The Children's Sermon Without Children
The clip above from an LCMS Divine Service is a demonstration of the impetus to liturgical conservatism. Once a particular liturgical tradition has been established, we Lutherans are reticent to change - even when times and situations have changed.
And this goes even for “untraditional traditions” like sermones infantium. For even here, where there are no children, the children’s sermon is retained in the liturgy.
Why there are no children is not made clear. It is possible that the congregation has no children, that it is overrepresented by an older demographic. It may be that, being summer, attendance was in the doldrums, and on this particular Sunday, there were no children in the Divine Service. Or it may be that there were children in church that day, but they and/or their parents did not want to participate in this rite.
The dearth of children is certainly a plague in the LCMS in general, to the church, to our country and civilization, and to the world. It is especially tragic that Christians drank the generational, secular Kool-Aid that children are to be avoided, rather than embrace the biblical truth that they are a blessing. It is also a paradox that where we do find more young families with more children are generally in more traditional churches that have no children’s sermon. What we are seeing may be the decline and fall of the liturgical rite known as the children’s sermon in a relatively short period of time, even as churches that maintain this rite are increasingly childless.
But in this particular instance we see the preacher and the congregation find a way to evolve the children’s sermon into a rite that takes into account its particular demographic: by substituting the elderly for children, maintaining the rubrics of calling them forth, sitting them down, and the preacher’s rubrics of speaking to them in a childlike manner, making use of exaggerated speech inflections, the rite of the object lesson, the distribution of stickers, the closing prayer, and the dismissal.
We are hardwired for liturgy and conservatism, even in contexts where one might be surprised to find it.
