. . .Where I stumbled

[continued from yesterday]

The form the pastor chose last Sunday morning he took from the grey Psalter, the one just previous to the most recent edition, which, you may remember, has no forms at all. 

It seemed to me--I may be wrong--that he spent more time in explanation than he normally does with baptisms, more time with the form, and that may be why I was listening so closely. 

Once, years ago, when a Christian Lao family wanted a child baptized, I got the job of rewriting the form in the gray hymnal into a language the couple might better understand. It was a great job, and it forced me to read a form I'd heard countless times, a form whose truth had registered long ago in me. I mean, I understood it. Still, creating a litany that non-English speakers might understand forced me to think about that form in a way I never had before. 

And this time, in the preacher's own shortened form, I got lost in one line. First, let me remind you what is there--or was there--in the old, yet newest form of the form. 

This part of what is labeled "The Instruction" begins by creating the argument for the baptism of infants: "God graciously includes our children in his covenant, and all his promises are for them as well as us (Gen. 17:7)." Then, more proof, this time from the gospels: 

Jesus himself embraced little children and blessed them (Mark 10:16); and the apostle Paul said that children of believers are  holy (I Cor.7:14). So, just as children of the old covenant received the sign of circumcision, our children are given the sign of baptism. 

Churches have formed and reformed out of all of this, of course, in part because most often we won't part easily with what is most sacred to us, and perhaps nothing is more sacred to Reformed Christians in our church polity than the sacraments. 

I'm not willing to go to the mat for infant baptism, so none of what was said was in the least bothersome until the last line of that form. This is it: "We are therefore always to teach our little ones that they have been set apart by baptism as God's own children."

That hit me--"set apart." I know the comfort of that line--some of us are chosen, others not so, and, thanks be, we are. That's what we are to teach our kids, the form says, remembering Paul and Jesus and the Father Abraham story. We are "set apart." We're not normal. We're favored. We're blessed. We're baptized. 

There's nothing inherently wrong about that, nothing mischievous, nothing close to some sort of wink-and-nod thing. The line is not blasphemy or some errant doctrine. The truth is, I believe it.

But I also believe that in believing it, once upon a time I took it as reassurance that my faith, my religion, put me very much at odds with the world. "Worldliness" is one of those words that long ago was discretely put aside with that oldest purple Psalter. "We are not of this world," is a proposition as deeply set within my psyche as those choruses of "Living for Jesus"; and even though I understand it, and believe it, and stand by it, the idea is no more sacred than our will to state it clearly. 

And I'll tell you why. Because it's woefully close to an ethic that created the fabulous idea of "Manifest Destiny": there's something in us that's special, something in us that allows us, even pushes us to take over a world that was never "ours" to take. 

My grandkids and I used to attend the Memorial Day parade in town. We'd pedal down to a friend's house, where the coffee and juice would be set, and we'd watch what didn't amount to anything more than a fifteen-minute parade--the old vets, the high school band, and some boy scouts, and kids on bikes. My granddaughter was just six years old or so, first grade, when she got up from the porch steps at one point and went to the front door where she stood and turned her back on the parade.

When I asked her what that was all about, she said she'd spotted the local public high school band. "They don't know Jesus," she said. She went to Christian school.

I don't blame her, nor her teachers, nor her parents. But somewhere, in her six-year-old mind she'd picked up the idea that the world is composed of us and them, and they're not us because we have something they don't. Somehow, she got the idea that she was "set apart."

We've come a long way since "the indubitable form." We might still consider our own darling little babies as "children of wrath," but today those words feel like a mouthful of sand. We probably don't loathe ourselves either anymore--there are far, far too many suicides. Let's be clear--we have altered our language in ways that make it easier for us to live with the ideas they attempt to create. 

I'm certainly not saying no one should ever again utter the sentence that distracted me on Sunday--"our little ones . . . have been set apart by baptism as God's own children." But I am saying, "Be careful."

All of this reminds me how significant a gift language really is; it's not a trifle. It often opens worlds we didn't necessarily intend to open.

There's immense comfort in being "set apart." I get that. But there's also a danger in claiming exclusivity, big danger.