Philip converted many Samaritans, say they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus and had not yet received the Holy Spirit that came only when Peter and John laid hands on them. Later (8:36-39) when Philip baptized the Eunuch the Holy Spirit came and took Philip away. These Scriptures show that as happened with Jesus, baptism is subordinate to the reception of the Holy Spirit.

Given all this, what does baptism mean to us? Is our baptism different that the one Jesus had? Where does the Holy Spirit come into play?

Calvin originated most Presbyterian Reformed Protestant thought. Calvin focused almost entirely on Baptism as the mark of the new covenant. He was literally dead set on refuting the arguments of the Anabaptists who believed baptism was a conscious act of will to accept faith, and on differentiating his ideas from Catholicism but not abandoning infant baptism. Calvin said circumcision marks God’s first covenant with the Hebrews. Both OT and Paul’s writing in Romans justify him on this. Calvin concluded Christian baptism is like Jewish circumcision. It marks the second covenant of Christ with all humanity.

According to Calvin, if the new covenant and the old covenant bear an analogous religious connection with God, then we must understand baptism the same way Jews understand circumcision. It is the act that marks a child of the covenant signifies selection of God’s chosen people and subservience to God.

Calvin concludes that baptism is completely connected to preexisting grace or election of Christians by God, just like God reckoned Abram righteous. (Abram did not actively embrace righteousness, he was reckoned righteous.) Calvin then concludes all Christians are similarly preordained and since baptism is the sign of the covenant and being “set aside as righteous from before the womb,” we should baptize all Christian children as the mark of grace. He said even though infants cannot understand the nature of the act, it can’t hurt them. He even went on to say in his Geneva Catechism of the Church of Geneva (see ref 1), " It is not necessary that faith and repentance always precede baptism" as justification of this position.  In spite of his interest in the Holy Spirit, the weakness of Calvin's argument is that it downplays the revelatory nature of the Holy Spirit in baptism.

Infant baptism upsets a lot of our Protestant friends for this very reason. They believe baptism is a public act signifying faith and repentance; namely, that we have voluntarily accepted God's salvation of our lives. Some take it to the extreme and deny universal Christian baptism saying it marks membership and affirmation of belief of a particular congregation or denomination. I am not interested in arguing these issues today. I only want to emphasize the sacramental nature of baptism.

I hope we all believe baptism is a sacramental sign of our relationship to God. I want to explore how baptism is related to the epiphany of God’s grace poured out upon us.

For Presbyterians, baptism is a much broader symbol of belief. It is a sign of rebirth. It is a public personal promise made by parents and congregation to provide Christian nurture to the baptized child or adult. It is sign of the unity of membership in the Church universal. The baptismal vow emphasizes that our own relationship to God places the responsibility on us for our children’s and unbaptized adults’ spiritual life.  (If you first publically professed your faith in the Presbyterian Church as an adult, you would have been baptized. If you are a professing Christian and have not been baptized you ought to consider it.) If we are loyal to that baptismal vow, we accomplish the same end, if not more, as a profession of faith and baptism in the church that does not baptize infants.

For those of you who were baptized, do you remember your own baptism? A lot of us former Baptists and Pentecostals who came to the Presbyterian denomination probably do.

I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. I remember getting up during the invitation at the end of the service and announcing to my pastor I wanted to be baptized. It must have been in late elementary school I am not sure, but I remember it quite well. I remember standing in the pews and feeling an urge to go down, but I cannot remember any real conscious reason fort hat decision. God seemed to move me. For reasons I did not understand, it seemed the right thing to do. I remember many of the details of my baptism down to the robe I wore, the handkerchief over my mouth and nose, and the words of institution as I was immersed.

Matthew points out the revelatory power of baptism. It should invoke the Holy Spirit to reveal our obligation to God to fulfill the whole of righteousness. What is the whole of righteousness? It is everything I have preached over the weeks. It is the whole work of God in the universe. It is awareness of our call to a Christian vocation. It is our awareness of the demand to apply the greatest two commandments to the n^th degree in our personal life. It is a reminder that adherence to the Law serves no purpose if our heart is not obedient to the Lord. Jeremiah in 4:4 proclaimed God’s command, “Circumcise your heart to the Lord.” Isaiah said much the same thing.  Paul said we are condemned if we choose to follow to the Law. Paul repeated Genesis: God reckoned Abram righteous before the law existed, so Christ reckons us righteous before there were denominations. We have the same obligation Jesus had at his baptism, to fulfill all righteousness; that is, to work to effect God’s will on earth, as he desires us to do.

As Presbyterians, our practice of infant baptism can put us in a little bind with that obligation. We baptize our children before they understand its significance for all the good reasons I’ve mentioned; but if we heed our baptismal vow, we will all provide a fully rich nurturing environment for our children. So do we need to do for our children?

Part of our obligation to nurture the children in Christian faith is to teach them so they may make a public confession of faith and accept the responsibility to participate in the life of the church. We call that process their confirmation. After confirmation they are no longer baptized members but active members in the full life of the church. It is not something to do lightly.

Confirmation is a process of Christian education of children and newly baptized members followed by an examination by the session that they enter our congregation as productive members. Did you know that every active member of the congregation agrees to 

(1) proclaim the good news in word and deed; 

(2) to take part in the common life of the congregation; 

(3) to lift up each other in prayer, mutual concern and active support; 

(4) to study Scripture and issues of Christian faith and life; 

(5) to support the ministry of the church though giving time, talents and money; 

(6) to demonstrate a new quality of life within and through the church; 

(7) to respond to God’s activity in the world through service to others; 

(8) to live responsibly in personal, family, vocational, political, cultural and social relationships of life; 

(9) to work in the world for peace, justice, freedom and human fulfillment; 

(10) to participate in the governing responsibilities of the church; 

(11) to review and evaluate one’s own integrity in membership, and to consider ways to increase ways to increase and make more meaningful one’s participation in worship and service? That is the syllabus for a confirmation class.

It is quite a list of tasks. We should always recall it when we read of the baptism of Jesus and when we participate in the baptism and confirmation of members.

Our baptism is a reminder of Christ’s baptism and our membership in the congregation of believers who have promised to bring their gifts to these eleven tasks. The most important of task in regard to our children is to be mindful when it is time for a confirmation class.

reference 1: John Calvin, Theological Treatises, edited by J.K. S. Reid, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1954, page 134.