Why Bring Our Children to Holy Baptism?

I am struck by the ease and sentimentality with which we proffer our infants and children for Holy Baptism – as if the whole point were to give them a nice religious sugar-coating! In contrast, the austere proclamations of the baptismal rite swath the ceremony and the candidate in themes woven of sin, evil, death, rebirth, holiness, judgment, redemption, crucifixion, and resurrection!

In what other sphere of life do we commit our children so blithely – if at all! – to such things? We bring children into this American life and culture and dedicate their future to increasing comfort and complacency in their existence. Yet if we are faithful, and if we know what we are doing, we bring children into the Christian church that they may find themselves ill at ease and never fully at home in this existence.

For in baptism we commit them to imitation of and identification with a crucified Savior. We commit them to live in the way of the cross, to take up their cross daily, to lose their selves that they might gain their souls. We commit them to an existence so jarring with the way of the world that it brought our Lord to crucifixion, that it portends for each Christian the possibility of persecution, suffering, and martyrdom.

How is it we dare to bring them to baptism then? Let us bring them, yes, for it signifies true life, but let us rid ourselves of all ease and sentimentalism in so doing!