The Sacrament of Wholeheartedness

a post-script homily

Nicolas Poussin Confirmation II 1645

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Should there be only six sacraments, not seven? Is confirmation, as some have suggested, a redundant rite, a practice in search of a theology? One of my mentors, Robert Jenson, stopped just short of saying as much. Although he argued that we must keep tradition by acknowledging the difference between baptism and confirmation, he quipped that “there is no theological excuse for the separation as such.” To his mind, Aquinas already said all that can be said about what happens in confirmation: “the Spirit is so given as to enable a more ‘robust’ Christian life.”

Certainly he’s right about the history. The first Christians drew only the slightest distinction between the washing rite and the anointing rite, if any distinction at all. Believers were baptized nude in a pool, confessing their faith and renouncing the devil. Afterward, clothed in white robes, they were anointed with holy oil by the bishop who laid hands on their head and invoked the Spirit. Then, they were welcomed to commune. Thus, confirmation effectively completed the initiation process, sealing the conversion of the baptized.

Eventually, however, after the so-called Constantinian shift, there were too many baptisms, too few bishops, so the time between the various aspects of the initiatory rites increased and confirmation emerged as a stand-apart sacrament. By the Middle Ages, the sacrament of confirmation had come to be regarded as the sacrament of perfection. Administered to adolescents nearing maturity, it marked them as soldiers of Christ, ready to fight the fight of faith. The rite included a slap to the face, a liturgical version of the blow to the cheek given in the knighting ceremony, meant to show their readiness to suffer honorably for Christ.

The Reformers found no biblical justification for confirmation as a distinct rite, recasting it as a necessary educational step between baptism (for infants) and participation in the Eucharist (for believers who had reached the age of accountability). In the modern world, at least in the American context, due to the corrosive effects of denominationalism and the loss of a liturgical and sacramental imagination, confirmation lost its meaning, supplanted either by calls to recommit one’s life to Christ or ceremonies for joining the church.

Where does that leave us? How are we to understand what we are doing here today? I agree with Jenson on this point: we need to insist on the unity of baptism’s water-rite and confirmation’s Spirit-rite. Still, we can and should embrace the distinction that has been made between them, because it testifies to the fact that God’s work in our lives takes time and needs space. To be sure, God’s work is a seamless garment, an uninterrupted flow. But our response to that work and our readiness to cooperate with it comes in fits and starts, irrupting and erupting in us—sometimes aptly, often not.

So, what is happening in confirmation? Despite Jenson’s quip, more can be said than that we are being given the gifts necessary to live a more robustly Christian life. We are being graced with and for wholeheartedness. In the words we prayed together:

Hallelujah!
I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart,
in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation.

To be baptized is to be totally immersed in the Spirit. To be confirmed is to be filled up to overflowing with that same Spirit. In baptism, we are made one with Christ. In confirmation, we receive the full array of his gifts, and through the act of obedience are internally resolved to our responsibilities as his co-workers. Together, these sacraments, by the Spirit’s power, create for us the possibility of a life of wholehearted praise. We can be all in on what God is doing around us and fully present to the work of God in our own lives.

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The work of the one Spirit is always toward the same end. But that work comes in manifold forms and at various times. This is why, as Kathryn Tanner explains, the grace of baptism is distinct from the grace of confirmation:

In baptism the Spirit unites us to Christ and we are made Christoform through the gift of Christ’s Spirit… Confirmation, on the other hand, bestows the quickening power of the Spirit, the Spirit that empowers, in and for the actual living of a holy life. This is the Spirit in and through which Jesus prays and acts in service of others… This is the Spirit with which Jesus is anointed at the start of his ministry (and not, say, the working of the Spirit by which the Word becomes enfleshed at his birth)—the Spirit as unction… Confirmation, on this understanding of it, does not serve to complete or ratify or validate one’s baptism. It is concerned with something else—something distinctive—that does not encroach on baptism’s territory… but builds upon its achievements and promise.

Following Tanner’s suggestion, we might say confirmation both effects a change in us and is itself a beginning of the living-out of the grace of baptism. It confers on us gifts that manifest as needed, gifts that come alive through the Spirit’s unction.

Talking like this reminds me of the Pentecostalism of my youth. Let me be clear: I know as well as anyone how the promise of Spirit baptism was turned by many into a word of law, not grace. We too often boasted in our experience, too often suggested no one else knew what we knew of the Spirit, too often left the impression the Spirit’s power was at our disposal. Nevertheless, there is a need for moments of irruption in our lives, times of “breakthrough” in which what the Spirit has already accomplished comes to fruition and expression. And that is what confirmation both affords and promises. A truly Pentecostal experience leads to and from a wholehearted life. Unction is a manifestation of integrity, wholeness, which is always first and last a gift.

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Today’s texts show us why such wholeheartedness is needed.

The OT reading (Deut. 18.15-20), reminds us that we can lose heart, can be disheartened, so that we live in fear of everything, even—especially⁄!—God. The NT reading (1 Cor. 8.1-13) warns against heartlessness, which comes from being big-headed, “puffed up” by knowledge falsely so called, so that others are made to live in fear of us and in fear of God! The first is entirely natural, the inevitable consequence of the fallenness of existence. The other, however, is wholly unnatural, the effect of our a perverse striving for control.

Standing as one at the foot of Mt Sinai, the people of Israel beg Moses to intervene, to save them from the unbearable Presence: “If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die.” The Lord says the people are right in what they’ve said—not because it’s good for them to be afraid but because it’s good for them to own their vulnerability, to confess their fear. The Corinthians, however, had set themselves in rivalry, exalting themselves above others. Intoxicated by their certainty, they became stupid and swollen with self-importance, insensitive to anything but their own petty resentments, unthinkingly indifferent to the fact that they are grieving Christ by wounding their brothers and sisters, abandoning them to confusion and prayerlessness.

Bad as it is to lose heart or to be heartless, something worse can happen. The Gospel (Mark 1:21-28) tells us our hearts can be defiled and darkened by what we’re made to suffer—often through no fault of our own—, so that we cannot help but live in fear of ourselves, afraid of our own shadow. Nothing is worse than that.

The good news is, Jesus, the Holy One, comes not to destroy us but to destroy what destroys us and in that way to make us whole. He rebukes us, as he rebuked that man in the synagogue in Capernaum, in order to awaken our agency, to spark our righteous anger, showing us that we do not have to let others voices speak to or through us because we have been given a voice of our own.

Paradoxically, the gift of wholeheartedness, granted to us in this sacrament, comes alive in us just as our hearts are broken. The Lord is near to the broken-hearted. The Spirit’s graces are perfected in weakness. This, then, is the hope set before us: to have received the laying on of hands and anointing with oil (and perhaps also the slap!) is to have received all we need to live fully the life Christ died to make possible. And we can be sure that the gifts of the Spirit will spring up in us as we draw near to those who are hurting and anxious. We do not have to be disheartened or heartless. We do not have to be afraid—not of God, not of our neighbors, not of ourselves. We do not have to leave others to their fears. In confirmation, we have received all that’s needed to praise God with our whole heart—and to help others find their voice.