Fourth Sunday of Easter - Confirmation Sunday

          To the six confirmation candidates and to the rest of you, welcome to the starting line! You maybe thought you came to day to witness a finishing, a completion, a graduation of sorts: the final ritual in Sunday School and church membership. Except today  is not a graduation, and this is not a valedictory address. It’s not a farewell talk or one last chance for me to get in some inspiring closing words before you all disappear for the summer and for the rest of high school. Instead, today is a beginning and I’m giving what more closely resembles a speech to the troops before battle.

          Today, Dom, Zach, Jack, Eden, Celest and Steph affirm their baptisms. They acknowledge the promises that were made on their behalf and take them as their own. In Steph’s case, she as an adult, chose to enter more fully into Christ, and join her daughter in this journey. They stand in a long line of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons who have affirmed the Faith standing shoulder to shoulder.

Today, these six people stand up here and make an important statement. A statement that rejects the devil and his lies and his empty promises. A statement that commits them to the future. A statement that commits them to living a certain way.

Today, these people consciously taking the path of suffering, following in the steps of Jesus who suffered for us, even though he was innocent. Today these men and women commit or recommit to live for righteousness: freed from their sins, they will promise to not take the easy way out. They will stand up for what is right and true, and if they suffer for it and endure, they have God’s approval. 

Like Jesus, when they are abused, they will not return abuse. Like Jesus, when they suffer for the truth, they will not threaten. Instead, they will entrust themselves to God. And they will not cease to proclaim that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. That he is the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep. That he is the only way into the sheepfold. That following him faithfully is our only hope. Not just on Sunday, or just in church, or just on confirmation day—but in all times and all places of our lives.

          Dom, Zach, Jack, Eden, Celest and Steph, today you confess that you believe that Jesus is Lord. Lord of your lives. It is not a confession to be taken lightly, or made only as a formality, or made because your family wants you to. To say that Jesus is Lord is to say that you are not lord of your own lives, but that Jesus is. It is to commit yourselves to the way the Lord has set for you and follow in his steps. You promise that you will listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd who has called you by name and follow him because you know his voice and you pay attention to what Jesus says to you.

To stand up here and confess that Jesus is your Lord means that your behavior matters. That what you say with your lips, you also believe in your hearts and show forth in your lives.

And that makes you a target. A target for the world, for the devil, for those who hate God. Like the Christians of the early church, being confirmed means that you devote yourself to the things of God. A real, day-to-day living of what you say you believe. The early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings, to the breaking of the bread in Holy Communion, to fellowship with one another, to prayer, to serving the poor and needy.

This is your new beginning today. Your renewed life. Your wonderful calling to bravely go beyond yourselves into what God is calling you toward. As I said to the kids, I plan to slap you—not hard--but following that old church tradition of reminding you that you should be ready to suffer for the faith, and telling you to be brave and steadfast.

Of course, I might be standing here talking and half of you have tuned me out.  Maybe you’d rather not have Jesus as your example, what with the suffering and inconvenient demands and all. Maybe you just want to get on with it and be “done.” Well, there’s plenty of other examples for you, then.

There’s the people who confess Jesus is Lord and then leave. They get busy. They get jobs and cars and make the varsity team. Sunday morning is their only day to sleep in. They go to the lake or stay home with their families. Church is one pleasant option among many, but hardly a priority or a necessity.

Then there’s the folks that say that worship is boring and the sermons irrelevant and there’s not enough going on at church to make it worthwhile.  If it were only like THIS or THAT, then they would come.

And then there’s the ones that figure they’re confirmed, they don’t have to come anymore, their parents don’t make them. Their parents don’t go themselves. Maybe they’ll come back when they want to get married.

If  you follow those examples, and listen to these voices, you will be forsworn. You will have made a vow today and broken it. And that’s hard to hear. It’s hard for me to speak, because God knows that I am sinner, too. We are all sinners—and yet we are called to live lives as holy people, children of God, so that others see what God is doing in our lives.

When Jesus died on the cross for us, sin was forgiven. When you were baptized, you shared in his death and that forgiveness, and you were made new people. This means that you live like the new people you are. God demands a radical commitment from you, and he gives you the power to say it, do it, and live it.

But as I said before, this makes you a target. You will be faced with temptations. You will have to make unpopular decisions. You will likely clash with the world and with your peers. To say that Jesus is Lord means that you are not lord, and others are not lord, and their opinions are not lord, and that popularity and success and work and money and hobbies and politics and friends and family and sports and activities and all the other things we turn into little gods—they are not lord! Only Jesus is Lord of your life and has the power to save and transform you.

You are tied to Jesus in your baptisms, sealed with his cross on your foreheads like a brand. He owns you! This is not glamorous, being stuffed in the sheep pen of the church with the other matted-up dirty sheep, smelling their stink. It’s nothing that’s going to gain you fame or wealth or the approval of the world. And yet, it’s the deepest and best adventure I know: to give your lives in the service of others, to receive the very body and blood of God in your hands, to know that your sins are forgiven with one single word.

But lest you think that this is all depressing and frustrating because you know you’re not some spiritual hero, you’re just a person sitting in a scratchy robe on your confirmation day--let me tell you that today is not really about you. It’s about God and what he wants for you, and what he has given you. You don’t do any of this on your own—you do it with God’s help. You are the sheep which follows the Shepherd. When you go astray, you return to the shepherd and guardian of your souls, the one who bore your sins in his body on the cross and healed you with his wounds.

Confessing Jesus as Lord means that you are not alone. All the rest of the flock is here with you. You wear a white robe today, and it’s not a graduation robe. It’s the white robe of your baptism. The robe that all of us have. We are your family, the other sheep, and we are here to help you, to support and pray for you, to welcome you as fellow workers in the kingdom of God, as our brothers and sisters in the flock.

The confession of Jesus as Lord can seem like it’s all full of rules and requirements: do this, don’t do this…but you know that such requirements come from God’s love for you. Not because he wants to make you jump through hoops and get a check mark on your sermon notes, but because for freedom Christ has set you free. Free to serve him and each other. Free to have life and have it abundantly.

Your baptisms were the beginning of that abundant life. Today is a new beginning in your adult life of faith, where you take hold of the abundant life that has been given to you, and you lay everything on the line to promise the Shepherd, the guardian of your souls,  that you will listen to his voice, and follow him all the days of your life, and so dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen.