ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE LPTP-17 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> ERIC: Are there circumstances which require extra care and thoughtfulness when baptizing persons? I, for instance, have run into at least one situation when a person was surprised that the baptism would occur in the context of a worship service. I can also conceive of unique medical situations or misconceptions about the beneficial nature of baptism. What kind of instruction might be necessary before a baptism? What types of circumstances should we prepare to handle with regards to baptism? >> PROF. WARNECK: Eric, how does a pastor help his people arrange for the baptism of a child or the baptism of another member of the family? Certainly the pastor's counsel and his guidance and direction are absolutely essential here, and we'd like to talk about that a bit as we address some particular and special circumstances surrounding these matters. Now I have in mind, first of all, the matter of sponsors. This may have been addressed earlier, but may I just add that in the Lutheran church we attempt to help our families find sponsors or godparents, persons who want to assist father and mother. In the spiritual care and training and upbringing of children, for instance, we want to find those persons within the community of faith. Ideally within the family the parents of a small child to be baptized might find those Christian people, those who might serve as sponsors. If they cannot find them within their own family, it certainly is well and good to go to the congregation. There may be persons in our churches in our congregations who would be glad to become sponsors of a baptized child. If our families go beyond our own fellowship, may, for instance, a Roman Catholic or a Methodist, Christians of other denominations serve as sponsors? How do we guide our parents in this regard? To be sure sponsors should be Christians. It would be very ill-advised for parents to find in their circle of friends a Muslim or a person in pursuit of the Buddhist faith or whatever, some nonChristian faith. It would be doubtful that those persons could really serve as sponsors. If they find friends who are members of other Christian churches or denominations, may I suggest that possibly these persons can serve with some provisions. It seems, Eric, we always have to suggest that these persons from outside our own community of faith will be willing to say that should the primary spiritual care of the baptized child ever fall to their responsibility, let us say in the absence of the parents for one unforeseen reason or another, that these sponsors then would raise the child�-- and they make the commitment to do so�-- to raise that child in the parent's faith, that is, in the Lutheran faith. Hopefully, we might get that commitment from sponsors who are chosen from a circle of friends outside of our Lutheran church. But, ideally, they would be�-- sponsors should be members of the Lutheran church. That would be our first preference. Now, there are some other circumstances surrounding baptism and some other questions that pastors must necessarily at times. Here is one real crucial question. Supposing in your church or your parish, Eric, a child dies before the opportunity to receive Holy Baptism. This occurs occasionally. And parents are very much grieved over this. On the one hand, our Lord makes it clear that baptism is for our children when he said baptize all nations and little children should be brought to him in this sacrament. But the opportunity for this child has been denied. And the question in the minds of the parents how is it with my little one who died without baptism? How do we address that? Eric, our pastoral practice on this point and pastoral reflection has traditionally said in the first place that the church certainly is bound to this means of grace of Holy Baptism. That's what our Lord commanded. But God himself is not so bound. God has taken the life of this little one. He is the Lord who gives life and takes life and precipitously before normal circumstances when the child could be baptized. We leave that to God's hands. He is still the prime player here. We need to assure our parents. Indeed, this is difficult to comprehend. And Christians are sometimes tempted to consider that God may be very capricious in taking the life of a child prior to the new life in baptism. Occasionally, the church has resorted to some rationalizations of various kinds on this subject that we wonder are they really very helpful. Our best approach, Eric, I think, is this: That we direct these grieving parents to the Lord God and all that we know about Him and His love and His mercy also His kindness and His tender care on the basis of God's own self-disclosure to us in Christ Jesus. The apostle Paul put it this way: We can virtually comprehend by faith is what he means when he says that we see the essential things about our God in the face of Christ Jesus. II Corinthians 4, verse 6. We see a God who so loved us that he did not spare his own son but gave him up into death on the cross for us all. The cross, the bitter suffering and death of Jesus for our sins communicates God's boundless love, that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Can we trust our child to such a God and father? Hopefully. Of course. And that's the direction I think, Eric, that you might be well-advised to take with parents who are stricken with that tremendous burden of grief over the child who was taken from them before baptism. For all of the suggested helps of rationalizations one kind or another, still our focus is best on the very nature of God as he discloses himself to us and His love and