Godparents For Life (Reflections on Baptism)

Back in the day I used to hang with this girl named Julie. She was a musician and played the organ at our church. She and I often joked about getting married, and I certainly couldn’t have asked for a better partner—she was pretty, wealthy, generous, funny, smart, talented, and Christian. But she was also gay, so that kind of put the marriage thing out of the question.

But I’m thinking of dear Julie this week in connection to her godfather, Clyde. Clyde was an elderly fellow in our congregation (I don’t believe there are young fellows named Clyde) who was ubiquitously loved by every member of the church. He was kind and funny and fond of leisure suits (Remember leisure suits..? This was all about thirty plus years ago) and white shoes and the Los Angeles Dodgers. But he was quite concerned when he learned that his goddaughter was into girls.

One Sunday during after-church coffee hour, Clyde approached me and wanted to know about Julie. “There is something,” he said, “which is extremely distasteful to me. And you know what I’m talking about.” I told him I knew, but I wasn’t comfortable discussing my friend’s sexual orientation around the assembled church folk. We agreed to meet for lunch the next day to discuss it.

Clyde picked me up from the small college where I was teaching the next day, and we dined at a local restaurant. After he said grace, I explained what I had observed in Julie since she had “come out.” You must recall this was thirty years ago, so folks’ attitudes towards the LGBT community were not as enlightened as we might have wished. But I told Clyde that, since Julie had come through the flood of recognizing her sexuality, she would now hug me—which she’d never done before. She’d also say, “I love you,” which she’d never done before. And she seemed happier than I remember her seeming before.

Clyde’s response to this was one of the most Christian things I can recall. He told me he loved his goddaughter, and, though he did not understand her lifestyle, he would pray for her happiness. He told me he accepted what I had to tell him despite his initial misgivings. All he wanted was for Julie to be happy. “Please tell her,” he said, “that I will not ask anything about her personal life. But if she ever needs anything, she’s to call me. After all, she is my godchild.”

I share this little tale with you on the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord because I want to celebrate what an extraordinary godfather this now long-deceased gentleman was. To subordinate the ingrained opinions of his upbringing for the sake of the love of the child he’d promised to nurture in the Christian faith was a true sign of sacrifice. But what impressed me the most about Clyde was how seriously he took the promises he had made at Julie’s baptism. His concern for her did not end after the water had dried on her infant forehead, nor did it terminate at her Confirmation or her eighteenth birthday. He had made a promise before God and intended to keep it.

“Sponsors,” the Evangelical Lutheran Worship baptism liturgy asks, “do you promise to nurture these persons in the Christian faith as you are empowered by God’s Spirit, and to help them live in the covenant of baptism and in communion with the church?” (ELW pg.228) There is no statute of limitations on this question. Living in the grace of our own baptism requires that we become servants to all the baptized—especially the young whom God has placed in our charge.

I get a bit miffed and feel rather superior when someone calls my church, claiming to have been baptized here, but saying they have lost their baptismal certificate and need a duplicate to prove to some Roman priest that they are worthy to stand as a godparent. I want to ask them, “What qualifies you to be godparent at a child’s baptism when you seem to have so little interest in your own that you haven’t even preserved your certificate?”

I can feel really smug at such times. After all, I know where my baptismal certificate is (hanging on the wall of my office). I can also lay my hands on my Confirmation certificate and my seminary diploma and certificate of ordination. But, truth be told, I have been one crappy godfather to my own godchildren. I have had nowhere near the life-long commitment to their spiritual growth which Clyde had for Julie.

What would the church look like if we all took seriously these baptismal vows? What if we committed ourselves to sharing our faith with our children and we all assumed parental roles for the kids in our parish? What if Affirmation of Baptism no longer meant “Graduation from Church?” What if we remembered that, in baptism, Jesus got down in our dirty bath water and promised to love us through all of our sin and pain and confusion, and we committed to doing the same for each other?

So often I feel that baptisms have become just an excuse for a party. What if we committed to being godparents for life?  I think, then, that God would be well pleased.

Thanks for reading, my dears. God bless you.