Ministry with Children

The boy Jesus in the Temple, Heinrich Hofmann, 1881

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 29th December 2024, the 1st Sunday of Christmas

Today’s readings are both about the presence of children in holy places.

In the OT reading (1 Samuel2:18-20,26) we heard about the child Samuel ministering before the Lord in the sanctuary at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh, where his parents had left him in the care of the priest Eli.

In the NT reading Luke (2:41-52) told us about the 12 year-old Jesus staying behind in the Temple at Jerusalem when his parents returned home to Nazareth. 

How did Samuel come to be with Eli in the shrine of Shiloh?

Shiloh was in what we now call the West Bank, about 30 km north of Jerusalem. After the Israelites conquered Canaan, it was one of the main centres of Israelite worship, until the Temple was built in Jerusalem. The Tabernacle which they had brought with them on their wanderings was kept there. At that time they were led by Judges, rather than Kings, and Eli was both a priest at Shiloh and a Judge.

Samuel’s parents Elkanah and Hannah made an annual trip to worship at the shrine at Shiloh. Hannah desperately wanted a child and prayed for one at the shrine, promising that if she had a boy, she would dedicate him to God. Her prayers were answered, she gave birth to Samuel, and when he was old enough, she brought him to Eli at Shiloh and left him there in his care. It is a very touching detail that when she came back on her annual trips to the shrine, she always brought him a little robe she had made.

It may seem strange to us that Hannah could give her child over to be fostered by Eli. But fostering of children was common among our ancient Irish ancestors, as it still is today among Nigerians, often causing real difficulties with immigration authorities. And posh folk still send their children off to boarding schools.

The fact is that by giving Samuel over to Eli, Hannah ensured he had a good education. He inherited Eli’s role as a Judge of Israel, the last one. And he would become a great prophet.

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us the single thing we know about Jesus’s childhood from the canonical Gospels - we know nothing else from his birth until his baptism by John.

The boy Jesus goes AWOL - absent without leave, when his parents return home from his family’s annual Passover visit to the Temple in Jerusalem. ‘When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.’

When they found him, Mary chided him, saying ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ And Jesus replies, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

Jesus was brought up as a Jew, in a devout Jewish family, attending the synagogue in Nazareth, where he would, no doubt, have become familiar with the Jewish scriptures, our OT. We believe Jesus to be the fully divine Son of God, the 2^nd person of the Trinity. But we also believe him to be fully human. 

Here we glimpse, I suggest, his humanity, as a 12 year old boy on the cusp of adolescence. He listens to and questions the teachers of his Jewish faith. He is slowly but surely feeling his way toward a mature understanding of the loving God he calls his Father. He is preparing himself for his adult ministry, in which he proclaims ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 4:17).

As he matures, ‘Jesus increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour’, we are told. Mary treasures all these memories in her heart. Later she must have shared them with a disciple, so that Luke could pass her story on to us.

All this gets me thinking about the place of children in our Church today.

It is our corporate responsibility to raise them in a loving community of faith, so that they can, like Jesus, ‘increase in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’, to use Luke’s words. Our duty is to model for them what it means for the kingdom of heaven to come near.

We must never forget that our children, like ourselves, are spiritual beings. When they listen and question, as Jesus did among the teachers in the Temple, we must be attentive and answer them with complete honesty appropriate to their age. They are feeling their own way to understanding the God of love we believe in.

When the time is right, the church, with our support, offers them preparation for confirmation by wise priests and teachers. In this we can see a reflection of the 12 year-old Jesus among the teachers in the Temple.

We hope and pray that they will then feel able to affirm their faith publicly, before the bishop, in front of the congregation. But that must be their decision – no one has the right to force them to do so.

This is the ideal, but sadly we know that some children experience something quite different.

With great sorrow, we must recognise that within churches of all traditions, as in wider society, there are those who prey on and abuse children, causing them immense harm.

We all know about the child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, which damaged so many children, and turned so many away from that Church. But none of our Christian traditions is immune. Our sister Anglican church, the Church of England, is now in turmoil about past child-abuse scandals. Senior churchmen have covered them up for years to protect themselves, their friends, or the reputation of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are now calls for the Archbishop of York and others to resign too.

We can only hope and pray that in our parishes, and in the wider Church of Ireland, our Safeguarding Trust processes are sufficiently robust to ensure that children and vulnerable adults are protected, and that appropriate, timely action is taken when incidents and risks are identified. Safeguarding is immensely important, and we must take it seriously. We owe a debt to those on our parish safeguarding panel, and to those working with children who undergo regular Safeguarding training. We should keep them in our prayers.

I shall finish in prayer with today’s Collect of the Word:

God of community,

whose call is more insistent

than ties of family or blood;

may we so respect and love

those whose lives are linked with ours

that we fail not in loyalty to you,

but make choices according to your will;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen

The origins of Baptism & Confirmation

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 10th January 2016, the 1st after Epiphany.

