WILL OUR CHILDREN HAVE FAITH?
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Will our Children have faith? You know that the trends say, no. But this sermon says, yes. Why? Because this sermon claims that there are teachers in this congregation who want to be the door-openers for our children-and even for the children of others who do not feel they can teach. This sermon is a call for those teachers to get ready for September. Teaching is one of the biggest jobs in the church because we teach with ourselves and our own faith- not primarily a matter of facts. So in this sermon I am going to speak first about what this faith is-in terms of prayer and the Holy Spirit within us-and the whole Gospel. For this we need a whole church, and there is nowhere where the church should be more whole than in its worship. The whole life of the church teaches, but its worship especially teaches what it is to know God.
But this sermon will also look at the challenges to our children having faith, and that is partly the challenge of organizing our education programs so that they carry the steadiness and reliability and personal welcome of God. I know some of the pressures families are under-partly self-chosen pressures of many activities. But if we base our programs on convenience, they will fail. Our programs need to be prayer-soaked and administratively self-aware. It is not just about the inner resources-the content of faith, but it is also about building a trustworthy vehicle that will match the dedication of our teachers and give full scope to our creativity as a whole people of God. I will speak specifically about the confirmation retreat I just led at Holmes yesterday and Friday to illustrate some of my points about how we teach by our selves, and I will draw guidance from both Jeremiah’s call and the Book of Hebrews. So, the sermon’s three parts: the personal content of what we teach, the whole church as teacher, and how we make this a reality for our children.
The most important part of teaching in any Sunday School class-adults or children-- is the prayer that begins and the blessing that ends the class. That prayer says, we are entering a time for sharing faith-and if it is Christian faith, it always also love and hope. Faith is that dialogue with God that is what we teach the kids to enter. Faith is trust in God-the steady source of life and truth Who gives us meaning and purpose, who holds us steady through death and suffering, who gives us the immense resources of the Bible and the traditions of the church.
The greatness of our Protestant faith is that we both have the tradition and the ability to question: we know that God is infinitely wiser and subtly powerful and that we must obey God, as Peter says, rather than people-so we are humble and obedient and to watch out for idols. But at the same time, our great teacher, Jesus, called us (in the Gospel of John especially) not only to be followers but to be his friends and to have the Spirit in us: Each of you is a Temple of the Holy Spirit (as Paul echoes): each of you has enormous gifts to use in your vocations, each of you is called to create and repair and maintain things of usefulness and beauty that are not idols, each of you is to be an earth-steward, each of you trusts the living light of conscience inside-and that is also the judging side of life; each of you has boundaries; each of you knows-as even children say-when something feels yucky, it generally is yucky. So our faith includes the way we look at the world and the way we operate within it.
Our faith changes and grows and we need to feed it-we need personal devotional life and corporate worship. We need the Bible Study and study of things like the Tapestries we will hear about this Friday night. We need the mission experiences of Midnight Run and Sing Sing prison and IFCA and Open Door and Food Pantry and environmental care and Nicaragua and Kenya. We need the whole gospel and we need to be a whole church and so we need those who are eating the solid food of the Gospel as well as those just nursing. And we need to be a church that is not a closed system, but a place where new people and new ideas are welcomed and no one dominates. We also need to be a church that welcomes other groups to use its space, but is not a doormat to be taken for granted. We need to be present to welcome every group. We are to be one of God’s doorways, and everything we do must be a witness-because we represent that consciousness that God is glorified in every good thing, and God is scorned in every unjust thing.
I want to illustrate the personal content of faith and the role of prayer in teaching with something that just happened on the confirmation retreat. Our goal was to get the 40 or so kids to think about the faith they were confirming-the meaning of their baptisms for themselves. This means looking both at the content of the faith, and the challenges of their lives as junior and high school students. I prayed about the program. I knew I could teach the content and we worked with pieces of the popular culture as well as the scripture. We looked at Jesus’ temptations to misuse his call and his power-we looked at temptations as the tests of faith.
I had the oldest minister present, a defiant Dutchman who had run away from God several times-like Jeremiah tried to say I am just a youth--- anyone of us who knows God also knows the impulse to cut and run and deny who we are an who God is-this Dutchman had actually quit the ministry at one point, he had two of his six children killed by drunken driving-he has found it hard to reach out from under the dark cloud. And yet he told those kids that God had kept him alive and given him joy. At 70 years old, limping with a cane, a stroke and cancer survivor--- this guy connected with the kids. And he quoted the Jeremiah text for himself (that I had chosen weeks ago for this sermon) to capture that sense of unshakable destiny-of predestination-that is part of our purpose. Was it coincidence- or "God-incidence?" (a quote relayed by Tom Tewell). Prayer makes you more aware of those connections-synchronicity is another name for Providence.
The real fulfillment of prayer came in the way three women chaperones became leaders in the program. I had wanted a video clip that looked at the experience of bullying and hierarchy in the schools that would grab kids, a piece that our presbytery consultant had used in a previous confirmation retreat. But we couldn’t find it. I was praying we’d find some other way to do it and that first night three of chaperones told of their reflecting on their high school time and they agreed to share with the kids: One woman spoke of how she had tried to befriend a girl who was always picked on in school-a girl who seemed to have no friends-and that 20 years later this girl, now a grown woman, had told her how much her graciousness had helped keep her from dropping out or worse. Then the next woman told about how she had been a picked-on kid in school, shy, very sensitive, a very easy target. You could tell the room was absolutely silent. Who has not been afraid-and afraid to talk about it?
And then the third woman told a story about her reunion connections on classmates.com. Most of her friends now have families, long marriages, some children and blended families. But one woman-a successful IBM manager-- wrote of the only caring and steady male in her life: her dog. This was the one girl whose desperate search to be popular had led her to spend a night in a boys room during their senior trip in high school-an experience we would now call abuse-which has helped keep her from ever entering a mature relationship. We need teachers like those three women, and like that crazy Dutchman. Remember: those women did not prepare or plan to be teachers, but when they reflected upon their experience they did want to share, and so they become teachers.
But our whole church also needs to be a teacher. Tonight’s discussion will look at how whatever we do must have continuity and build relationships and not be slapdash. Kids can tell whether we are committed to teaching faith or not. And our teachers must themselves be nourished, in worship and in small groups and seminars with good training. This is Sunday School, but its not Mickey Mouse.
The final question about how we make this a reality for our children? It has to be a reality for your families. The book of Hebrews speaks of faith development like general development: from nursing to solid food-even the dangerous red meat of theology! Certainly at least the Bread and Wine of communion. There is a kind of everyday heroism to Christian faith: to being married and keeping communication open, to nurturing children with structure and love, not indulgence and disorder-even when there is illness, unemployment, divorce and re-marriage. There is the everyday heroism of compromises and sharing and helping the other spouse grow to maturity. How much do couples pray together? How many of you can describe the faith journey of your closest friends? What values do we really share and try to teach? I believe there are enough people in this church who can run a program and it is our job to support them wholly. Amen.
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