Confirmed

Scripture: Holy Trinity, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

For all the youth among us this morning who have completed three years of Confirmation class, let me just say—none of you are graduating. You are being Confirmed, not graduating, and there’s all the difference in the world between the two.

Since before you were born, God has been with you. It was He who knit you together in your mother’s womb, weaving the lives of your parents into a completely novel human being, an utterly new creation. He gave to you a spirit and an immortal soul, the ability to learn and to reason and to choose. He gave to each of you a unique set of talents and challenges, insuring that your gifts would be unlike those of any other. And then, after nine months of quiet wonder, God unleashed you upon the world, eager to see which paths you would take and what adventures you would tackle. And He has been there ever since, bidden or unbidden, to give you comfort and aid, to pick you up whenever you would fall.

God was there for your second birth as well, when your parents and sponsors brought you to the font of Christian Baptism. They made promises on your behalf—promises to raise you in the community of faith, to place in your hands the holy Scriptures, to pass along to you the five thousand year inheritance of the Church. In the waters of that font, Jesus Christ chose you as His own. He gave to you His own death, already died for you, that you need never fear death again. And He gave to you His own eternal life, already begun. He made you part of His Body, the Church, and promised that you would be His people and He would be your God for all eternity. And let me tell you, we may break our promises, but God never breaks His.

Since then, you have grown and flourished in your family and in this community. You have been taught to kneel humbly in worship and to delight in the wonders of Creation. You have been given the ancient story of God’s people and made it your own. Today is proof that your parents have fulfilled their baptismal promises. And so we come now to your Confirmation.

You are adults now, or nearly so. You have grown in body, mind, and soul. It is my fervent prayer that you have seen how God is active in your life, in your neighbor, and in all the world around you. It is time now that the Church rightfully recognize you as full and mature members of the Body of Christ, with all the honors and responsibilities that entails. We will affirm our baptismal promises together, share in the laying on of hands and the anointing, and you will receive the full blessing of God’s own Holy Spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being. The whole assembly will call upon the gifts of the Holy Spirit, as prophesied by Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.”

This is not the end of Sunday school. This is the beginning of your adult life of faith. This is not graduation from an institution. This is the completion of spiritual boot camp. Confirmation is God’s call to arms, to take up the whole armor of God and the sword of the Spirit, to relentlessly wage peace and truth in a fallen world consumed by conflict and lies. Every day, the world cries out to God for deliverance, for salvation, for heroism. And in answer to those prayers, God has chosen to send you. We should find this very frightening, yet infinitely inspiring. We are called to be part of the army of Heaven, the host of saints and angels led by the Lamb. And I don’t mean to spoil the best part of the story, but folks—the Lamb wins in the end.

Let us be frank. The Church is deep in crisis. This shouldn’t terribly surprise us, however, since the Church has never not been deep in crisis. Those who would identify themselves with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ have always been belittled, mocked, corrupted, ignored, humiliated, or outright murdered—just like Jesus. We have been scoured by sin both within and without. Today more than 100 million Christians live under active persecution, imprisoned, crucified, beheaded simply for proclaiming to the world that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. These are not distant horrors perpetuated upon alien peoples. These are our brothers and sisters in Christ, dying for the exact same faith that we preach and teach and live right here.

In the West, our challenges are different. No one is going to execute us for worshipping Jesus anytime soon. But we are nonetheless sending you out, my dear Confirmands, as sheep amidst the wolves, into a culture of death—a culture fixated on bald-faced lies and narcotic distractions. Every day, in ways both subtle and overt, we are told that the elderly are disposable, that the young are just pollutants, that family is for fools and age is just a number and truth is always relative and everything will be fine if you just buy the latest gizmo and take the latest pill and watch the latest show and whatever you do don’t stop for even the slightest moment to question what might actually matter in life. These are obvious, ridiculous lies. And everybody falls for them. Every day.

God calls you to show the world a better way. God calls you to live lives that reflect the goodness, truth, and beauty poured out for the world in Jesus Christ. God calls you to love people over things, to value what is right over what is expedient, to stand humbly in the presence of the holy and to share that gift with all. In a world of suffering, where the East is always bleeding and the West is always bored, God calls you to show the world what a human being looks like when he is fully and truly alive. God calls you to show them Jesus.

And you can do it. I know you can. Not just because you’re all good kids—good young adults, really. But because you are baptized; you have been bought with a price. Christ is with you. His Holy Spirit dwells within you. And He has seen in you the greatness for which we are all of us intended.

That’s why we slap you. Did you know that? There’s an old tradition in the Church that after receiving the laying on of hands and the oil of anointing, the bishop would say to the newly confirmed Christian, “Peace be with you”—and immediately slap him in the face. Why would he do that? It was an admonition to be brave. To be strong. To be “little Christs” for the world. Don’t worry, I won’t actually slap you—hard. But we must remember. Because throughout life there will be times of doubt, of loneliness, of confusion, of loss. Times when we feel abandoned or alone. It is then that Christ draws closest to us, if we but remember the unbreakable promises He has made.

I’ll be honest, I don’t recall much about my Confirmation class. I was a teenager, all wide eyes and hormones. I’m not sure what all I did or didn’t learn from my pastors. But that’s sort of my point. Confirmation is not the end of our journey but the start. Clearly those who taught me laid the foundation. Clearly they showed me that Confirmation is not the end but the beginning of an adult life of faith. I pray to God that your pastor and your parents and all the souls in your congregation have done the same for you. May the Spirit be your guide and guard, in Jesus’ name.

Boot camp is over. The time has come to join the saints upon the front lines of battle. And we will be victorious, my brothers and sisters. Not just because the Church is always dying and rising again. Not just because truth will always outlast falsehood. But because Christ is with us always, in this world and the next.      

Love the poor. Fight injustice. Admonish the sinner. Forgive your enemy. And above all things, stand in the truth of Jesus Christ.

The crown is yours. Take it, and live forever.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.