Weirder Than the World

Created by Human, by Laura H. Rubin

Lections: The Ascension of Our Lord, AD 2026 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.

The Sacramental Rite of Confirmation serves to seal the covenant created in our Baptism. We baptize at any age, including very young children, because we believe that Baptism is not our promise to God, but God’s promise to us, God claiming us as His own. For indeed, our promises are rarely worth much of anything at all, while the promise of God is unbreakable, inviolable, eternal. And that promise is given to you.

My old Confessions professor used to say that if we were to die today and find ourselves before the throne of God, and God were to say to us, “You wicked, vile sinners! You deserve to burn forever in Hell,” we could then hold our Baptism aloft like a shield and cry, “You know what God? You’re right. But that’s tough! Because you promised, and God does not break promises!”

His point of course was not that God is cruel—quite the opposite—but that Christians place our faith, our trust, in the Word of God, in the promise of Christ. And that promise holds, come Hell or high water.

A promise, however, does us little good if we have no idea what it is that we’ve been promised. And so, at the Baptism of every child, parents and godparents pledge to teach us the faith: to raise us in the community of the Church; to teach us the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the 10 Commandments; to place in our hands the Holy Scriptures; and bring us to the Sacraments; all so that we may learn to trust and love God, in word and in deed, throughout time and all of eternity.

Thus we gather our Confirmands around the Font. They affirm before the community the faith inherited from the saints. We lay our hands upon them and anoint their heads with oil, as symbols of Jesus’ Holy Spirit dwelling in their souls. And then, traditionally, we slap them—lightly, liturgically—so that they remember the charge entrusted to them, the promise fulfilled in them, and the demands of Christian life amidst this fallen, weary world. It is an admonition to bravery, to trust in Jesus Christ.

As a sign of this, a memento, our Confirmands are invited to pick a Confirmation name: that of a biblical character or ecclesiastical saint with whom they might identify. To claim that name is to claim an identity: an affirmation, a confirmation, of who and whose we are.

And every year I wonder whether we have done enough. On paper, our three-year curriculum appears rather thorough: one year each for the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and the Lutheran Catechism. That’s not a half-bad primer. Even so, the purpose of Confirmation isn’t to mark the end of Christian education, but merely the beginning, the basics. An amuse-bouche, if you will. It is the entry into a more mature and lifelong walk of faith. Have we prepared them? Have we given them what they need?

It is a really weird world out there. To a certain degree it always has been, though I feel it’s gotten stranger even just within my lifetime. We are told, every day, through media and advertisements, that obviously false things are real, while obviously real things are false.

AI would be the most recent example: immensely complex algorithms devoid of awareness or reason, stringing letters together in mishmashed patterns that devolve into so-called “hallucinations,” because computers can’t think. They have no concept of syntax or semiotics, no real notion of language, only raw data stolen wholesale from the internet and jammed through brute-force processing centers that suck up more water and energy than entire US States.

Yet we turn to AI for truth—not just facts, but truth—as well as for companionship, advice, even intimacy. We rely on it to read for us and write for us, to do our math and make our art. The whole thing would be hilarious were it not so terribly dystopian. We’re Narcissus wasting away, in love with our own reflections, mistaking them for people.

Or money, that’s an old idol. Money’s a collective fiction, just slips of paper, zeros and ones on a screen. Yet we treat it not only as having intrinsic value, but as possessing ultimate value: the omni-value that assigns unto all other things their worthlessness or worth. We’ve put a price tag on everything, from free time to fresh air. Money is a religion, with its own metaphysics, clerisy, and deities: economists, managers, and ad-men all casting bones with the stock market, sacrificing hecatombs of human beings unto the Invisible Hand.

Meanwhile, the most real things in our world—consciousness, free will, beauty, love—we dismiss as mere illusions, epiphenomena, distractions from materialism. But illusions are things that minds have; they cannot be things that minds are. Determinism has always proven laughably self-contradictory. And our civilization denies God without ever bothering to understand what that word actually means. It’s really quite insane.

Our graduates and Confirmands are heading out into a weird and wild world, where everything seems to be shifting, everything falling apart. And I wonder: Will their faith see them through, or will it be caught up in the whirlwind, dashed against the rocks? Ah, but now I’m the one getting things backwards. Christianity does not rely, and has never relied, on our strength, our wisdom, our fidelity, let alone our preparation. If so, the Church would have perished millennia ago. Yet we remain, weirder than the world.

We as Christians place our faith solely in Jesus Christ; in the Man whose love revealed to us the very heart of God; through His life, His death, His Resurrection; His wisdom, patience, and compassion; His uncompromising justice for the outcast and the poor. His is the Spirit who now burns within our breast. His is the Body ever gathering us as one. His is the Blood, which has washed away our sins and pulses through our veins.

It is to Christ and Him alone that we entrust our children. Just as we brought them to meet Him in the Font, so now we send them out to meet Him in the world. It is a supreme act of faith for them to step boldly into this new stage of life, no doubt. But it is also an act of faith, indeed a sacrifice, for us as parents to let go and entrust them to Christ as adults. Truly their lives mean more to us than do our own. But the Cross reveals that they mean even more to Jesus Christ. He will not leave them orphaned.

I find it fitting to speak of Confirmation on Ascension Day. As we heard in our Scriptures this morning, the Risen Christ appeared to His disciples, His Apostles, and even to large crowds for 40 days following His Resurrection—at which point He ascended into Heaven, obscured from our sight by the Shekinah, the cloud of God’s own presence. And part of the story that we tend to gloss over is that Christ rose to Heaven in order to fix it.

The New Testament, and especially the Epistles of St Paul, make it clear that the corruption of Creation runs from root to branch. Christ came to Earth to save us; He descended into Hell in order to liberate the damned; and then He rose unto the angels, unto the celestial firmament above, in order to bring their house in order, to set the cosmos right. Christ is Lord of All, of Earth and of Heaven and of Hell. And for as broken as this world is now, Christ will save it all. He will reclaim the present, rewrite the past, and sanctify the future. Nothing and no-one remains beyond His power to redeem.

This is what gives us our hope amidst the madness of our world: the promise of our Baptism, the sure fidelity of Jesus, confirmed here in each and every one of our own lives. He sends us out as sheep amidst the wolves! Yet He is with us always, unto the end of the age.

For our graduates and Confirmands: We love you. We are proud of you. We will always be here for you. Christ will send you out, and guide you, and gather you back home. You will know astonishing adventures, superlative successes, and devastating failures. Wonderful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid. For you have never been, and will never be, alone.

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.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026