His tender care, His grace and His mercy in the Lord Jesus Christ. About the safety of the child taken by God, you recall King David's loss of his son. He said, "Can I bring him back again?" And his answer, "I shall go to him, but he will not return to me." Some theologians direct parents to I Corinthians 7:14 "For the unbelieving wife who is consecrated through her husband otherwise your children would be unclean. But, as it is, they are holy." But the use of this passage in our particular instance addressing this particular question seems to give parents to discover comfort in their own Christian faith when the parents are wondering about the child's saving faith. In some quarters much is made of the child carried in the womb of its Christian mother who with her husband live in a Christian home where devotions are held, a family who attends church and holy communion. And the appeal is made to Roman 10 verse 12 that faith comes by hearing the word of God, the inference being that the child, though yet unborn, at that point heard the word of God through which the Holy Spirit works faith. But I wonder, Eric, if this is a really strong argument? Does such reasoning really comfort grieving parents? Yes, we read, when Mary carrying the infant Jesus in her womb greeted her cousin, Elizabeth, the child, John, leaped in Elizabeth's womb. Luke 1, verse 41. Certainly this event was a sign pointing to the Christ child. Does it teach, however, even by inference, that the unborn child hears the word within the mother's womb? I don't know. Our best course, as I repeat once again, is to point parents to God in his revealed grace and goodness in Christ Jesus. And invite them to commend their child to him. Now, Eric, you may surmise that there is a related unusual circumstance. And it is this that comes to the Christian pastor sometimes in the rush of an emergency situation. When a child is born, as we say�-- as we formerly said, stillborn, a frantic father might call you as pastor. "Please come to the hospital. Rush here. And baptize our child." We have to empathize with the -- the agony and the pain suffered by those parents, certainly. Yet our pastoral practice in this instance, is it well to just move forward and accede to that kind of emotional request and baptize a stillborn child? That would be our question here. I always share in classes that I certainly would not fault a pastor for baptizing a child in that instance. Not at all. But, then again, the question is whether or not that action�-- because the Lord has already acted in the disposition of the soul of that child in taking that soul to himself�-- whether baptism in that instance is going to in the long term really help and comfort these grieving parents. Eric, would it not be of greater comfort to such parents to convince them that God has already acted for their little one? The God who gives life, that God has taken life. And, knowing our God as He is, as we emphasized before in Christ, as a God of love and mercy, compassion, that we now commend this child to Him as God has so acted. We abide by His will. I suggest, Eric, that moving parents in this direction will move toward the closure that seems to be most helpful to them in the long-term. Furthermore, there is evidence in the scriptures that both circumcision under the old covenant and baptism of the new were intended for the living only. I think we have to reckon with this. When our Lord addressed Nicodemus, he stated, "You must be born again." Nicodemus reflected, "Must I enter my mother's womb and be born a second time?" No, our Lord was speaking about the new birth of a living person once born from their mother's womb. The sacrament, ostensibly, is for the living. I think this has to be stated, at least in our thinking and in our review or our approach, to this very difficult pastoral care situation. To administer baptism to a child now dead could -- I say could bring hurt instead of comfort to parents who later in their life in the Christian congregation and the public worship services are going to see again and again that baptism is administered for the living. Always they will be taunted by the memory that their child was not living. The child had died. And then the question: What cause baptism in that instance? Would it not be better to try to help these parents arrive at some amount of closure the very time this tragedy occurs to prevent mixed feelings of loss and guilt and disappointment that may trouble them in time to come. We want to emphasize, Eric, that there's a basic pastoral practice principle here that comes to the fore. And it needs to be said in difficult cases particularly. We, as Christian pastors, help people only when we comfort them on the basis of sure and certain words and promises of God. If we attempt to comfort and counsel on the basis of our reasoning, which cannot be sustained always by those divine words and promises, that kind of care may stand to hurt rather than help and to heal. And I cite this basic principle, I think, for good reason. Our counsel and our care brings the sure and clear words and promises of God and fairly well should be within that range. Else, our care might turn to be otherwise than we had initially intended. Now, a corollary to this principle, Eric, is yet another. We administer the sacraments within the boundaries of normality, normal circumstances. Our Lord gives no indication of how administer the sacraments in out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. Those rubrics are simply not there. And so we question some other inferences that persons sometimes make in the very area that we are speaking. For instance, it has been suggested that when a child's welfare prior to being born