Moroni 8

Here’s a letter Dad wrote me on paper right after I decided to start preaching. I want to preserve it here on metal:

Dear Son,

I’m smiling widely at the thought of you as a preacher. Good call, Lord.

I always pray for you, son, that he will be as good to you as he’s been to me. Stay true and you’ll learn that his goodness is really infinite.

But I am frowning on the inside about one thing. There seems to be some debate about baptizing small kids. I’m writing this letter mostly to enter the fray.

I got your letter about this, prayed, and got this from God:

“Listen, this is Jesus talking. Your Lord. Your Savior. (I just wanted to emphasize my authority as a preamble.) I didn’t come to beckon good people. I came to beckon bad people to get better. Who would be exempt from the latter, I leave you to judge. I came the way a doctor comes to sick people, not well people—but then again, you’re all either sick, about to get sick, or recently recovered. So, I’m just saying. Let’s not overcategorize for the sake of my point.

“Little children are like both good people and well people. They don’t need saviors or doctors in God’s eyes. They’re too young to call ‘sinners.’ Don’t believe that yap about people being born guilty. It’s total crap, pardon my bluntness.”

Okay, that was a direct quote, with maybe a little embroidery by me, Mormon. After Jesus talked to me, God’s spirit congealed in my brain with the thought that small-kid-baptism mocks God.

Because repentance and baptism are for people old enough to sin and accomplished enough to have proved it. And Jesus’ ideal was … small kids. Remember? We should come to him as little children and no one gets into heaven who isn’t like that. So if they’re the model, why would they need to repent?

Small kids have the spirit of Christ in them from the onset. If not, then all those kids who died in childbirth would be cursed to the smoky, un-put-outable firepit. I don’t think so.

Anyone who thinks little children need some adult ritual to make them prettier to God has poison running through their veins. All that stuff about faith, hope, and love—well, anyone who thinks small kids need baptism is missing exactly three-thirds of the requirements for themselves.

Okay, maybe I’m getting too hot under the collar about this. And, compared to some of the cruddy behind-the-scenes evil we’ve perpetrated for years, it’s a speck in our eyes. But it really offends me to hear talk about how God saves one child because he she’s baptized and destroys another because he she’s not. That twisted notion should go to hell. Not innocent kids.

I speak boldly, maybe a little naughtily, some might say. But I have God-cred, if there’s such a thing, and I don’t care about punditry. In life it’s love versus fear and love always wins.

I’ve got love to spare and some of it comes from loving children equally, not with religious litmus tests. They’re all equal and all go to heaven. God loves equally too. And that, as they say, is forever. His heart is saturated with impartial love.

We talk a lot about wickedness in the church. But judgmentalism is some of the worst wickedness. I don’t speak of discretion as such, but the gall of assumptions about God’s relative affections toward people you do or don’t like.

Children have, by right, an exemption from judgment. That comes with the Great Reconciliation.

If you think differently—and I guess that here I myself sound judgmental—you’re on the freeway to the underpass of hell. My words are like sirens in the high-speed chase to apprehend you.

Now, let me extrapolate: children can’t sin and so can’t be damned. Because, indeed, anyone outside of the bounds of law can’t sin or be damned. I won’t enumerate the ways in which someone could escape law and some of them we won’t understand for a thousand years or more, I suspect. But what’s your hurry? God’s not in one.

Baptism comes after turning toward God’s laws after breaking them. If you can’t break them because you’re not in their jurisdiction, you have no reason to get baptized.

Before leaving this topic, let me give you a checklist:

—Repentance

—Faith

—Commitment

—Baptism

—Sin-penalty refund

—Loss of stuck-upness

—God’s spirit pays lifelong visit

—Hope

—Extreme Love

—Zeal

—Heaven

Try to keep them in that order. It works best that way.

I’ll write again if I don’t go back to the battlefield. Whether I do or don’t please pray for our nation, which is about to implode. I worry God has left the battlefield and is drawing up plans for the postwar period, which will be an ugly one. We can’t assault God and expect him to defend us. We can’t scorn his spirit and pray for victory.

I don’t fear pundits. But I fear what I see every day. To trample truths is to stomp on the accelerator to hell.

I’m not saying anything new, though I hope you’ll quote me alongside the oratorical greats, despite my occasional lapses.

Goodbye for now. Or …?

I usually sign with “Love” or “Sincerely.” Today, because I got so preachy, I’ll sign with “Amen.”

Amen.