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| Pentecost Window, Cologne Cathedral |
I confessed to the students on our last day
of class… I always dread the start of confirmation class. I’m just completing
my 10th year as a volunteer in the Stuttgart Chapels – and my 6th
year in the last eight teaching Confirmation. I started it because parents spoke
up and said this process was important to their families. In that first class,
there were 8 high school seniors, all baptized as infants, who had missed out
on confirmation back home. Tricia Huebschman, Rick Kuenning, and Chaplain Mike
Klein “encouraged” me to take up this as my volunteer job. And so, I did.
When we couldn’t find literature that fit
our needs, each week I taught lessons I thought teens should have as they prepared
to affirm their baptisms and take responsibility for their faith journeys. A
few years later, we added the “Sticky Faith” lessons and invited families to
enter into the journey with their youth. The next year, the 12 brothers and
sisters of those 8 youth became the students Every year we asked if there was
interest, and except for 2021 when COVID changed all our plans, teens and their
parents responded “yes”. In raw numbers that means that with the seven youth
who participated this year, a total of 56 young people since 2015 have made a
public profession of faith in our chapel services.
And yet, every year, there’s this tiny
piece of me that hopes no one will sign up. This year, I wondered about why
that is. Is it because I’m old enough to be their parents’ parent? I graduated
from high school 45 years ago this week… maybe I’m worried that I don’t have
the most “hip” language to talk to kids about faith… many of my best
illustrations and stories are about movies and are very dated. Or maybe this is
it: I’m afraid they will learn more about Jesus and God and the church and say,
“No, I don’t think all of that is relevant to me at all.”
And then I remember my own confirmation
class, as dry and dusty as a cookie that got pushed to the back of a shelf and
found getting ready to move. There we were, six 6th graders, sitting
in the minister’s office, talking about the 10 Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer,
and the Apostle’s Creed. Let’s just check the box because this is just something
you have to do to get the grown-up bible and be recognized before the whole
church.
Fast forward ten years, and I was a
college graduate who thought she didn’t need church. Yes, I went after
Confirmation because all of my friends did. I even went to church in college
because the Methodist church was across the street from the Clemson House dorm,
where I could eat the fancy brunch on my meal card every Sunday if I brought in
a church bulletin. Turns out the long-term bonus was my biology instructor, Dr.
Dorie Helms, was also my Sunday School teacher and taught me science and
religion are good partners because they are asking different questions about
life.
But on my own, I wanted to sleep in on the
Sundays I wasn’t working. I thought going to church would cramp my style. That
lasted for maybe a year or two until I realized that I missed church. And so, I
church-shopped until I found one filled with people who wanted to love me, who
needed my service, and who recognized in me gifts I could not see for myself.
The rest, as they say, is history…
We celebrate Confirmation on Pentecost
Sunday because it’s a day of new beginnings… of the next steps of the journey
of faith. After confirmation classes are complete, and as high school and
current work assignments are winding down – there are some lessons I want you
all to remember.
1 – God loves you just as you are.
God created you in God’s image and calls you to worship and service and
relationship, despite the mistakes and miscalculations, past and present, we
all make. And because God loves you, God believes that you are a member of
God’s family. Welcome to worship, welcome at the table, welcome to serve as the
hands and feet and voice of Christ in the world. This blessing comes with only one
responsibility… LOVE.
2 – God calls us to love. Several
times this Spring, we have concentrated on the stories where people quizzed
Jesus on the greatest commandment. To each his reply was the same: Love God,
Love others, Love yourself. If we believe the bible is a rulebook at best,
or worse - a Magic-8-ball that will give us a divine word from God if we just
open it to the right page, chapter and verse, we will be disappointed or
disillusioned. It doesn’t take long to realize that the more we read the Bible,
that doesn’t fit with God’s call to put love first.
Instead, we should think of the bible as a book of family history, with grand stories that draw us in and reflect our own stories
within its pages. There, God is always the primary actor. And even though we
don’t always understand the ways God’s story is told, we know it is important
because it continues to teach us more and more about who God is calling us to
be. The same is true when we lead our best faith lives. We don’t serve God to
reserve our place in the Kingdom of God… we serve out of thanksgiving and
gratitude that we are already invited without having to be worthy.
