Baptismal meditation

Matthew 18:15: If your brother sins, go and reprove him in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.

We often attack egalitarianism around here, and rightly so. God created a complex world, and things are not simply interchangeable with other things. Women are not the same as men, children are not the same as parents; there is always a disparity in the power of rulers and ruled. Efforts to erase those distinctions are attacks on the way God created the world.

Yet, the Christian faith also has a powerful egalitarian thrust to it, and it’s no accident that egalitarian movements arise in Christianized and post-Christianized cultures. Islam doesn’t afford any opportunity for feminism; Islamic feminists borrow from Judaism and Christianity or the post-Christianity of the secular West.

This egalitarian thrust begins with the Trinity. We think of the relationship of Father-Son as a hierarchical relationship, and it is true that there is an irreversible order even in the Trinity. The Father sends the Son, not the Son the Father; the Son does the Father’s will, not the Father the Son’s. But that order is not really a hierarchy, because in the Trinity Father and Son are equal in glory, dignity, power, and share fully in all the divine attributes. One is not prior to the other in any way, for the Father cannot be Father unless He has always had His Son. The Father begets the Son, not the Son the Father; and yet, the existence of the Son is what makes the Father the Father.

This all seems fairly abstract, but it has enormous practical impact on the way you raise your kids. For many, including many Christians, parenting involves maintaining the parent-child hierarchy. Parenting means establishing authority, and maintaining that authority over children after they have grown and moved out. This form of patriarchalism is anti-Trinitarian, because it implies that sons are never equal to fathers.

A Trinitarian form of parenting is very different. There is order, and there is hierarchy. But the goal of your parenting is not to keep your child down, to keep him subordinate, to make sure that he remains dependent. Over time, fathers and sons become more equal; fathers never become sons, nor sons fathers. Fathers exist to raise sons to become brothers.

This is where our sermon text comes into play. By baptism, your son Peter becomes a brother, a fellow-Christian, marked by the name of the Triune God. Right now, and for the next couple of decades, he’s a junior brother, called to obey you. Even when he is grown, he is responsible to honor you.

As he grows, though, the relationship equalizes. He still must honor you, but increasingly you’ll find that you pay honor to him – as you recognize his distinct gifts, calling, abilities, achievements, as you recognize that he is superior to you in many ways and has qualities and abilities that you didn’t give him. Sons should always say, “Dad’s great”; but fathers should return the honor.

This is what baptism means for your parenting: Peter is a brother as well as a son, and you should raise him up to become more and more what he is – more and more a brother, to Jesus and to yourself.