“Many Gifts – One Faith”

September 19, 2004

Scripture Reading:  

 Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost  

That is the theme for the church this year.  Many Gifts – One Faith.  What does that mean?  It means that in our church we as individuals and families have an opportunity to explore our faith with a caring group of people.  Many Gifts – One Faith means that we encourage each other to give voice to our questions and desires.  Many Gifts – One Faith means we have a place here at Blue Point Church to discover what we do based on who we are in Christ.  Together we can individually find the presence of Jesus in our lives.  Individually we can find the Holy Spirit moving among us together.  Many Gifts – One Faith recognizes that we are unique people and families with special experiences, interests, talents, hopes and concerns.  We are unique but we find each other on one journey of faith.  Many Gifts – One Faith recognizes the value of that individuality as we listen for God who knows us by name…Cathy, Sara, Mike, Susan, Nancy, Amy, Robin, Arthur, Steve,….  The United Church of Christ has a motto it is :  “God is still speaking….”  I think we should each take our name tags, pull it out of the plastic sleeve, get a pen and write this… “God is still speaking to _____________”  and there is your name.  God is still speaking to Carol.  God is still speaking to Steve.  God is still speaking to Robin.  Many Gifts – One Faith means we hear this voice of God speaking to us better when we are connected to Blue Point Church and the Christian faith than when we are not.

We have name tags for our children too.  Perhaps we should write not “God is still speaking to Ian or Rebecca, or Noah…” but we should write “God is just beginning to speak to Ian”  “God is just beginning to speak to Rebecca.”  “God is just beginning to speak to Noah.”  Today is the first day of Sunday school for the year.  I want to applaud you all for coming and bringing your children because I think that our children getting this chance is vitally important.  In fact, we hear about children in poverty.  Usually we think about children who don’t have much money, or much food.  But I think there is a different kind of child poverty.  One that is harder to detect but real none the less.  This is spiritual poverty.  As Betty Shannon Cloyd writes in her book Children and Prayer.  Spiritually impoverished children are children who have a void in their life because no one has told them that they are divinely created and infinitely loved by God.  They have not been given that grounding that gives life hope.  Spirituality is as much a part of being human as language, walking upright, intelligence, and those grasping thumbs of ours.  It has been said that we are not human beings trying to have a spiritual experience, but we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Not talking about and educating children in prayer and God is like depriving them of their right to learn to read.

Moreover, by bringing your children and youth to church you are making a commitment to do something very exciting with them.  It is something that is at the core of having a family.  You are intentionally handing down a heritage of laughter, tears, musings, deeds and values all bundled in love.  By bringing your children to church you are not giving your children up to the world so it can do that.  (Goodness knows the heritage they will be handed from what is on T.V. or from what they hear on the School bus!)   You are becoming intentional about passing on to them all that is wordless and full of wonder in you.  You are giving them memories and thoughts and stories and friendly people so that they won’t have to drag themselves around in joyless lives, and be lost because they haven’t been given the keys to find God and meaning.  (as we read in this morning’s litany).

“That’s my church,” said the little boy as they drove along a street not far from his house.  “Oh, that’s a pretty church!” his grandmother said.  “Is it nice inside?”  He looked at her without comprehension, and his mother shot her a warning look from the passenger seat.  Later, she explained.  They have told him it was his church because he wanted to have a church like his friend did, but they didn’t want to force him into any kind of a religious mold.  He’d never actually been inside.  She said it was important to them that he be allowed to make up his own mind. 

We all have run across parents who have this philosophy about raising their children in a faith.  I certainly have, anyway.  I have a number of problems with it.  But, the biggest one is that they are depriving their child of a way of expressing, understanding and getting in touch with a whole part of his or her life experience.  As the age old adage goes:  God and children speak the same language.  I am sure that mother’s son had had spiritual experiences of some sort.  Take one boy who was asked if he ever had felt the presence of God.  He thought about it and said, “I say this big yellow sun, and it reminded me of God.  At first I thought it was God, but then I saw it was the sun that God had made, and that reminded me of Him.”  These experiences that children have are spontaneous and they do not come with promptings from and adult.  They are just as valid as religious experiences of an adult.  They are not imitations of one’s their parents might have shared with them. I bet you can share some of yours with a friend or family member today.  It would be one of the best conversations you probably have had in a long time.   And yet this with no Sunday School this child will have had no where to go with his most important experiences.

Sometimes parents think church will stifle a child’s freedom of exploration and spiritual expression because they think church’s will scare the children by making God out to be angry and punishing.  There are plenty of churches out there like that.  Once a child care worker said to a group of three year olds  “God and Jesus won’t like you if you do that.”  Think of the damage that person is doing to the three year olds trust in God.  Indeed, what a cruel and bitter God it is who decides to withhold love from a three year old because what, “He stole some snack from the snack table before he was suppose to?”

My son in his first grade class had some other student regularly telling him how he was going to go to hell if he did or didn’t do certain things.  It would scare Ian and he would come home asking me all sorts of questions.  I had to say that we could call another minister Ian knew, Rev. Paul Shupe, to reassure him.  It was getting so bad I thought we would both have to put on our robes and ecclesiastical garb to gain authority in the eyes of Ian and to counteract the fear that this other boy was instilling in his classmates.  No Ian, God does not hate you and will not send you to hell.  This is very damaging stuff.  I want to say right now, the United Church of Christ and this church, the Blue Point Church is not like that.  I tell the children every Sunday, “There is nothing you can say or do that will ever make God to stop loving you.”  No one in church is ever going to say to a child that God will not like them or is going to send them to hell or will not like them.  If they do they will have to answer to me and the Vestry.   The United Church of Christ does not scare people about God.  In fact I was once talking to a woman who taught at Weston Seminary and had counseled with many people from many faiths around the world about their spiritual experiences.  I mentioned I was from the United Church of Christ and she said that she loved working with people from the United Church of Christ.  I asked why?  She said because they have so few “hand ups” about God.  She wasn’t even in our denomination.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Our Sunday school approach of God’s love and not God’s wrath really does pay off in the long run.    