The first step to understanding God’s
story is to remember what Jesus said about love. There were no qualifiers.
Jesus lived out that example by meeting, teaching, eating, and working with
just about anyone – in fact, with the most outcast people of his day. He was absurdly
patient with his disciples and their slow learning comprehension and rightfully
annoyed with people who wanted to limit the scope of God’s love. In the end, he
gave us a remarkable example by feeding and washing the feet of the people he
knew would abandon and betray him and then forgiving the ones who killed him as
he was dying before them.
In life, it's easy to love loveable
people. And it’s impossible to love everyone by our abilities alone. Loving
God, loving others, loving ourselves… we can only do that if we put our trust
and faith in the one who gave us the greatest example. That’s the conversation
that Jesus and Philip were having in our gospel lesson today.
3 – With love as the foundation, we are
called to learn and serve. When we take responsibility for our faith, it doesn’t
free us from anything but brings us into a deeper relationship with Christ and
with one another. Baptized as infants, we were too young to take responsibility
for those promises ourselves. The good news is that we have many chances to
say, “I do.” Today is one of those times.
But that doesn’t let us off the hook…
saying “yes” isn’t a one-and-done. Our faith journeys, and our continued
recommitment to faith for a lifetime, are dependent on our spiritual growth.
That growth happens in churches, as we read and study the bible and faith
ideas, in deep and honest friendships, in the way we think about and treat
others, and in how we serve people and the creation.
Peter Storey, a Methodist Bishop in South
Africa, partnered with Bishop Desmond Tutu to help the Christian church become integral
in the transition from Apartheid to democracy. His words echo the dramatic
nature of the event of the first Pentecost Day, when all people who were
willing to be swept up were united in the power of the Spirit, God’s promised gift
to the church. Storey wrote,
Some tell us that
following Jesus is a simple matter of inviting him into our hearts. But when we
do that, Jesus always asks, “May I bring my friends?” And when we look at them,
we see that they are not the kind of company we like to keep. The friends of
Jesus are the outcasts, the marginalized, the poor, the homeless, the
rejected—the lepers of life. We hesitate and ask, “Jesus, must we really have
them too?” Jesus replies, “Love me, love my friends!”[i]
Peter and the followers of Jesus gathered
in the Upper Room to grieve the loss of their beloved leader. I took a picture
of a stained glass window in the Koln Dom this week and it showed a little
flame over the head of everyone in the picture – men and women alike – everyone
got a portion of the Holy Spirit that day. And before the day was done, they
were driven into the streets, speaking in the languages of the world,
proclaiming the good news of God’s love.
On that day, what was private became
public, and that is what we celebrate today. These young people are committing
to continue to grow in faith and, to the best of their abilities, to be the
church. We affirm their promise by recommitting ourselves to our journeys, too.
As we all contemplate the mysterious gift of Christ’s presence with us as we go
into the world, please remember this quote from Fr Richard Rohr, author of The Universal Christ:[ii]
The “Christ
Mystery” is much bigger than Christianity as an organized religion. If we don’t
understand this, Christians will have little ability to make friends with,
build bridges to, understand, or respect other religions or the planet. Jesus
did not come to create a country club or a tribe of people who could say,
“We’re in and you’re out. We’ve got the truth and you don’t.” Jesus came to
reveal something that was true everywhere, for everyone, and all the time.[iii]
May we live this truth with love out into
our world.
Peace, Deb
[i] Peter
Storey, Listening at Golgotha: Jesus’ Words from the Cross
[ii] Richard
Rohr, Bigger Than Christianity, Center for Action and Contemplation, October
2016, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/bigger-than-christianity-2016-10-31/
See also Richard Rohr On the Mystery of Christ, Seeing
God First: exploring freedom in Christ, February 2011, https://maes-seekgodfirst.blogspot.com/2011/02/richard-rohr-on-mystery-of-christ.html
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