The Reformed Church of Locust Valley Easter V May 13, 2001 II Timothy 1:1-10
“Catching Faith”
There are certain things you will hear people in the church say over and over –. some are true and some are not. One of the things people say is that the children are the future of the church. I like it when people say that. I like it because churches should be full of children. They are great to have around. Children are a challenge. You have a reasonable expectation that adults will sit still through a service and maintain a certain decorum. Although everyone knows that often in the church, adults who are angry about something will not act with the best decorum, and that sometimes adults in the church sometimes sit and chat when they should be quiet, and sometimes they even gossip in the pews! And sometimes even during the service!
But children have to be taught how to worship. Now, if you started going to church as a child, you will remember being respectful of your parents, and their rather stern corrections when you misbehaved, and being a little fearful about acting the wrong way. Well, guess what. You did not start out as a prepackaged adult doing all the right things. You had to be taught. And you squirmed a bit sometimes too. The difference is that you remember your perspective as a child – you remember YOUR emotions, your fear of disapproval. Now you see it from your perspective as an adult.
Children must be taught how to worship. “Open the hymnbook, dear.” “This is how to find the book of Psalms.” “Close your eyes and fold your hands when you pray.” “Shhh, we must be quiet now.”
That can be a challenge with an active child. But there is no way around it, and it is a sacred pleasure to teach our children how to worship.
Children are a challenge, though, not just because they must be taught. Because the Christian faith is not so much taught, as caught.
When the nose runs, and we sneeze and the coughing starts, we say, “I caught a cold.” Now, you didn’t set out to catch a cold – it’s more like the cold caught you than you caught the cold.
Something like that happens with our faith. Someone told you about Jesus. Who was it? Did you meet Jesus Christ when you were an adult? Some people can identify their first moment of faith. Others of us cannot, because from the first weeks of our lives, moms and dads brought us to church.
The story is told of a crowded airport where a man was passing out tracts. An elderly black man was walking toward him and the man with the tracts accosted him. “Sir, can I speak with you?” “Yes,” said the elderly man. “I am going to ask you the most important question of your life.”
Have you been saved?” “Well, I think so,” replied the old man. “That’s not good enough,” said the man in a strong voice waving his tracts in the air. “Can you remember WHEN, you were saved?” continued the man with the tracts. “Not exactly,” replied the old man. “Aha, so you aren’t sure?” said the man with the tracts. “I can’t say exactly when I was saved,” said the old man, “but it was about two thousand years ago.”
Two thousand years ago Jesus died for you. Someone told you about that, and you caught his or her faith.
This is how Timothy in the Bible caught his faith. Paul writes, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you.”
That is what we are telling the children in the Locust Valley Reformed Church. And so you see, I contend that THEY are not the future of this church. You are. Because they are catching their faith from you.
How do you come in here Sundays? Excited, anticipating God’s presence, joy-filled? If so, the kinds here will see and hear you and learn, “Oh, this is how someone acts who is coming to worship God.” Do we struggle to meet our budget, giving halfheartedly, or do we plop nice fat gifts in the offering plate that represent the first and best God has given us, giving with cheerfulness, so the children see and hear, “Oh, this is how someone acts in stewardship.” Do we have posters of goats, and maps of foreign countries, and brochures about the Homeless Shelter and soup kitchen, and about writing to senators on behalf of the poor through Bread for the World so our children learn, “Oh, I guess I am my brother’s keeper.” Do they ever see adults in the church eager to get inside their Bibles so they learn that Sunday School classes are not just for little kids, but that Bible study is for the big kids too, the ones who are 36, 56 and 86, so they say, “Oh, I’ll keep on reading the Bible when I’m a grown-up, just like the big people in my church do.” Are they smiled at and loved by the adults in the church so that they know they are part of this covenant community, not just in the dusty doctrine books on the bookshelves, but in the hearts and in the arms of the adult members of the church, so that they say, “I am part of God’s kingdom. I belong here.” Do we allocate whatever is necessary, whatever is necessary in our church budget for Christian education and youth work, saying that nurturing our children in Jesus is important to us, so our children will know, “Oh, we are all responsible for each other here from the least to the greatest. And we children, though we can’t be on committees, or give fifty dollars a week to the church matter too.”
Our children have everything. Game boys, computers, expensive sneakers, television sets, VCR’s, soccer balls. We give them these things. We give them all they need and almost everything they want. We want them to go to good schools, good universities, and get out and get good jobs. Do we care as much about their souls?