is jeopardized in one way or another or possibly jeopardized, that we administer so-called intra-uterine baptism through the use of an invasive technique which would bear water to the unborn child inside its mothers womb. Should a pastor be pressed for that kind of administration of the sacrament? I don't know. I kind of think not. Nor should a pastor be pressed to baptize an unborn child by simply pouring water on the exterior of the mother's womb. These are somewhat unusual circumstances that I wonder whether these things were ever in the picture when our Lord instituted the sacrament. He did not press the church to use extraordinary means. Where it is impossible to administer baptism, He is able to intervene in His own grace and mercy, we have to believe. Certainly, children who are born with deformities we should baptize. Even a child fully formed but hardly more than a miscarriage, if living, may be baptized, as C.F.W. Walther teaches. Though prepared indeed to baptize the living, still the church's ministry is not required to engage sophisticated technology in order to administer the sacraments. Nothing in scripture infers that the church must extend its sacramental ministry in unusual ways. Well, I'm repeating myself a bit, Eric, on this point. We could mention some unfortunate instances where parental neglect was the apparent reason that a child was not baptized before some tragic occurrence. I'll cite you an instance. Here's a family. They're blessed with a child, and they do not get around to arranging for a -- his or her baptism. The pastor calls them six weeks after the child is born. Are you going to make arrangements to have the little one baptized? And they say, "Well, we're going to get around to that. We have to contact some people and so on; and we'll get back to you, pastor." Well, they don't get back to the pastor. The pastor makes further contact over a long period of time. This goes on for a year, year and a half, two years. And one day the child is playing on the porch of a second floor apartment. And the spokes in the fence around the porch are somewhat wide, at least wide enough and the child somehow slips through, falls to its death. And now the parents are not only grieved at the loss of their child, but they are in pain and agony over the fact that they neglected so long to have the little one baptized. Well, in an instance like that, we can -- we may certainly counsel parents in this direction that God is still gracious and merciful and He -- he certainly in His grace will not hold the missed opportunity for baptism to the child's account. And, certainly, with those parents who are grieving in guilt and a sense of repentance, we want to assure them of God's mercy and forgiveness of sins and the help that the Gospel gives them in such a tragic circumstance. God is gracious, and He is able to receive the soul of a child to himself into heaven. And He will do it. And He's also gracious and merciful to these parents. All right. We're speaking about unusual circumstances. When a pastor is approached to baptize a child without the permission of the parents, how, Eric, do we proceed in that kind of a circumstance? A God-fearing grandmother may plead with her pastor. "My daughter and her husband have no interest in seeing that my granddaughter is baptized. Would you, Pastor, baptize the little one in private if I bring her to church one evening while babysitting for her?" Well, consistently our Lutheran pastoral practice has been to respect the first authority over the child, in this instance, the parents. We hesitate to baptize against the will of the parents. This is a fourth commandment issue. Probably we're correct on that. It has been suggested that a grandparent, however, is a blood relative of the child. But that is really not what the fourth commandment and parallel passages are speaking about. There is parental authority. And we do well to respect that. What the pastor can do is intervene and make an evangelical appeal to the parents to permit the child to be baptized even if they do not believe or are indifferent to the sacrament themselves. If the pastor gains parental permission, he then is able to proceed and baptize such a child. Finally, in this area of unusual circumstances, a request may come to you, Eric, to baptize elderly and senile persons. The request may come from a relative. Perhaps this relative has custodial care of these very mentally diminished persons. The Lord's command to baptize is to baptize all. And that's certainly a factor here. And yet the pastor would want to be assured that such persons when -- in their life they had full command of their senses and were rational, that they were not hostile to Christ or the church and not resistant to the sacrament. Because, you see, it is a very unusual thing that they have lived so many years and very likely and some -- some connection with the church, though very indirect, but they're not baptized. And now the conscientious relative wants them to be baptized lest they die without the blessing of the sacrament. Well, all of these things considered, the pastor certainly will baptize such persons even though their intellectual faculties are spent, as it were. They cannot receive adult instruction or a normal course of a normal track with adults. Those faculties are simply not there. And he will have to baptize them somewhat in the manner of administering infant baptism. But the point made�-- we want to make sure is that we don't want to be stingy with baptism. We want to make the sacrament available. And that issue we're going to address in a little more detail in another question and another discussion, Eric. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***