Baptism - Children's Sermon
Today I did a children's sermon on how people see Jesus in us because he has been raised from the dead. I was trying to figure out how to make this comprehensible to children. So I decided to talk about how we look like our family members. I thought that was something they could grasp. I figured I'd then use that to talk about how we are part of Jesus' family and so we look and act like Jesus. So I used baptism to talk about how we became part of Jesus family, and I said, "When we were baptised we were adopted into Jesus' family." Was that really me that just said that? I thought baptism was just an "administrative function." :) OK, not quite that bad but I think its something along the lines of the symbol of our adoption into the family of Jesus. So...the main point of sharing this is to say that Duke continues to come out of my mouth whether I like it or not.
Tom
Tom
posted by Tom Arthur at 2:20 PM
3 Comments:
Duke? Sounds like Paul of Tarsus to me. For those of us reared in traditions for which the Bible is optional (oops, that slipped out, Wilson. I know I promised not to slam my own tradition anymore...Please pardon my offense!), Duke deserves tons of credit for transforming us by the renewal of our minds, but you? Nahh! Seems to me that you thought Scripture had some relevance way back in August, when I first met ya. It's great to hear that you were able to make such a complex idea comprehensible for children. Good job!
I like the description of baptism as a statement contra citizenship, a "we're still here, faithfully," but I wonder if bracketing metaphysics out actually does more harm for the description. It makes it possible for dialectical materialists (even sympathetic ones) to embrace the gesture. The whole physics/metaphysics typology I find silly but we work with what we've got.
I'm not saying much, and I apologize for that, but I feel that, especially after reading NT Wright, that gesture and symbol is vital to the metaphysics of Christianity, which I embrace as universal. And by bracketing it out we become so anthropocentric as to lose history and be some hip contrarian organization, kind of like Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, another person Zizek has made trendy.
Prince,
You talk over my head! Have you run any of this negative symbolic gesture by any of your lay-people at your field ed placement? I'm trying to imagine a lay person wrapping their mind around this. I'm also trying imagine you explaining this to a set of new parents who have come to you to have their first infant child baptized (especially if they're only nominally invovled in the church).
Basically I've come to a theory about worship and actions in worship: what we do is less important than that we talk about why we're doing what we're doing. I'm remembering back to a paraphrase one of my OT preceptors gave of a statement Abraham Heschel made to one of his students: "There are seventy right answers to the question, and that is not one of them." In the case of worship, there are 70 right answers to explaining what's going on in baptism. There certainly are wrong one's too, but the more important thing is that we talk about why we're doing what we're doing. And at least at my church, we almost never talk about why we're doing what we're doing. We just do it and assume everyone knows.
In the case of your negative symbolic gesture, I can appreciate how baptism takes us out of the nation-state citizenship stamp. We are now citizens in an entirely other kingdom, the kingdom of God. It transcends geo-political boundaries. I can fly with that. Is it all that baptism is? No. Is it one of the 70 right answers? Maybe. Can you explain it easily to a bunch of non-theological intellectual lay-people? That's a stretch.
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