As a father of two children, I am responsible for making sure my children are fed. My children were Baptized and are now God’s children. Why does my LCMS church deny my children the Body and Blood of Jesus every other Sunday (we don’t have Communion every week)? Why do my children have to wait until some arbitrary day when they are older to be fed by God?
Rev. Palke addresses this issue when he states:
“I had always wondered why we baptized infants, bringing them to spiritual life in God's Kingdom, but withheld spiritual food from them until they reached some mythical “age of accountability.” It's a lot like watching the birth of a baby with the intention of withholding food from the child until it is able to distinguish between peas and carrots. It had occurred to me that children had participated fully in the life of the Old Covenant, including circumcision and partaking of the Passover meal. And from a liturgical point of view, I knew that the early Church baptized, chrismated, and communed the catechumens in a discernible, inter-connected sequence of sacramental actions.
If John 3:5 indicates the necessity of the new birth by water and the Spirit (baptism and chrismation), then John 6:53 (“unless a man eat my flesh and drink my blood he has no live abiding in him”) is equally clear in asserting the necessity of the Eucharist. And if children belong to the Kingdom, should they be denied the banquet table of the Kingdom? I'm not ignoring Paul's exhortation to examine oneself, which the Orthodox fulfill in sacramental confession. But shall we withhold the Sacrament from those who are not capable of self-examination, such as the retarded or the senile?
I finally came to the realization that we had been turning faith into a rational act of the mind rather than trust. And I then realized that if we were consistent in our interpretation of Scripture, we would end up denying infant baptism for the same reasons that we deny infant communion. There is only one class of Christian in the Church--those who are baptized (the Easter experience), sealed with the Holy Spirit (Pentecost experience), and partake of the Sacrament of the Kingdom. As a Lutheran pastor, I had to keep track of “baptized members” and “communicant members.” Orthodoxy makes no such distinction, recognizing the need of the “medicine of immortality” for all its members."
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