“Remembering Confirmation”

Sometimes confirmation gets forgotten, especially when you reach my age. But with seven bright and eager students this semester, confirmation is hard to forget and easy to enjoy.

Confirmation, or “Affirmation of Baptism,” recalls the sacrament where God’s Word combined with water to make you a child of God forever, delivering you from sin, death, and the devil through the forgiveness of sin. Salvation has been accomplished for you by Christ’s own life, death, and resurrection. What is there left for you to do to be saved? Nothing. You are free.

So now what? As Luther put it, “The Christian individual is completely free lord of all, subject to none. The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”[1] In other words, your salvation needs nothing done for it, but your neighbor does. Faith naturally does good works just as a good tree naturally bears good fruit. But how do we receive faith? By hearing God’s Word. Which brings us back to confirmation (and church). As the ELCA’s Presiding Bishop recently put it, ““The church is unique among institutions. … It is the only institution whose reason for being is to preach the gospel in its purity and to administer the sacraments according to the gospel.”[2]

Remembering confirmation reminds us why the church exists: to deliver God’s promise of grace, to bring life from death right now and into eternity, to make faith so that good fruit blossoms from it in all of life’s daily words and deeds. As Luther says, “They [Christians] live in Christ through faith and in the neighbor through love.”[3]

In Christ and with you in love,

Pastor Stephen