This sermon was preached live on Facebook for Sunday, May 10. The texts for this sermon are: Acts 7:55-60, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14, and Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16.
The verses the kids chose to recite ranged from Gospel parables to Deuteronomic commandments to apostolic advice. Some kids read their passages slowly, others whipped through. One couldn’t help but giggle a bit and give a huge whoop when he was done. Another breathed passion and anger into the voice of the character of the older son.
One kid chose his passage because it was his grandmother’s favorite. Another because it reminded him of his passion for building. This verse urged her to be kind, this one prompted him to stick to his convictions.
One heard in the image of the fortified tower of Proverbs 18, “if we have faith we always know God’s going to be there to help us when we need him most.” Yet another found Aaron and Miriam’s doubt in God to be most “relatable to my position of faith.”
Here in the scripture, was God’s celebration of this teenager’s close relationship with her family in the time of quarantine, and there, God’s response to the exclusion and alienation of this student’s classmates. “Sometimes in situations I don’t know what to do,” said another. “And so sometimes I think about what would God want me to do or what would the church want me to do, that really helps me think about what the right choice would be.”
If our kids learned one thing from confirmation class this year, I’d want it to be this: there is no one right way to be Christian. Our faith is about relationship, not about following specific steps to fulfillment. And, as each of their varied videos and voices kept making clear to me, every relationship is different, one person to the next, and every relationship will grow and change over the course of their lives. No one can tell them what that will look like, and no one should pretend they can.
We only ever see glimpses of one another’s unique relationship with God, but man, are those glimpses precious, empowering, holy.
Tonight is our last confirmation class. Like a lot of things right now, it’s not the ending I would have chosen. But as is the way with life, this ending is a beginning, the start of these kids’ journeys as mature, adult Christians. Today’s passage from the Gospel of John reminds us that even the season of Easter is both a beginning and an end, grief and joy. Philip’s question to Jesus, here on the last night of Jesus’ life, is full of pain. What will they do without Jesus as they have known him- a companion, leader and guide? How will they know the way? Jesus is resurrected on Easter, yes, but we still face saying goodbye again at his ascension. We’re still left behind in this world, stumbling around, trying to find a way forward.
I cannot fault Philip for longing for a clear step by step path to salvation, especially these days when we cannot even rely on our most familiar patterns and routines. I’ve been holding our graduates on my heart these days – not just our confirmation kids graduating out of middle school, but our high school seniors and college seniors, and their parents. In a normal year, this next month and a half are a bittersweet Easter moment of goodbye: celebration and joy in the victory of perseverance and love, grief and uncertainty in the crossing of a highly-anticipated threshold. But this year, the threshold markers are gone, proms and graduations and mortarboard tosses wiped away—just like so many weddings, funerals, events. Job interviews are being cancelled left and right, and this huge question mark has replaced visions of college campuses in the fall. Acute as this sense of uncertainty is for these kids and their parents, it’s permeated all aspects of our lives. Our parishes still don’t fully know what church will look like when we come together, masks on and six feet apart.
So Philip asks, We do not know where you are going, where we are going. How can we know the way?
When Jesus replies, I am the way, the truth and the life, and when he says, no one comes to the father except through me, it can be easy to hear it as an exclusive, prescriptive course of salvation – a there’s-only-one-way kind of attitude. I think that’s because it’s what we’ve come to expect, maybe even crave, from charismatic leaders, life-style movements, TED talk speakers, religion in general. Here’s the step-by-step guide, the one correct solution to life.
But in proclaiming the way is relationship with him, Jesus is offering us something else entirely. He’s refusing to give all the disciples one single map, and instead opens up a whole world - love. Know me, get close to me, Jesus says. There is such beautiful variance in what our particular relationship to God looks like from chapter to chapter of our lives. There are whole libraries of books on books about what relationship to Jesus feels like for one person or another. Where I am going, Jesus says, there are many, many dwelling places. There is one prepared just for you.
As a preacher, I know that I often focus on community – the importance of gathering and being with. But this passage and this time in our community life – it’s been bringing to the forefront the deep significance of our individual spiritual journeys, our personal relationships with Christ and how they change and grow. Every one of you I've been lucky enough to connect with these past few weeks has had a different story to tell. Some families are overwhelmed with too much to do, others are craving more creative activities to fill their kids’ afternoons. I’ve heard from many of you who are savoring a new daily pattern of tuning in for morning prayer, and others who struggle to connect with online worship. Some of us are grateful for extra time with family, others are being driven up the wall, and a whole bunch of us are both. The beauty of our faith is that we are called to turn away from the fantasy of a one-size-fits-all solution to life and faith. If even Jesus won’t tell us, how dare we tell each other?
You already know the way, Jesus says. Our kids already know the way. We already know the way.
Come close to me, says Jesus, and you come close to God.
