Hand to Hand

Propers: The Seventh Sunday of Easter, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

Confirmation—what my old liturgy professor would call, tongue firmly in his cheek, a rite in search of a justification. Why do we as Christians confirm our youth? What does this impart to them? What exactly does it mean?

There’s an old joke, tired but true, of a church with bats in its belfry. And no-one could quite seem to convince the critters to leave, until one day the old pastor climbs up into the steeple and confirms the bats. And nobody sees any of them ever again. For centuries in the Western Church, Confirmation has served as a coming of age ritual, a Christian quinceañera. My Jewish friends had bar mitzvahs; I had Confirmation.

But it wasn’t always so. In the Eastern Church, Confirmation and Communion both occur at Baptism, regardless of age. When a baby comes to an Orthodox church, they get the water, the oil, and the bread all at one go. The Orthodox have a story as to how the sacrament of Confirmation arose, and unsurprisingly it has to do with the Holy Spirit.

Now, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. At root, “spirit” means breath. And breath is synonymous with life. As Christ is the Word of God, so the Spirit is the breath of God, and together they speak all things into being. “Let there be light,” says God in Genesis, and there was light.

At the same time, however, spirit means more than just earthly life, which is subject to time and decay. The Spirit is eternal life, inexhaustible life, the limitless Source of All poured forth for this and every world. So to be clear, the Spirit is not simply something God has made. The Spirit is who God is—as is the Father, as is the Son. Everything we have, every breath, every heartbeat, every moment, every thought, is poured out to us in the Spirit.

When Jesus Christ came to earth, He brought with Him His infinite life. And He laid it down for us, poured it out for us, that we might have life and have it abundantly. See, Jesus was the New Adam, the New Creation; He is the human being whom we were always meant to be. Indeed, He and He alone is really, truly, fully human. Jesus came as one of us to make us one with Him, as members of His Body; that just as He and the Father are One, so we might be one in Him.

For this is eternal life, He says: that we might know the only true God, and Christ whom He has sent. That’s not pie in the sky, my friends. That’s salvation here and now, a New Creation here and now.

All of Christianity is about proclaiming this Good News in word and in deed: the union, the bond, the liberation, of God and Man in Jesus Christ. And this life, this love, this resurrection that conquers death and hell forever, is the Holy Spirit, is the life of Christ within. That’s why we have sacraments.

Baptism, by water and Word, pours into us the Name and the Spirit of Christ. Holy Communion nourishes us with His own Body and Blood. And when we have the Name of Christ, the breath of Christ, the Body and the Blood of Christ, what does that make us? It makes us into Jesus! Wonder of wonders! And then we are sent out together as Jesus, together as little Christs, into a world in need of resurrection, in need of His Gospel of salvation.

And all this occurs through the Church: the Church, not as a gatekeeper, not as a “members only” club, but as one beggar telling another where he has found bread. Our job is to tell people where God is, not where He’s not. The sign of this, the representation of this, is the laying on of hands. We lay hands on one another to consecrate, to heal, to bless—not because of magic fingers, but because the promises of God come to us incarnate, shared between sinners.

When people were baptized into the early Church, into the Body of Christ, the Apostles would lay hands on them, to pour out upon them the Spirit. For indeed, that’s what Baptism is, what the Church is: sharing the life of Christ with each other. Yet as the movement grew, as more came to the call of the Christ, it became unwieldy for the Twelve to be physically present at every Baptism. They couldn’t lay their hands on everybody. So instead they blessed oil.

Now, oil—specifically olive oil—was everything in the ancient world. It was soap, sealant, lubricant, light, and food. Before there were plastics, before petroleum, there was olive oil, an absolute necessity for Mediterranean life. Oil conveyed fatness, abundance, and health, and so quite naturally came to represent the grace and the Spirit of God. When you consecrated a priest, when you consecrated a king, you poured oil on his head; you anointed him.

In Greek, anointing is chrism. And the Anointed One is Christ. When people came to Baptism, when people came to the Church, they were welcomed and marked by oil, as a sign of the Holy Spirit, a sign of our shared life in Christ. To this day, at a Chrism Mass in the midst of Holy Week, the bishops of the Church consecrate and bless oils for use at Baptisms, healings, and Confirmation. It is a sign of our unity in Jesus, a sign of His life now in you.

The West has drifted from Eastern practice in that Baptism and Confirmation now are typically separated, as we baptize mostly babies and confirm our young adults. Yet they remain at heart connected. The Spirit poured out upon us in Baptism is confirmed at every stage of life together, our life in Jesus Christ. The hands we lay upon you are really Jesus’ own.

To Morgan and to Lucy—to all confirmands past, present, and future—the Rite of Confirmation is in no sense graduation. With the dedicated coöperation of your families and your congregation, you have completed three years’ instruction on the Scriptures of our faith and the teachings of our tradition. It is my hope that you have come to read the Bible not with pitiless literalism but as a depthless trove of stories from which Jesus draws to teach. The Spirit opens us unto the living Word, providing treasures old and new, the vocabulary of faith.

Yet religion is so much more than merely books, beliefs, and bureaucracy. Religion is a universal norm, an instinct that will never go away. It is our longing for transcendence, for something wider, something truer, for the infinite, the eternal. The ancients, in fact, did not speak of religions in the plural but of religion as a singular virtue: that proper deference due to the beautiful, good, and true.

Heed not the false and easy gospel of a vampire Christianity, peddling just enough of Jesus’ Blood to keep us out of hell—never understanding, never imagining, that to live as Jesus lives, to walk as Jesus walks, to give as Jesus gives, is itself salvation, is our heaven here on earth. It’s not as though we check off Confirmation and then carry on our way. People want a rubber stamp on their passport to the afterlife, so that they may then continue unmolested trying to fill the hole in their soul with false and fickle gods: with a world of endless consumption, endless lusts, and everything for sale.

Yet none of that will satisfy, none of that will do. “Our hearts, O Lord, are restless, until they rest in you.” Therein lies our liberation. Thereby are we freed to love one another as Christ has first loved us. For this indeed is life eternal.

Today, dear sisters, we confirm your faith. We lay our hands upon you, offer prayers for you, anoint you with the Holy Spirit; and then slap you in the face—symbolically, liturgically—as a reminder ever to be strong and loving and fearless in the fellowship of Christ. It is a good day to die, this day of resurrection.

I have striven as your pastor to give you but the barest hints of your beginning, your first and faltering steps along the Way of Jesus Christ. Faith is a lifelong journey of joy and disappointment, tedium and surprise, falling and rising anew every morning. It means returning, time and again, to things we thought we knew, and seeing them afresh as though for the first time. We are always confessing, always forgiven.

Read your Scriptures; say your prayers; come to worship. Never cease to learn. Never fear to doubt. Always be open in compassion and humility to all of those around you, while clinging nevertheless to the truth that you are God’s own child. The life of God is within you, around you, and beyond you. No matter where you go, no matter whom you meet, Christ is there before you, waiting for you there.

Go in the Spirit of wisdom and truth. Go in the Spirit of Jesus, our King.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

 

 

 

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