Sermon

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A, RCL)
January 27, 2008

Sian Jones

Good morning.

I am here today to speak with you about the Youth & Family program at St Marks. As un-authoritative as I find myself to be about scripture, this being Sunday morning - and ostensibly a sermon, I figured I should at least take a look at the lectionary readings for the week. Low and behold – they actually seemed like a good way to kick things off.

As we have just heard, the author of Matthew, finds Jesus returning to the Galilee to recruit his disciples. Having come upon a group of fisherman, including Simon Peter and Andrew, Jesus bids them leave their nets to take up a new profession - fishing for people.

Humanity at that time needed to be gathered up like fish because it was “walking in darkness,” having strayed far from the pious path set out by Abraham and Moses for the Hebrew people. And Jesus - who the Christian story casts as the great light that will help mankind “get it” – Well, Jesus is looking for a fishing crew and a little help.

I think one could have an intelligent conversation about how well modern humans “get it” – the Christian “it” or any other kind of “it”, for that matter. But that’s another pseudo-sermon for another time. For my purposes, I refer back to this portion of the gospel because children, I believe, are a special breed of fish. They aren’t necessarily the blank slates that John Locke once described, but their personalities and moral compasses aren’t fully formed yet either. They are experimental creatures who look to the world around them for examples of how to think and act. In many ways, children are looking for fishers to catch them and illuminate the crazy world they live in. The trick has always been whether or not they are caught by the right people.

I’m not quite sure what I thought I was getting myself into when I accepted this job but, in one way or another, it involved two ideas. 1) that religious organizations – somewhat regardless of the individual’s relationship with divinity – continue to be powerful cultural tools in our society and 2) that modern children are increasingly deprived of the kinds of constructive social institutions that I remember shepherding me through the awkward years and turning me into a responsible, thoughtful member of society.

So here I am, ready to fish for children. But what is “here”? What is St Mark’s?

I have spent many hours trying to figure out the answer to this question.

St Mark’s is a beautiful Victorian building that looks as though it has been air-lifted from a quaint English hamlet.

St Mark’s is a religious community known both for its devotion to Penniman’s principals of functional education and for its frequent questioning of institutions and conventional wisdoms.

St Mark’s is also the Church of the Holy Activity - where urban ministers share space with devotees of Buddhist Meditation; actors & artists coexist with biblical & liturgical scholars; and children frolic with Third Agers – with a handful of crabs thrown in for good measure.

I agree with all of these descriptors. They have all been most helpful when trying to explain to my still-incredulous friends that I don’t exactly work for a fundamentalist mega-church.

There’s something else though. Something that has taken me a while to put my finger on, but something that has been quite helpful as I navigate the ebb and flow of my job: In many ways, the most apt analogy I have found is actually that St Mark’s, for better and for worse, is much like American Democracy.

To elaborate, let us consider a piece of Benjamin Franklin’s final speech before the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Franklin, ever the optimist even at the age of 81, gave what was for him a remarkably restrained assessment of the innovative governmental blueprint they had just hammered out, remarking that "…when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.”

The American experiment has been successful beyond most people’s wildest dreams but I think it is fair to say that our government is far from being a well-oiled machine.

At its best and worst, I think that St Mark’s and America are often caught in the same tension:

How do you balance – one the one hand – the desire to harness the potential of human imagination and ingenuity with – on the other hand - the need to maintain a stable government that protects the rights and liberties of its citizens and delivers certain services?

Government by and for the people still requires organizational structures. Without them, it would be chaos.

A little creative chaos, of course, has its advantages. When we loosen or remove the strictures created by rules, hierarchies, and social conventions, we are free to play, to turn the world on its head and see things from a whole new vantage point. A large part of childhood is testing the line between chaos and order – and one of the advantages of liberal society is that it gives people the freedom to change the status quo as human experience reveals its flaws. This is also one of the promises offered by the St Mark’s community.

In my estimation, however, chaos is not always constructive. Your own Charles Penniman defined “religion” as everyone’s attempt to make “sense out of that which is by nature nonsense.” In other words, chaos becomes too much and everyone resorts to some sort of organizing principle in their search for meaning.

Similarly, I believe, that a degree of organization is necessary for directing a group of people towards a common purpose.

Youth Ministries – as I inherited them – had fallen into disarray. It wasn’t all-out chaos, but the chain of continuity had been broken and what remained were a series of fiefdoms that worked with varying degrees of success.

The shining stars seemed to be the Honduras Committee and Christmas Pageant. It is part of the St Mark’s identity that a service trip will occur every two years and that the Nativity Story will play out on the center platform every Christmas Eve. Collie & Betsy Agle have on-going relationships in Honduras, parents of teen-agers emerge to raise money & book plane tickets, a mother of Mary always steps forward, and the costumes get hauled out of the basement every December. There is communal commitment to these events, leaders step forwards, and various forces provide a sense of continuity from one generation of trip participants or Wise Men to the next.

But what about the rest? What about red-headed step-children of the Youth activity family – Summer Sunday School, the teen beach weekend, activities at Shrine Mont and the Canvass dinner? Some communal notion seems to exist that these things should happen, but before I was hired, there was a general reluctance to take ownership of them because that often meant shouldering the full burden without any guarantee of support.

Without commitment, continuity, and organization, the very existence of many events fell into question. Yes, chaos might reign when parents abandon their children to the Adam’s Room during Sermon Seminar in the summer but, perhaps worse, there was a serious fear that these opportunities for fellowship and education would evaporate – become extinct.

