A sermon for the high school graduates of 2013

Text: Galatians 4:1-7

This is a message for graduates… and also for the rest of us who really haven’t ever grown up.

There’s nothing quite like starting out a service celebrating the high school graduates of 2013 with scripture telling us that minors are no better than slaves. Yay! Congrats! You are no longer slaves! Not exactly graduation speech material. Now, I know none of our youth can relate to the feeling of being trapped under the repressive regime of parentage. Our young people are never rebellious against authority; they wouldn’t dream of doing anything they wouldn’t want their parents to know about, and since we all have such brilliant, angelic young men and women from such perfectly well-adjusted families, this scripture really doesn’t speak much to us today.

Right…

Young people get this metaphor—they do feel like slaves from time to time—and the rest of us have to reach back through the dimness of our memory to the time when we, too, were in those shoes. This is part of the reason why father and mother images for God are so tricky. For some in our midst our childhoods may have been filled with abuse and other marks of slavery. So when Paul says that we were all slaves to a divine parent, unapproachable and incredibly formidable, some of us might be able to relate to that a little too closely. But this is why it’s important that Jesus came. When Jesus Christ appeared on the scene, then Paul says, “So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.” You are not a responsible, presentable adult; all of us are but children in God’s eyes. And, more importantly, your divine parent is not unapproachable but loving and welcoming—something I hope you are lucky enough to have in your daily lives.

On this Sunday when we celebrate our graduates God's favor for children is important because the church has no idea what to do with young people. Kids are one thing. We know how to teach kids about Jesus; we like it when kids sing songs and act in our Christmas pageants, and even when they cry in our services (unless it’s your kid and then you are pulling out every trick in the book to make them stop). Oh, and Sunday School! Sunday School is good, and of course there’s VBS. Kids are great. We love baptisms and first communions and Confirmation; we have several moments where we show off our kids’ growth in the space of worship. And then we have the date of their confirmation where we welcome our youth into full membership in the church and, by extension, in the body of Christ… 

…and it all comes to a screeching halt.

After our young people get confirmed they enter into a period of uncertainty in the church. What is expected of them during those high school years is often unclear. That they are full members of our body is true but what that means is anybody’s guess—both for them and for us. So, by the time we celebrate our high school graduates the church is frankly relieved to let you out into the world.

On behalf of the church, I apologize for what we have done with you.

I apologize not because I think we have treated you like slaves, to use Paul’s words, but rather because we have done a horrible job of telling you what it means to be heirs. I apologize not because we have treated you like kids, but because we have forgotten that we are all children; I apologize because we have too high a view of ourselves and too low a view of your readiness.

So, OK, for your part maybe you haven’t been the best Christians either. Maybe you’ve been dragged out of bed by your parents on occasion; maybe you didn’t drag your parents out of bed when they didn’t want to wake up on Sunday morning. Maybe your faith isn’t as important to you as girls or sports—you know, silly things like that. Maybe we are—all of us—sinners who have lost our focus.

The funny thing about the Christian faith—I’m stealing this idea from Will Willimon’s sermon this week at the Festival of Homiletics in Nashville (it’s amazing how quickly ideas can spread in the age of the internet)—anyway, the funny thing about this Christian faith is that we profess our faith in a Lord and Savior, who we believe came to die for us—for our sins—on a cross of all places, and who was raised from the dead—believe it or not—three days later, having descended into hell before rising again and ascending into heaven. We believe that this person—this Jesus—was the most important figure in the history of the world. We have absolutely no problem as a church confessing that fact. We have creeds to say it. We have communion to share in it. We do funerals where the dead are blessed in Jesus’ name. He is our comfort in times of trial.

And through it all the greatest irony is that this man, this Jesus, whom we are worshiping in this church, was a young adult, and at the same time we are a church failing young adults.

Wrap your head around that for a second.