Is the Reformed Church as important as Roosevelt Field? Is the Bible as important as baseball? Is Sunday morning as important as Saturday afternoon? It should be MORE important!
We want our kids to do well. We want them to get a degree. Why? So they make money and buy things? So they can make a big heap and build a fence around it and clutch it all till the day they die?
Why? If we lead them to all these things, what have we given them?
In the movie, “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” the school music teacher, Mr. Holland, is called in to the principal’s office and told that after teaching at John F. Kennedy High School for thirty years, the school board is cutting out the music department to make ends meet. Mr. Holland angrily protests – he furiously catalogues how important the arts are. Then the principal says, “Look, if comes down to a choice between funding reading, writing and long division as opposed to music, you know which one I’m going to choose.” Mr. Holland looks the principal in the eye and says, “What are they going to have to read and write about?” The question the church needs to ask is, “What are we giving our kids?” “Is our goal for them to be successful in the eyes of the world?” “With nice salaries, gleaming cars and a good address?” If so, then what life have we sown them having all those things? Because Jesus said, “A man’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of his possessions. In this country we have five percent of the world’s population and we use 47 percent of the world’s resources. What do we have to show for it? A country full of happy people? Not hardly! We have bookshelves crammed with self-help books, trying to find joy. But we’ve sold out joy for a mess of potage.
I heard a one of America’s greatest preachers say this week, the American people used to be referred to as citizens. Now we’re consumers.” We’ve even made God in our image. He is a great dispenser of things. Like the little boy whose parents told him it was time for him to go upstairs for bed now. He said, “Okay. By the way, I’m going to say my prayers before bed. Do you want anything?”
I want to know something. I want to know why seminary enrollments are down. I want to know why fewer and fewer people are going into the ministry. Many if not most of the new students in seminaries are older people – retired after careers of thirty years, now looking for more and getting a theological education and giving the last of their working years of the church. But what about twenty-five year olds? I have always harped from the pulpit about the importance of people of faith going into secular occupations to bring their faith to bear where they work and live. But now I must start asking, “Why don’t our kids go to seminary?” Do we want them to? Do we want them to give up the big bucks and give up prestige? What would you say to your daughter if she came home and said, “Mom and dad, I’ve decided I want to go to seminary and be a minister and help people in the South Bronx or South Philadelphia. Would your face light up and would you exhale, “Thank you, Jesus,” or would you say, “We had hoped for more from you, dear?”
I hope and dream that someone from this church, someone with a good education in our schools will someday soon stand before us and say, “I want to be a minister or missionary, will you help me.”
Children catch their faith from us. Our report card is the children of the church. Are they catching faith from us, or are they catching worldliness?
It’s time to throw some wood on the fire. Paul writes to Timothy, “Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control.”
Last May, the week before Mother’s Day, there was an article in the NY Times about a young woman graduating from Harvard University. She was Brooke Ellison and her honors thesis was, “The Element of Hope in Resilient Adolescents.” Brooke had been struck by a car on the first day in the seventh grade, and was given little chance of survival. After a day and a half in a coma, she awoke to find she was a quadriplegic.
She began her long journey with no sensation below her neck, passing every grade and ending up with an A- average at Harvard. 21 years old, Brooke drives her electric wheelchair around campus using a keypad built into a retainer on the roof of her mouth. Her peers asked her to address the graduating class. “This is just the way my life is,” she said, between the quiet clicks of the ventilator that forces air through her trachea 13 times a minute. The hero in the story, she suggests, is her mother, Jean Marie, 48 years old. She has attended every class with her daughter since the eighth grade. The family reluctantly decided that mom and daughter would go together to Harvard, to live in the dorm, leaving husband and son on their own for a while in Stony Brook. Her mother helped by setting up a voice activated computer, did the research on the internet for papers, and turned pages of text books for her daughter during study times. Her mom was with her everyday, and when Brooke graduated, her mother was given a mock degree in virtual studies. Mom says, “She’s the brain, I’m the brawn.”
Her mother was with her everyday.
We are with the children everyday of their lives. When they sally forth from Locust Valley, Roslyn, Bayville, Brookville, Glen Cove, they will go carrying the values we instilled in them these short years we have them. Will we be like Anheuser Busch and say, “Grab all the gusto you can?” or will we say, “give yourself to Jesus Christ.” “Those who lose their lives find them.” Take up your cross and follow.” Which are we doing? Let’s give them eternity. Let’s give them justice and righteousness. Let’s give them God – modeling faith for them.
Fred D. Mueller
