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From September 3, 2006 On the Navajo Nation, when a girl reaches puberty an ancient ritual is held. Kinaalda, it's called. An intense five-day ceremony, it tests a girl's physical fortitude, her mental strength, and her spiritual resolve. At the end of those arduous days and nights, the girl is gone. In her place stands a woman, one the whole community takes great delight in celebrating. Something similar happens in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. Only there, the generations-old rite of passage is how boys become men. A diplomat friend from that tiny county once described the experience, one he recalled in vivid, still somewhat-mortified detail. Once every year, Jean said, his village gathers together all the fourteen year-old boys. After a ceremony involving much chanting and dancing, the boys are led out into the bush and each one deposited in a different location. Alone in the bush for four nights without food, water, or shelter, each boy is forced to rely on sheer wits and prayers. When he comes back--if he comes back, because lions live in the bush--when each boy comes back, he is reunited with the other boys and together they run through a long line of elders who, as the boys race past, whack them hard with sticks. Any boy who survives the whole ordeal is rightfully acknowledged to be a man. Aren't you glad, Kaitlin, Judson, and Zach? Aren't you glad that your rite of passage has not been as demanding? Aren't you relieved that your village, the church, didn't drop you off in Shawnee National Forest and let you fend for yourself? Aren't you grateful you belong to this Christian tribe and not one that made you run twelve demanding races, some at night, as is the case with kinaalda? Today you celebrate, the congregation celebrates, the entire body of Christ (the church) celebrates your coming of age, your rite of passage, your transition from spiritual childhood into spiritual adulthood. After today, you will never be the same. And neither will we. In just a few minutes you will be invited forward to take your place before your village, this congregation. Standing on the chancel, you will face your church family and tell them, by way of your answers to some very important questions, that you no longer wish to be a child of the church. Instead, after a journey of study and prayer, your heart's desire is to be received as a spiritual adult, a full-grown disciple of Christ, a member of his body, the church. After you tell us of your desire, I will then invite you to kneel. And when this happens, you won't be addressing us anymore. You will be talking to God. As you kneel, you will be speaking to the God who knows you by name, the God who has loved you longer than anyone--even your parents, the God who has chosen to gift you with particular talents and interests so that you, in turn can bless others as God has blessed you. You will kneel before your God, the creator of the heavens and the earth, the one who sent Jesus as your teacher and savior, the one who moves within you now as Spirit. And there you will offer yourself to God. Your whole self, I mean. Not just some of you but all of you. And not just for this hour or this afternoon but for all the days of your life. This is no decision for a child to make. Only those who have come of age can make such a life-altering choice. Your parents can't make it for you. Neither can your grandparents. Not even your minister can. Today's decision to dedicate yourself to God is yours and yours alone. Which is why, on our last day of confirmation class, I asked if you each intended to take the next step. Because not everyone who completes confirmation class does. Some confirmands know they're not quite ready to take this most important, life-changing step and so they wisely wait. In the coming years, you will have opportunities to make all kinds of important decisions. Like where to go to college and what career to pursue. Like where you will live and who you will marry (if you marry). Whether to have children. By the time you're old and grey, you will have made so many important decisions you will have lost count. But none of those decisions will ever be as important as the one you make today. Because this decision to dedicate yourself, to offer yourself to God in love so that God can use you in love, this decision will influence every decision that comes after it. Let me say more about that. When it comes to decisions and choices, to be an adult in the church is a very different thing than to be an adult in the world. In the world, when you're an adult you get to decide how late you're going to stay out, how you're going to spend your money, who your friends will be, those kinds of things. When you're an adult in the world's eyes, as long as what you do isn't illegal or doesn't hurt or endanger someone else, you are free to do pretty much what you want, when you want, with whomever you want. When you become one of the world's adults, you don't have to answer to anyone unless you want to. But it's the opposite in the church. When you decide to offer yourself to God, then with each decision you make, you have God to consider. What does God want for me? What is God asking of me now? How does God want me to spend my time--today, in the coming year, in the next twenty? How is God hoping I will spend my treasure? My talents? On whom is God asking me to spend my love? As a spiritual adult, you answer to no one... but God. Not some mean parent God looking down from heaven scowling at your every move, waiting for you to make some little mistake so that you can be punished. Not some God who, like some boss at a factory, is only interested in how much you get done. No. The God you are dedicating yourself to today, the God you will spend your whole life answering to is the