At least today’s service is honest. After your graduation you are going off into the world and we are wishing you well; unlike our other graduation service which is not graduation at all but confirmation—though if we’re honest it is treated far more like the latter than the former most of the time. Maybe your confirmation felt like graduation from the church, which makes today kind of superfluous. I’m going to guess, at the very least, that the last three years or so have been strange when it comes to what to do on Sunday morning. You’re full members of the church—why does it not feel like it?

OK, we young adults have our issues. Honestly, now that you’re graduating from high school you are more in my age demographic than those kids in Sunday School—and that should probably make you feel kind of old. And I’m here to say that my generation has its flaws—like most generations I suspect—and individually some of us resonate with the Christian faith and some of us could not care less. Nobody wants their generation painted in wide brush strokes. But here’s the thing about the world our young adults are entering: it is a world where the church is ignorant of your desires, and a world where any faith you carry with you will be challenged in far more ways than it will be uplifted. You may no longer feel like slaves to your parents but that transition from slave to heir is not without its pains.

In fact, many people spend their childhood wanting to be an adult only to become an adult and wish they didn’t have the responsibility that comes with it. Worse still is to be stuck between the two. I don’t envy you in this struggle. But there is good news in all of this—I swear there is. As I said before, you are part of a church that worships Jesus, who is far easier to relate to than many of the traditions we have about him. This guy was full of energy and life and every time his followers thought they had him pegged he turned their deep-seated expectations upside-down. Well, you are part of a church that has some deep-seated expectations for how things have been and how they will be. If there’s anything for certain in this life it is that Jesus is going to turn this church that you see now upside-down in your lifetimes. He’ll do this in just enough time for you to get comfortable with it and then the whole thing will happen again, like a plow turning over the soil.

If you’re not comfortable in church then that’s probably a good sign. Jesus was never concerned about being comfortable. He was always going out on some limb; tossing tables in the temple, dining with sinners, visiting the woman at the well; in fact, he went out on a couple particularly big limbs on the cross. In all of this he was turning the world upside-down, so that—as Paul says in today’s reading—you are not really becoming adults but instead you are becoming children, “and if a child then also an heir,” and if an heir then you are the future of this church.

Some of you may wait awhile before feeling comfortable coming back, but I have a different hope; and indeed a challenge for you: be a part of the church that makes you uncomfortable and help it to reform itself. And if you’re not sure you buy into the importance of the church as an institution then all the better. Many of you have families here that wanted you to be brought up in the faith because they wanted you to have something to trust in when life gets wavy. They faced some of the same difficulties you do and made some of the tough decisions you will have to make. None of them were trained specifically for teaching you about God and, still, here you stand: heirs to a promise.

And the strangest thing of all is that their motives were sometimes not the best. They wanted you to come here in the desperate hope that the church would help keep you in line, or they wanted you here because their legacy as members of the church community depends to some degree on you. The irony is that it’s fine that your parents and grandparents may not have always had the perfect intentions, because this isn’t a place for people with perfect intentions. The church is a place that rests of the mercy of God, a place filled with people who are slaves—to their pride, their ambitions, their legacies; their sin. It’s a place that has spent too long trying to cater to you and figuring out how to entertain you when the truth has been staring us in the face. You don’t need entertainment; there’s X-Box and TV and sports and Twitter and even less healthy things for that. What you need is a place that is honest about who you are: a place filled with people willing to admit how sometimes messed up we all are. All of us are the same; all of us are broken; all of us are slaves “to the elemental spirits of this world.” That means we are sinners. So are you. You’re going to find out how much of a big, fat sinner you are when you go off to college or into the world of adulthood.

You’re going to hope your big, fat sinful self isn’t going to get exposed to your parents and these people back home, but you know what? They already know. They know how full of crap you can be. That’s why they brought you here. And you know what else? They still want you to be the future of this church—warts and all—and so do the rest of us, because you are children of God, heirs to a promise. That is the hope in which we send you off into the world and the only hope any of us have.

Thanks be to God.