Baptism Promises and Foxholes

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Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 13, 2025

During baptism Sunday a kind of hush falls over the congregation as the baptism party approaches the baptismal font for the moment of truth. A solemn promise is about to be made.

Sometime in the spring of 1951 my parents, Leonard and Bernice Sumwalt, stood before the congregation of the Loyd Evangelical United Brethren Church and made a promise that had a profound effect on my life.

Our pastor at that time, the Rev. "Miss Sarah" Mower, said to them, “Do you therefore accept as your bounden duty and privilege to live before this child (that was me) a life that becomes the Gospel, to exercise all godly care that he be brought up in the Christian faith, that he be taught the Holy Scriptures, and that he learn to give reverent attendance upon the private and public worship of God?”

They said, “We do,” and they did. Some of you reading these words are who you are in part because you had parents who made such a promise.

Back in the day, when I was in the full-time baby-dipping business, I would remind every couple who came into my office in preparation for baptism that they would be making a promise to teach their child what it means to follow Jesus. And that included bringing him or her to worship every Sunday until they were old enough to make the promise for themselves. After years of pastoring, I learned to be very specific in these instructions:

“No one will give you a medal for bringing your baby to worship, for getting two or three small children dressed and out the door for church with a little nourishment in their tummies in time to get to the nine o’clock service,” I said. “But it will make an immeasurable difference in their lives.

“There will be Sundays when they will fuss and cry and play around in the pew to the point that you will want to say, ‘What’s the use? I’m not getting anything out of worship.’ But that is the price we all gladly pay to be faithful, to keep our baptism promise, because someone did that for us.

“We do this because there is no better way to show our children what we value ultimately. And because, some day, when they are 19 years old and find themselves in a foxhole during some bloody war, or, God forbid, fall into the hands of the enemy and spend several years as a prisoner of war, the promise you kept may mean the difference between life and death.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author, spent eight years of hard labor in the gulags of Siberia. In a sermon in 1976 at San Diego Stadium, Billy Graham related a story he heard the great writer tell about a time he was so discouraged that he contemplated suicide.

“A man he didn’t know came and sat beside him,” Graham said. “And he said he didn’t say anything. They weren’t allowed to say anything to each other. He said he took a stick, and he drew a picture of the Cross in the sand. And Solzhenitsyn looked at that Cross and then the man took his hand and wiped it out so the prison guards wouldn’t see it. And Solzhenitsyn said, ‘At that moment I knew that that was the most important thing in all the world; and that God loved me. It gave me the courage to go on and face the future.’”

The late Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese prison, told of a similar lifesaving moment in his 1999 family memoir “Faith of My Fathers.”

“On Christmas Day we were always treated to a better-than-usual dinner,” he wrote. “We were also allowed to stand outside our cells for five minutes to exercise or to just look at the trees and the sky. One Christmas, a few months after the gun guard had inexplicably come to my assistance during my long night in the interrogation room, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw him approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me. Again, he didn’t smile or look at me. He just stared at the ground in front of us. After a few moments had passed he rather nonchalantly used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We both stood wordlessly looking at the cross until, after a minute or two; he rubbed it out and walked away.”

Our faithfulness to the promises we make as parents and as a congregation, when our children are baptized, can make a saving difference in their lives even when it seems we have failed.

I have never forgotten a story I read in 1997 in “The Christian Century.”

“A woman received a letter from a soldier she didn’t know,” the story went. “The soldier, named Murray, wrote that he had once been in her Sunday-school class, and she had spoken about Christ as a hero for boys. He even mentioned the date when her witness had altered his life. She had kept a diary all her life, so she turned to the date Murray mentioned. She came home that Sunday discouraged and thought about giving up teaching Sunday school. The entry read, ‘Had an awful time. The boys were so restless. I am not cut out for this kind of thing. I had to take two classes together. No one listened, except at the end, a boy from the other class named Murray seemed to be taking it in. He grew very quiet and subdued, but I expect he was just tired of playing.’”

John Sumwalt is a retired Wisconsin Conference pastor and the author of “How to Preach the Miracles.”