Moving on to a different point, let me tell you about another boy, Tom, who spoke at his Middle School graduation ceremony.  It was about how he came to be committed to God. 

I was mountain biking.  Those who know me know that I love mountain biking.  Mountain biking is a way I like to remind myself that I’m alive.  Anyway, I was mountain biking, and I intended to check out a new trail that one of my friends had told me about.  So, here I was, biking down this trail, and the path got narrow.  Like, 10 inches across narrow.  Now, I wasn’t really concerned or anything, because I’ve been on narrow trails before, but then it started to get really steep.  I got a little worried.  Then, I hit an especially steep part in the trail.  The trail was about 5 or 6 inches wide now, it was going down, on my right was sheer rock, and on my left, a precipice jutted down about 40 feet.  I was going pretty fast, and so I pulled on both brakes.  I skidded and didn’t see the rock right in front of me.  I hit the rock going really fast, flew off my bike, and fell over the precipice.  I managed to grab a rock jutting out of the cliff surface, and I prayed over and over for help.  I thought my bike was gone, that I had fallen over the cliff.  So, I was hanging on the side of a cliff and praying.  Here’s the crazy part.  I had looked all around for a handhold, and had found nothing.  I prayed and looked up, and I saw a root just sticking out of the ground above me.  I grabbed it, found a handhold, and pulled myself up.  There, just lying across a tree, was my bike.  I shakily walked the rest of the trail and then rode home.  That night, I dedicated my life to the Lord.  I gave God my life to do with as God pleased.  God saved my life in more ways than one.  I belong to Jesus.

I wonder, how did Tom think to pray to God for help when he was hanging off the cliff?  On the one hand, Tom might never have gone to Sunday school.  He might have just heard about God on the school bus, or T.V.  Maybe he could do nothing else but punt and try praying for the first time. Certainly he would not have been the first person in the history of the world who called to God in dire straights.  On the other hand, maybe Tom went to Sunday school and that was where he got the idea to pray.  I don’t know the answer to that.  But, I do know that Tom would have been able to access his faith better and be more likely to feel God’s presence and know what it was because of Sunday School.  Church would help Tom integrate his renewed commitment to God that he came to later on that night and the idea of his life being a gift from God.  The language of Church itself would give Tom a powerful language to express his experience.  Take the 23^rd psalm “My cup overflows.  Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”  That sounds pretty much like the way Tom was feeling. 

Tom wasn’t done at his middle school commencement speech.  He had another story,

Once I was at Camp-of-the-Woods, in Speculator, New York.  It was raining, and I had walked up to the dining hall early.  I was sitting on the balcony, watching the rain, and suddenly I saw the most enormous flash I had ever seen in my entire life.  The sky everywhere around me had lit up and was white with light.  The ground shook, literally shook, then it was gone.  I looked at my arm and noticed I had dirt and little pieces of wood on me.  I looked up, and 5 feet away from me was a tree with a huge black scar down the middle of it.  That tree had gotten hit by lightning while I was sitting 5 feet from it.  God works in amazing ways.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is here and is taking care of me.

If I was Tom’s Mom at this point I think I would be on my knees praying as hard as I could, even if I had never gone to Sunday school before…. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,…God!”  If I was Tom’s Mom I think I would have started going to church regularly by this time, even if I had never gone before.  I would also be thinking of how to get Tom out of the woods.  I would be wondering if I could hire some sort of disaster control unit to follow Tom around.  I would think maybe a professional fireman, someone trained in EMT and a movie stunt man.  That would do the trick.  But, as Tom’s Mom I would realize I couldn’t do that.  We can protect our children only so much.  We can make sure they wear helmets, not play outside in thunderstorms, wear safety belts. But, beyond that it is out of our control.  We cannot guard against everything.  The woods are out there.  The world is a dangerous place.  We can’t get Tom out of the woods entirely.  So we have to teach Tom how to keep on praying when he is in the woods.  We need to teach our children how to hope, how to thank, how to have faith and how to look for meaning in things.  Certainly Tom was well on his way.  Tom was not out of the woods, but Tom found his faith in the woods.

Bringing our children to church is a terrific thing you are doing for them.  Rachel Carson said, “If a child is to keep alive his or her inborn sense of wonder…he or she needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him or her the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”  Many Gifts – One Faith.  You can share the passwords of God at home too.  I hope this year this Church experience will help your unique faith journeys become powerfully alive at home too.  In fact, October 3 Susan Fitzgerald a professional Christian Education Director from the Brunswick Congregational church will be sharing with us parents ways of how to do that.  (3 in the afternoon).  Also, my own challenge is for you and your child to read the whole Bible together this year.  It is the Bible challenge.  Any time you have accomplished it.  Tell me and I will specially recognize that child and parent in worship.

Thirdly, learn to pray together.  They can be simple prayers, like “Thank you God, for such a beautiful day.”  Or “Help me be kinder to my brother.”  Say a family prayer at dinner time.  Mention everyone’s name.  Hearing your name in a prayer is very moving experience.  “God we thank you for the joy of Tommy today.”  Or “Protect each one of us David, Carol, Ian and Gavin, and the dog.”  Try the “tucking in prayer.”  The parent writes a prayer on an index card and they say it with their child at night.  Then they tuck the card in under the child’s pillow so he or she can sleep on it and feel help by it all night.  Talk about your faith to your children.  Remember the name tags at church and ask each other where have you heard God speaking today? 

Many Gifts – One Faith.  Welcome back everyone.