Confirmation Sunday:
A Message to Confirmands
By Charles Rush
June 3, 2001
oday
is an important day. Up until this point in your life, someone has been taking
you to Church. Your parents literally carried you here when you were very
young, enticed you to participate, and in some cases dragged you kicking and
screaming to be here. Your parents were doing their job to give you a moral and
spiritual foundation. So you learned some of the most important stories from
the Bible, you acted in Christmas plays, you discussed moral issues in Sunday
School, and you got involved in service.
Today,
you are making a stand for yourself. No one is going to make you be here. I
know some veiled threats might have been made. But you are really standing up
for yourself. You wrote some very thoughtful reflections on who God is and what
you think of the teachings of Jesus. Every year from now on, we are going to
ask you to stand on your own more and more. We want to know what you think. We
want you to think for yourself. We want you to do things because you want to
from inside yourself, not because someone has to tell you to do it. Today, we
as a community recognize that you are no longer children. You are on your way
to becoming an adult.
In
just a minute, we are going to symbolize that starting out by having you read a
scripture verse that means something to you and take a plunge in the waters.
You were baptized with just a drop of water when you were a child. On that day,
your parents made a pledge to get you to this point, where you can stand on
your own, walk of your own free will into the waters and take the plunge. It is
a wonderful symbol, spiritually speaking, of taking the plunge into the
adventure of life. You are just starting out on a great spiritual journey that
will last the rest of your life. We cannot live it for you. You will have to
make the mistakes yourself, stumble upon incredible wonders yourself, make
profound leaps of faith all by yourself.
This
year, we tried to give you a few things to pack with you on the journey, things
that will come in handy later on. We read many of the important passages from
the Bible and you memorized one because years from now when you are confused,
perhaps frightened, the scriptures will give you a way back to the path when
you can't find it on your own.
We at least
introduced you to meditation and the life of prayer because years from now when
you have to manage more anxiety than you can deal with and you have to stay
focused on what is positive and you have people around you that are sick or in
trouble that need your spiritual strength, you will know how to tap into the
spiritual force of hope and healing that courses through the universe.
We got you involved in service at the Sherman
Community Center in Newark, with the guys on the street and some of the
children on the street in Manhattan because years from now you are going to
understand that giving back keeps you human and in touch in a grounded way.
We visited some
other congregations to see what worship is like there because years from now I
want you to be at home in a lot of different religious settings and I hope that
you will learn to appreciate what they have to offer.
Lastly, we
developed a little community among ourselves because years from now, you will
come to appreciate the fact that, quite in spite of our limitations and our
faults, we are the face of Christ for each other, and the most profound
spiritual experience you will probably ever have will be the rich experience of
a loving community that really knows you and stays with you unconditionally.
The tradition is strong and
it has a lot of spiritual nutrient that you will come to appreciate as you get
older. And you will need it. Possibly you will be able to complete this
adventure with nothing but one great experience after another but it is not
likely. It is likely that somewhere on your journey you are going to have to
stand for something that is the right thing to do and a whole bunch of people
around you will be pressuring you not to do it. You will have to have the
courage of your convictions. It is likely that somewhere on your journey you
will be deeply disappointed that something you really wanted or someone you
really loved suddenly disappeared. You will have to be open to the comfort of
others and the hope in the midst of discouragement and doubt. It is likely that
somewhere on your journey, you will not have enough material resources to do
something that is very important and you will have to step out boldly in faith
that things will work out anyhow without any evidence that they will.
I hope that on your trip,
you will be dogged in the pursuit of truth. Do not take what we tell you for
granted. Question it, probe it, doubt it, make it true for you. Do not
unquestioningly trust the authority of others, your professors, the New York
Times, or CNN. Almost to a person, you all said that the most important
teaching of Jesus was ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you', that
understanding other people was the key to getting along in the world. You will
find that no one can do that work for you. Every day, we hear reports from
Israel about the Palestinians making terrorist attacks in Israel and the
Israeli's making military strikes in Palestine. You can read the papers and get
some understanding of what is going on. But it will never take the place of
actually visiting the people there, getting to know them, hearing what they are
living through, and seeing the realities that make up the complexity of these
situations. Often times after doing that, you will hear CNN and wonder how they
even covered the story. They are clueless. You will have to get to know the
world for yourself. I hope you travel widely. I hope you are genuinely
interested in what different people are all about because understanding is
vital to our future.
At the same time that you question,
don't be afraid to draw upon the great saints of the past and the great
traditions of history. One of you raised the question in your answer on God as
to how much we actually are able to know about the world vs. how much is merely
our subjective projections that interpret the world in light of our
subjectivity. It is a great question. Great people have wrestled with it in a
profound way. Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, George Berkeley, Rene
Pascal, Martin Heidegger, and in our own day Hans Georg Gadamer and the
Theologian Paul Tillich. As you go along the journey, don't be afraid to read
the great thinkers in philosophy and theology. You will only be as profound and
as interesting as what you have read seriously.
And that takes focus and discipline.
There was once a young boy that was very smart but he didn't seem engaged in
school. His mother took him to see the Rabbi to see if he could inspire him to
study. The Rabbi and the boy were talking about science because the boy was
very gifted in science. The Rabbi said, “tell me, what is the difference
between a light and a laser? Do they emit the same energy?”
“Yes”, said the boy, “the
energy is the same. The difference is that with a light bulb the energy is
going in all directions at once. With a laser it is concentrated along a single
beam.”
“Exactly”, said the Rabbi,
“and that is how it gets its piercing power. And so it is with our
concentration. We have to bring it to focus.”
So draw upon the great
thinkers of the past and draw upon the best part of the Biblical tradition.
What has it taught us? That the positive forces of hope, grace, love,
forgiveness, and compassion will ultimately triumph over the negative forces of
despair, indifference, resentment, and hate. So open yourself to the positive
spiritual energy of the universe, let it course through your soul, and bless
others with it. The negative forces are always there. It is a daily task to
reorient ourselves to the Good
And it is amazing when we do, that purpose for living just seems
to emerge, that our lives just seem to have meaning. We just seem to run into
strangers, some of them odd folks we would never usually talk to- hurt,
sometimes impoverished, sometimes imprisoned, sometimes folk far, far away from
Jersey- and these people become a blessing to us, and we to them because we
received something positive spiritually from them.
You know you have problems. You know you have parts
of you that you would like to change, parts that are unlovable. But the promise
of the Spirit is that, in spite of yourself, you can bless other people. You
can release the power of love and goodness and beauty. St. Paul, once said,
“While we were still jerks, God loved us.” And at the end of the day, it
doesn't matter what kind of skills we started out with, what kind of phsique,
what kind of mental abilities. What will matter the most is how much love you
have released, how much compassion, understanding, grace, forgiveness, hope and
peace. What will matter the most is how much blessing you have given to others.
And blessing, my friends, is eternal. So be positive, stay positive. And may
you live to eat the orchards you plant, may you inhabit the houses you build,
may you live to see the blessing you release live through the next generations.
God speed.
Amen.
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