Quick Summary:

Sermon delivered on the occasion of the Rite of Confirmation.

When the disciple community experienced the outpouring of God's Spirit in wind and tongue and flame, they began probing immediately for the meaning behind it all. Their question: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Fast forward 20 centuries and WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? continues to be a question Lutheran Christians ask not only because of Brother Martin poses and answers it over and over again in his Small Catechism, but because faith that lives and becomes doesn’t simply repeat the answers of previous generations, it engages in a conversation of its own at the intersection between God’s Word and human experience.

That’s what we—what you—have been about these last two years:
• Entering into a conversation with the faith you have received from parents, grandparents, congregation and tradition;
• moving toward a place of deeper understanding and curiosity in matters of faith,
• beginning the process of finding your own voice in it all, and today,
• publicly affirming your trust in the One who called and claimed you in baptism and promises to voyage with you throughout this life and into the next.

Affirming your faith today doesn’t mean that all the questions are answered and all the issues are settled. Some of the best questions are still ahead of you, waiting to be discovered, probed, lived. So in that sense your Confirmation is much more a beginning than it is an ending. Yet, you are on your way. You have a compass, and a fundamental benchmark from which all your ventures can be plotted.