Baptismal meditation

Romans 10:9-10: If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

A baptismal liturgy is an appropriate place for the creed, particularly for the Apostles’ Creed we’re currently using. The Apostles’ creed probably originated as a series of questions posed at the time of baptism to the candidate for baptism. “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth? Do you believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” Many churches today still use the Apostles’ Creed in this way in their baptismal rites.

The Apostles’ Creed elaborates Paul’s exhortation to confess the Lord Jesus. Paul emphasizes that we have to articulate this confession with our mouth to be saved. Having unexpressed faith in our heart does not save. It must come from the heart to the mouth as testimony and witness for Jesus. In the early church, those who confessed by affirming the content of the Apostles’ Creed were baptized into the community of salvation.

But what is this confession doing in an infant baptism?

Your children cannot speak. They won’t recite the Apostles’ Creed this morning. They can’t understand questions, much less answer them. Why confess when the subjects of baptism cannot confess with us?

Infant baptism rests on the premise that redemption runs along the path of creation. Human beings grow from infants to children to teenagers to adults. That is the created path of human maturation. When God renews us, He follows the same tracks, tracks that He laid at the beginning. God renews humanity from the ground up, from infancy to old age, and all along the way. When He came to save us, Jesus started at the beginning, a zygote to save zygotes, an infant to redeem infants, a child to deliver children, a man to bring men and women to glory.

Infants don’t talk at the beginning; we speak to and around and at them so that they learn to talk. Infants aren’t able to believe and speak while they’re infants. We teach them to name the world, and they gradually come to believe that the sun rises and sets and the moon waxes and wanes; we train them, and they learn to confess with their mouths the beliefs of their hearts. Running on the same tracks, the Christian life is, for children of believers, a life of growth into faith, of maturity into a confession. Your children cannot yet confess, but we confess at their baptism because they are joining a family of believers, of confessors, of witnesses, so they learn to believe and confess with us.

We’re confident you will teach your children English grammar, colors and shapes, the names of trees and plants and amphibians and precious stones and stars. We are confident of this because we know your older children, and they are all perfectly capable of speaking. But above all your calling is to teach them this faith, this grammar, this language, this speech, the confession of the Lord Jesus, the faith into which they are baptized, so that they come to believe in their hearts and confess with their mouths, and so be saved.