As you may have seen in your bulletin, I have created and have been implementing an organizational model to line up volunteers to help plan and execute the 30-odd activities that I have been told make up the backbone of Youth Ministries at St Mark’s. As Director of Youth Ministries, I hold much of the responsibility for logistical planning and communication, but it’s physically and mentally impossible for me to do it all by myself. That is why I am eternally grateful to the people who stepped up last fall to serve on my action teams. Without them I’d probably be in St. Elizabeth’s right now.

I won’t be here forever though and this isn’t just our pet project. These activities – this “program” is a product and possession of this community. It existed before me and if it is to exist after I leave, the community will have to share responsibility and ownership so that individual volunteers don’t get burnt out and once-joyous occasions don’t become burdens.

As I ask you to take on this responsibility – because community is about saying that no one fails as an individual since there is always a team to jump in when one member stumbles – as I ask you to assume this ownership, perhaps it is worth asking – somewhat rhetorically – why the community should care about the long-term health of youth ministries?

As cute as they are, what is the intrinsic value of Christopher Sherman & Duncan Andrews parading around as the Virgin Mary’s donkeys at Christmas or of Lee Rumpf or Miranda Ossolinski “preaching” about how St Mark’s has impacted their lives? How much do the kids really care? I have seen many a St Mark’s child fill many an unstructured minute seeing how far they can jump from the tops of the chairs stacked up in the Adams Room. Would they really miss Sunday School or any other organized activities?

There are many answers to these questions and they are probably different for each of you.

They aren’t my kids. But the reason I care, perhaps even the way I rationalized taking this job, is that all of our destinies are intertwined. They are fish waiting to be gathered in by some fisherperson and, whether or not it is obvious on the surface, what Emma Earnest, Dylan Corr, Josh Abramowitz, or Alyssa Stanford end up doing as adults will affect the country and world that I live in. As a result, I have a vested interest in helping to raise them and to provide them with the tools they need to figure out how they can and should fit into the increasingly dissonant world that they will inherit.

It’s the same reason I did AmeriCorps after college. The kids I worked with in the DC public schools aren’t charity cases. They are little people with all the same potential that any 5, 6, 7, 8 year old has. They can turn out to be thoughtful, dynamic contributors to the society I live in, or they can be disaffected dependants who live on the margins and become the stereotypes that so many people consider to be blots on the American Dream.

But even if you don’t buy my interconnectedness argument - or just figure that you’ll be dead and buried by the time these children impact your world, as Episcopalians, I remind you of the baptismal ceremony that we all participate in several times a year.

After the baptism of the candidate, the presider turns to the congregation and asks, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” To which we respond “I will” before renewing our own baptismal covenant.

So – granted that these are more than empty words - how should we support “those persons?”

We do it, I would suggest, by providing opportunities for exploration and growth within a community based, at least in theory, on the religious tradition in which many of us were raised. A tradition that nurtures our children and teaches them about reciprocity, charity, inclusivity, the value of work-ethic and, perhaps, even the value of failure.

This is easier said than done, especially when it comes to children. No matter how enriched our lives are by this community at its most active and interactive, it is often the costs of producing and sustaining that activity that are easiest for us to identify and dwell on.

The lives of both parents and kids are over-scheduled – there aren’t enough hours in the day to do music lessons, sports practice, family dinner, homework, and Youth Group - and who can read all the emails anyways!!!

For adult volunteers, there is the issue of creating the enriching experience. If Sunday School classes are to be anything other than aggrandized babysitting, they require a great deal of work and commitment on the part of teachers – research about lore; resuscitating repressed memories of just how bad middle school actually was, and then fusing it all into a seamless arc of launch, discussion, and reflection.

There is also the issue – highlighted recently and eloquently by Loretta Veney – of interacting with “the other.” Children and teens are often a daunting “other” to adults. They like to question authority and don’t have the social and cultural filters that temper most adult interaction and, as a result, are more blunt than your average, politically-correct lobbyist parishioner. As kids struggle to find their own identities, they expose all of the demons that we, as adults, have stowed away, never fully having been conquered. We fear that any show of indecision or lack of knowledge on our parts will expose us as frauds to the next generation. We’d rather not sign up to help with Summer Sunday School than be confronted with 25 five to ten year olds that we can’t captivate. We know that children can smell fear and we know that we are terrified.

I understand the costs. But the promises, in my estimation, include offering joy & enlightenment to a youth and connecting you - the teacher, youth leader, Halloween party organizer – with the sustenance of our community. To me, the promises warrant the leap of faith that it takes to manage the costs.

In closing, I am reminded of another famous anecdote about Benjamin Franklin. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention he was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Franklin’s point was that democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.

St. Mark’s – like the American Republic – will not stay in good health without the active and informed involvement of the congregation.

I’d like to invite each person here – child, parent, grandparent, single person – to act on the Baptismal covenant you renew regularly - Get involved in some aspect of youth ministries; Make a commitment to being an ‘active and informed’ participant in building a sustainable youth program at St. Mark’s. Some of you have already jumped in – you are ‘the usual suspects’ on whom so many of us rely to get things done. But this is not my project – it’s your program for the children in this community, and communal ownership means being a part of the team that sustains each of us, especially ‘the usual suspects’, your clergy, and the staff. I look forward to getting to know many more of you in the year ahead as together, we make an even greater leap of faith.

Amen