To those of you who will be in the Sydney area on October 15, we are pleased hereby to extend an invitation to attend the baptism of our son Garrett Lazar.

For those who are not able to be with us, we invite you to join your prayers to ours as we celebrate the sacrament of Garrett's initiation into the heavenly kingdom of Christ our God.

Garrett will be baptized by our family priest, Father Joachim Ross.  The Orthodox Church has both married priests and monastic (celibate) priests.  Fr. Joachim is a monk.  He lives at St. John the Baptist Skete, on monastery grounds which are on the outskirts of the Sydney metropolitan area.  We travel about an hour each way by train and taxi to attend church there every Sunday, because, out of the 53 Orthodox churches in the Sydney area, it is the only one that has its regular Sunday morning liturgy in English every week.  (Although I understand there may now be one other one as well.)  At all of the other Orthodox churches the liturgy is in Greek, Slavonic or Arabic.

Garrett will be baptized at St. Lazar Serbian Orthodox Church in Alexandria, just south of downtown Sydney.  This is not our regular church, but we thought it would be appropriate to have him baptized there in honor of his patron saint, Prince Lazar of Serbia (1329-1389).  Our plan is to attend our regular church in the morning with Fr. Joachim and then proceed to St. Lazar's church after lunch, where Fr. Joachim will perform the baptism.

Father Deacon James and Marie Carles will be Garrett's "sponsors," or godparents.  Throughout the baptism they will hold Garrett and at the appropriate time will hand him to the priest for his three-fold immersion in water, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  They will also say the confession of faith, the renunciation of Satan, and recite the Nicene Creed, on Garrett's behalf.

Fr. James & Marie are Australians who became Orthodox Christians as adults.  They now have five children ranging in age from one to nine years old.  Fr. James serves (in Slavonic) as a deacon at one of the Orthodox parishes in Sydney (though not the same one we attend).

We had the joy of meeting the Carles family shortly after we arrived in Sydney in April this year.  I contacted Fr. James by e-mail, inquiring about times of services at Orthodox churches in Sydney, and he wrote back quickly with helpful information.  We met him and his family at church the first Sunday we were here, and they invited us to dinner at their home later that same week.  They also invited several other Orthodox friends to dinner so we could meet them as well.

Mark's parents, Virgil & Lois Swearingen, will be flying to Sydney from California for Garrett's baptism.  Garrett is their first grandchild, though they have another on the way, since Mark's brother Varrin and his wife Edi became pregnant a few months after we did!

Varrin & Edi Swearingen (left) and Lois & Virgil Swearingen (right)
on Amy & Mark's wedding day, Sunday, November 14, 1999
(Saratoga, California)

This will be the first time for Mark's parents to meet Garrett and the first time for Mark to see them since moving away from California last November.

We welcome them to Sydney!

Infant baptism has been the normal practice of Christians throughout the entirety of the Christian era, from the early church up to the present time.

Although infant baptism is not mentioned explicitly in Scripture, there are hints of it in several passages that record the baptism of a whole "household," which may have included children and infants:

Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.  And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The promise is for you and your children..."  (Acts 2:38-39)

"Baptize first the children, and if they can speak for themselves let them do so.  Otherwise, let their parents or other relatives speak for them."  (Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21:15, c. 215 A.D.)

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two primary founders of the Protestant Reformation, both believed in infant baptism:

Of the baptism of children we hold that children ought to be baptized.  For they belong to the promised redemption made through Christ, and the Church should administer it to them.  (Martin Luther, The Smalcald Articles, Article V: Of Baptism, 1537)

"If, by baptism, Christ intends to attest the ablution by which he cleanses his Church, it would seem not equitable to deny this attestation to infants, who are justly deemed part of the Church, seeing they are called heirs of the heavenly kingdom."  (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559)

When Garrett is baptized, he will be immersed in water three times, in the name of the Holy Trinity.  Orthodox Christians understand baptism to be a sacrament or a mystery -- a visible means by which the grace of God is communicated to us.

In [Christ] you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.  (Colossians 2:11-12)

The Orthodox Church practices not only infant baptism but also infant communion.  The three sacraments of initiation -- baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist -- are all administered to babies, and children continue to receive communion regularly throughout infancy and childhood.

(For more on infant baptism see my article on The Orthodox Practice of Infant Baptism, from which the above comments have been summarized.)