same amazing and marvelous God Jesus knew and couldn't live without. This is the same God who, even before Jesus had officially come of age, loved Jesus so completely that Jesus knew no matter how wonderful his earthly parents were, God was even more so. Which is why Jesus ended up freaking out his mother and father as they started their long trek home after spending Passover in Jerusalem. Jesus hadn't meant to scare them; it's just that he couldn't get enough of anything related to his heavenly Father. So he hightailed it back to the Temple where he could listen to the wise ones, learn from them, and even put in his two cents' worth. Which must have impressed the heck out of everyone because he was, after all, only twelve. Well, not everyone was impressed. Jesus' parents weren't. When they finally found their son hanging out with the wise ones there on the Temple steps, Mary and Joseph were a crazy combination of furious and scared and relieved, something most parents here have felt before. And just like in every family, when they all had a chance to say what was on their minds there at the Temple, Jesus couldn't understand his parents' feelings and they couldn't really understand his. Mary and Joseph could only see Jesus as their little boy and not the man of God he was in the process of becoming. As your church family, our responsibility to you, Zach, Kaitlin, and Judson, is to try never to do what Jesus' parents did that day. Which is to fail to see who you really are and who you are becoming. You are more than just children of God. Kaitlin, today you are a woman of God. Judson, today you are a man of God. Zachary, today you have come of age; like your brother, you too are a man of God. You're not church kids anymore. You are spiritual adults. So after today, you will have a vote at congregational meetings. In fact, we are so committed to recognizing your adulthood that if there was something happening at the church that concerned you, you would have the right (maybe even the duty, depending on what it was) to call for a congregational meeting so that together we could hear your concern, discuss it, pray about it, and then take appropriate action. As confirmed members of the body of Christ, you will enjoy all kinds of privileges. You can attend any church meeting you like. You can serve on any committee. If you felt called in this direction, and the congregation agreed, then you could even have a seat on the church council as one of our spiritual leaders. But being a spiritual adult means more than having privileges. It means also taking responsibility. First and foremost, it means taking responsibility for your spiritual life, your relationship with God. To a child's way of thinking, when confirmation ends, so does the learning. A spiritual adult knows, though, that the end of confirmation is when the real learning begins. But no one is going to tell you how to learn about God, how to increase in wisdom (as Jesus did his whole life). Your learning about God, your learning with God, these are your decisions, your responsibilities now. As I said before, you don't answer to us on this. You answer to God. As adults, you now have other responsibilities, too. With the other adults in the church, now you will be responsible for the life and future of the church. As happens when a tribe welcomes in its newest adults, we will be looking to you to share your God-given gifts and interests and abilities with us, your tribe. We will be counting on you not just to say "yes" when asked, but to volunteer for things, to think about our tribe and notice when you are needed and to step up before anyone else has even had time to think to ask for your help. You are a caretaker of this church now. As such, we will be counting on you to support the church financially. Which is why we will be giving each of you a box of offering envelopes. From today on, we will expect of you what we expect of every spiritual adult in the church: to share with God's church a portion of what God has given to you. No one is ever going to tell you what that portion is or ground you because you have not shared; as it is with every adult, what you give to God's church is between you and God. One of the big surprises when you go from being a child to an adult is how much harder it is than you realized. Which is why what the church does is so much cooler than what happens in the world around us. In the world around us, once you become an adult, it's all up to you. But in the church, we support and encourage one another. That's great. But it gets even greater. When you go from being a child to an adult in the church, God uses the church's hands to send the Holy Spirit upon you and into you. So that no spiritual responsibility is one you carry alone. God will see that you are given everything you need so that you can be and do what God is calling you to do and be. And it gets even greater still. When our hands slide off your shoulders and we move on with the rest of our worship service, God's will stay right there. God's hand is going to be upon each of you all the days of your lives. Not just every day but every moment. "Here I am," God will say to you in the best of times. "Here I am," God will say to you when being a spiritual adult starts to weigh you down. "Here I am," God will say. And if you stop for just a minute, you'll not only hear God but you'll feel God. You'll feel how that heavenly hand is upon you. Blessing you. Strengthening you. Encouraging you. And it will be that holy touch that will enable you to keep being the spiritual adult you were called to be and which we celebrate. Zach, Kaitlin, Judson: we're so glad you made the journey from childhood to adulthood. And God, God is even gladder! Amen. ©
Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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