Baptismal meditation, September 25

Galatians 3:26-29: For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to promise.

In many churches throughout the centuries, godparents have joined parents at the baptism of children. Though godparents are not universal in Reformed churches, they are not unknown. The early Reformed baptismal rites in Zurich, Basel, and Strasbourg included godparents, though the role of godparents diminished as the Reformed had to respond to Anabaptist critiques of their baptismal rites.

Godparents do not minimize the responsibility that parents have for nurturing their children in God’s ways. Nor do godparents, even ones who are blood relations of the parents, turn baptism into a family rite. Baptizing a child is a moment in the history of the family, but baptism does not belong to the family and it is not primarily about family ties.

Rather, baptism is an enactment of the truth that we examined this morning, namely, that water is thicker than blood. A child is baptized not because he shares the blood of his Christian parents. He’s baptized because he is born into a wider family, the family of believers, the family of Abraham. This is Paul’s point at the end of Galatians 3: The Galatians had no blood relation to Abraham, but through baptism into Christ, they become Christ’s possession, and thereby became children of God, members of Abraham’s family, heirs of the promises to Abraham. Baptism is not a mark of membership in the blood family, but the visible adoption into the family of God.

This is what godparents represent. Godparents are a sign that the child is part of a wider network of family relations, wider than the immediate blood family. Through baptism, a child becomes a brother of all the men and women, all the boys and girls of this congregation. Godparents represent that wider family. All of you are witnesses to this baptism, all of you will promise to assist the parents as they raise their child. But the godparents are taking on a particular responsibility to do that. They stand here as members of the family of Abraham to be the first to welcome the child officially into that family.