For many in mainline churches, the experience of confirmation is a rite of passage.  It is a time when the church leads the young person through a systematic study of the faith:  Old and New Testaments, the Trinity, history of the church, the Confessions, significant themes of faith, the practice of faith, stewardship, and so on.  Some church traditions have a lengthy period of time dedicated to Confirmation; others practice Confirmation-lite. 

My home church set time aside on Sunday evenings for a few months when the students would come together with the pastor.  That pastor was my father.  I went through confirmation with my father teaching the lessons.  Not once, but twice.  I’m not sure why my father wanted me to come to the confirmation class he was leading the year before my peers went through the class, but he did.  So I attended the year before I was to be confirmed and then again the year I was confirmed. 

It actually was a good thing since the second time through helped me to remember so many of the lessons.  Amusingly, as I sat through it the second time and my father would ask a question I would remember that he’d asked it the year before, but I couldn’t remember the answer.  I guess it wasn’t amusing to me at the time, but now I think of how often I tell my boys things and they forget.  Come to think of it, it’s not amusing.  Forget that I said that.

One of the things that really stuck with me through the years is the lesson on SIN.  Having one’s father stand in front of all your peers and talk about sin is an interesting experience.  I remember he wrote on the chalkboard in BIG capital letters:  SIN.  He turned around and looked at the now quiet class of pubescent adolescents with wide eyes and asked “What is at the center of sin?” 

Total silence.  The kind of silence that is the result of being caught; from feeling guilty. 

Have you ever been on a tour of a cave when the guide flips a switch and all the lights go off?  It’s absolute darkness.  The confirmation class was the audible equivalent of absolute darkness.  I imagine my peers were thinking what I was thinking, although maybe it was just me since it was my father who asked the question.  It was a memorably uncomfortable moment for me, but that’s not the point. 

After my father solicited a few responses like lying, killing, and a few others I don’t recall, he asked again “What is at the center of SIN?” and then he turned to the blackboard and drew a circle around the center letter and then looked at us again and said with an actor’s flair “I.  I am at the center of SIN.” 

Now there was silence, but it was a silence that arose from confusion.  The synapses were firing, but the connections weren’t yet established.  My father went on to explain that sin arises from putting ourselves in God’s place, self-idolatry.  All sin is the result of trying to be, desiring to be, believing one is God.  Eat of this fruit and you will be like God. 

It has been a lesson I have remembered so many, many times.  It’s a lesson I’ve reused too. 

I’ve wondered if I would have remembered that if I’d only attended confirmation once instead of twice.  I probably would have eventually remembered it anyway since the lesson is reinforced on a daily basis.  It’s a lesson that has helped me make sense of so much in my life and the world as I experience brokenness and hurt and pain and suffering and emotions that I don’t think we were created to feel, but do feel because of the sin that rises from our own hearts. 

I’m thankful for that lesson, but I’m thankful that my father didn’t leave it there, didn’t leave us there in our sin, sitting in the stench of our self-idolatry.  Sin needs to be addressed, but it is never and should never be the last word.  Instead, the last word is Grace.  We are forgiven.  We receive mercy.  We are loved.  We are redeemed.  We are reconciled. 

Those confirmation lessons weren’t comprehensive or absolute, but they were like a detective kit that has served me through the years, helping me to see the clues God leaves, helping me to make sense of the experiences and also to understand scripture. 

We each were given a Bible verse that we were to commit to memory.  Mine was 2 Corinthians 5: 21:  For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 

© Stephen Carl