On this 1^st Sunday of Epiphany we celebrate the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

St Luke in today’s Gospel reading (Luke: 3:15-17, 21-22) tells us what happened when John baptised Jesus: ‘When all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the same event is described in slightly different words in the other three Gospels.

In this striking scene God reveals to us that this man Jesus is his Son, the Beloved. It is also the only scene in the Gospels where we find all three persons of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit - together at the same time. It is in fact an epiphany of the Trinity, so it is especially important for all of us Trinitarian Christians.

Luke tells us that John’s baptism was ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.

John baptised with water those who came to him to signify their repentance – that is, their personal commitment to live in future by God’s standards. God forgives their previous failures to live up to his standards – their sins – which are symbolically washed away in the water.

Since the earliest times, Christians have been puzzled that Jesus came to be baptised by John. After all, the argument goes, Jesus as the Son of God must be without sin, with nothing to repent, so a baptism for forgiveness of sins seems inappropriate. Matthew tells us that the Baptist himself was reluctant to baptise Jesus, but Jesus insisted, saying ‘it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness’.

For Jews, righteousness meant doing God’s will. Jesus clearly believed God willed him to be baptised by John. But for what purpose? Perhaps so that Jesus would be certain who he was before beginning his ministry. Or perhaps so that John could testify to his Trinitarian vision. But I like to think that God willed Jesus to be baptised in a stunning act of solidarity with sinful people – with you and with me – so that Jesus stands alongside us as we bare our souls in repentance, as our sins are washed away, and as we receive God’s forgiveness.

What about the Christian sacrament of baptism with water as we know it today?

None of the Gospels tell us that Jesus himself baptised anyone, but his disciples certainly did. They did so with his approval while he was alive, as John’s Gospel tells us. John also records Jesus teaching that ‘no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit’. And the disciples continued to baptise after his death, following his Great Commission, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel in these words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  3000 are said to be have been baptised on the day of Pentecost alone!

Those who came to Christian baptism in the earliest days would have made the same personal commitment to change, in expectation of God’s forgiveness, as those who John baptised. This baptism, like John’s, must surely have been ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’.

But as time passed, baptism with water more and more came to be seen as a ceremony of initiation into the community of believers, the Church. Baptism was essential, Christians felt, because Jesus had said no one could enter the kingdom of God without being born of water. In times when many children died in childhood, Christian parents naturally wanted to make sure their children would join them in the kingdom of God, so they began to baptise infants too. Parents and friends sponsored the infant Christian, making personal commitments on their behalf. The original idea of a ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ began to fade into the background, perhaps because it is hard to see what sins infants need to repent.

So baptism evolved to become the sacrament of Christian initiation we know today, and the parents and friends became what we call sponsors and godparents.

But surely there is something missing in this baptism as Christian initiation?

In today’s Gospel John the Baptist says ‘I baptise you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming.’ That’s Jesus, of course. ‘He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire’. What has become of Jesus’s baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire?

The apostles were baptised with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, just as Jesus had promised them before his ascension. They also experienced tongues of fire – and fire was certainly kindled in their hearts. They went out fired-up to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, which as the Book of Acts tells us spread like wild fire.

The embryonic Church spread despite – or rather because of – persecution. As it grew the apostles found it necessary to appoint assistants, called deacons, one of them a man called Philip. When persecution came the new Christians scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria, leaving the apostles in Jerusalem. Philip fled to the city of Samaria, where he in his turn preached the good news. Large numbers of people responded and Philip baptised them.

This is the background to today’s 2^nd reading from Acts 8:14-17.

‘When the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them’. Peter and John were, of course, apostles. In Samaria, we are told, they discovered that the new Christians had not received the Holy Spirit, even though they had been baptised by Philip. Peter and John prayed for them, ‘laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit’ - in other words they received Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit.

The apostles were faced with the problem of maintaining the unity of the church as it spread away from Jerusalem. Their solution seems to have been to insist that they alone could administer Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit by laying on of hands. As a result Christians in faraway places maintained links with the apostles in Jerusalem.

As the church grew and the original apostles began to grow old and die, they consecrated others they trusted to carry on their work, which included administering the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These others in turn consecrated their successors to do the same, and so on to our own day.

Their successors are what we now call bishops. The line of succession we call apostolic succession. And the sacrament of confirmation is Jesus’s baptism with the Holy Spirit, administered by a bishop in apostolic succession laying his hands on a person seeking confirmation.

So to conclude, as we celebrate the baptism of Jesus:

First, let us give thanks for the insight we receive into the nature of God as Trinity from the epiphany of Father, Son and Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism by John.

Second, let us give thanks for the sacrament of baptism with water, which builds on John’s baptism, to mark our incorporation into Christ’s body the Church, whether as infants or adults.

And third, let us give thanks for the sacrament of confirmation, through which we are born again as we receive Jesus’s baptism of the Holy Spirit, to inspire us and put fire in our hearts to work for his kingdom.