All throughout this week, little gifts began popping into my inbox: short videos of our confirmation class eighth-graders reflecting on bible passages.
The verses the kids chose to recite ranged from Gospel parables to Deuteronomic commandments to apostolic advice. Some kids read their passages slowly, others whipped through. One couldn’t help but giggle a bit and give a huge whoop when he was done. Another breathed passion and anger into the voice of the character of the older son.
One kid chose his passage because it was his grandmother’s favorite. Another because it reminded him of his passion for building. This verse urged her to be kind, this one prompted him to stick to his convictions.
One heard in the image of the fortified tower of Proverbs 18, “if we have faith we always know God’s going to be there to help us when we need him most.” Yet another found Aaron and Miriam’s doubt in God to be most “relatable to my position of faith.”
Here in the scripture, was God’s celebration of this teenager’s close relationship with her family in the time of quarantine, and there, God’s response to the exclusion and alienation of this student’s classmates. “Sometimes in situations I don’t know what to do,” said another. “And so sometimes I think about what would God want me to do or what would the church want me to do, that really helps me think about what the right choice would be.”
If our kids learned one thing from confirmation class this year, I’d want it to be this: there is no one right way to be Christian. Our faith is about relationship, not about following specific steps to fulfillment. And, as each of their varied videos and voices kept making clear to me, every relationship is different, one person to the next, and every relationship will grow and change over the course of their lives. No one can tell them what that will look like, and no one should pretend they can.
We only ever see glimpses of one another’s unique relationship with God, but man, are those glimpses precious, empowering, holy.
Tonight is our last confirmation class. Like a lot of things right now, it’s not the ending I would have chosen. But as is the way with life, this ending is a beginning, the start of these kids’ journeys as mature, adult Christians. Today’s passage from the Gospel of John reminds us that even the season of Easter is both a beginning and an end, grief and joy. Philip’s question to Jesus, here on the last night of Jesus’ life, is full of pain. What will they do without Jesus as they have known him- a companion, leader and guide? How will they know the way? Jesus is resurrected on Easter, yes, but we still face saying goodbye again at his ascension. We’re still left behind in this world, stumbling around, trying to find a way forward.
I cannot fault Philip for longing for a clear step by step path to salvation, especially these days when we cannot even rely on our most familiar patterns and routines. I’ve been holding our graduates on my heart these days – not just our confirmation kids graduating out of middle school, but our high school seniors and college seniors, and their parents. In a normal year, this next month and a half are a bittersweet Easter moment of goodbye: celebration and joy in the victory of perseverance and love, grief and uncertainty in the crossing of a highly-anticipated threshold. But this year, the threshold markers are gone, proms and graduations and mortarboard tosses wiped away—just like so many weddings, funerals, events. Job interviews are being cancelled left and right, and this huge question mark has replaced visions of college campuses in the fall. Acute as this sense of uncertainty is for these kids and their parents, it’s permeated all aspects of our lives. Our parishes still don’t fully know what church will look like when we come together, masks on and six feet apart.
So Philip asks, We do not know where you are going, where we are going. How can we know the way?
When Jesus replies, I am the way, the truth and the life, and when he says, no one comes to the father except through me, it can be easy to hear it as an exclusive, prescriptive course of salvation – a there’s-only-one-way kind of attitude. I think that’s because it’s what we’ve come to expect, maybe even crave, from charismatic leaders, life-style movements, TED talk speakers, religion in general. Here’s the step-by-step guide, the one correct solution to life.
But in proclaiming the way is relationship with him, Jesus is offering us something else entirely. He’s refusing to give all the disciples one single map, and instead opens up a whole world - love. Know me, get close to me, Jesus says. There is such beautiful variance in what our particular relationship to God looks like from chapter to chapter of our lives. There are whole libraries of books on books about what relationship to Jesus feels like for one person or another. Where I am going, Jesus says, there are many, many dwelling places. There is one prepared just for you.
As a preacher, I know that I often focus on community – the importance of gathering and being with. But this passage and this time in our community life – it’s been bringing to the forefront the deep significance of our individual spiritual journeys, our personal relationships with Christ and how they change and grow. Every one of you I've been lucky enough to connect with these past few weeks has had a different story to tell. Some families are overwhelmed with too much to do, others are craving more creative activities to fill their kids’ afternoons. I’ve heard from many of you who are savoring a new daily pattern of tuning in for morning prayer, and others who struggle to connect with online worship. Some of us are grateful for extra time with family, others are being driven up the wall, and a whole bunch of us are both. The beauty of our faith is that we are called to turn away from the fantasy of a one-size-fits-all solution to life and faith. If even Jesus won’t tell us, how dare we tell each other?
You already know the way, Jesus says. Our kids already know the way. We already know the way.
Come close to me, says Jesus, and you come close to God.
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