It is a labor of love, preparing this slide show for your 26-year-old’s wedding. You’ve gone back to the shoeboxes full of family pictures cataloged year by year. You’ve got the first day of kindergarten and Boy Scout and baseball shots, the Halloween costumes and school play outfits. There are shots with grandparents and birthday parties and standing too near the edge of the Grand Canyon. You’ve pulled out school pictures and family portraits from church directories. Here are some from recent years, he and his bride-to-be.
One day you receive the e-mail from your future daughter-in-law’s father. “I’ve got mine done,” he writes, “go to snapfish.com and enter this password, they’re there.” You go, and there are dozens of shots of the young woman your son will marry, except they are of a baby girl, a toddler in her grandmother’s arms, school pictures too, and family portraits. Mixed in are photos through the years of her with her mom and dad, love you can understand in their faces. Ah, look at this one! It’s your son, planting a big kiss on her cheek at her college graduation.
Arranging slides, adding their favorite music, you blend their lives. The music plays and the slides come up, and with them tears of joy and grief at the young man and young woman you see grow up before your very eyes.
There are things not in the slide show; that’s part of the emotion you feel. You will never forget his reaction the day word comes that his best friend has died, a boy with a rare disease; he cried inconsolably for an hour. There are the seizures, the tests at the university hospital, imagining the worst, and getting better news. You recall times you lost your temper, wounding his spirit and yours too. There is adolescent turmoil, including his refusal to profess his faith after confirmation. He did not want to spout out a spoon-fed faith; he had his own faith, and he would say it the way he would say it, when he wanted to say it. There were some rough times for him, and you, but you’ve loved him the best you could.
Now it is the day of the wedding. The minister calls the assembly to worship. Your son and his bride stand before the minister, holding hands and listening. Calling each name, she asks: “In your baptism you have been called to union with Christ and the church. Do you intend to honor this calling through the covenant of marriage?”
In your baptism … . Those pictures flash before you again: you, holding him in his baptismal gown; she, as a little infant girl with her proud parents and family.
You look around at the people gathered for their wedding. They are grandparents and aunts and uncles and family friends, most of whom are Christians. Here are friends who were part of raising each others’ children. They are Sunday School teachers and youth leaders, including the one who stuck by your son when he rebelled against the church and you. Some of these young adults were together on high school mission trips, hammering nails and praying together. Here are the staff members from the church camp where this bride and groom worked with children, shared their faith, and fell in love.
”In your baptism you have been called to union with Christ and the church,” the minister says, and it dawns on you: it is true. Before these were ever your children, they were God’s children. Before you can take credit, or blame, for the good or the bad, you know: Jesus Christ had them in his hand in both good and bad. Watching these two begin life together, you know: Jesus Christ has them in his hand for all that is ahead of them.
We baptize our children because we trust God’s promise and covenant made with Abraham, the covenant marked by circumcision: I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you …
We baptize our children with Jesus’ words echoing in our ears: Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
We baptize them, trusting that baptism is not our washing them in water, but Jesus Christ washing them in the ever-flowing fountain of his grace. Christ gives his grace before we are ever able to know about it.
Our forebear John Calvin, whose 500th birthday we celebrate this year, is thought to have had three or four children. None of them survived infancy; infant mortality was high in the sixteenth century. Listen to his words:
God’s boundless generosity, in showing itself … (in our children’s baptism), first gives (us) … occasion to proclaim his glory, then floods … (our) hearts with uncommon happiness, which … (spurs us) to a deeper love for (our) kind Father, a as … (we) see his concern … for (our) posterity … .
… (we) see with (our) very eyes the covenant of the Lord engraved upon the bodies of (our) children. … the children … benefit … being engrafted into the body of the church … .
… how sweet is it … to be assured, not only by word, but by sight, that (we) obtain such favor with the heavenly Father that (our) offspring are within his care … . Who even after our death maintains his care for us, providing for and looking after our children (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, iv.xvi.9 & 32).
Sitting at your child’s wedding you hear the minister ask him and his bride: “In your baptism you have been called to union with Christ and the church, do you intend to honor this calling through the covenant of marriage?”
It is about God from the very start.
Replying to the minister’s question they both answer: “We do.”
David H. Sutton is pastor of Nazareth Presbyterian Church in Moore, S.C.
