Sermon: Confirmation Sunday, 2005

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Confirmation Sunday, 2005

By Charles Rush

May 22, 2005

ue story from West Texas. During a revival service the Baptist Minister delivered a sermon that ended with the question, "How many of you here are down-to-earth, loyal, born-again Baptists?' Every hand went up except one woman, who turned out to be Presbyterian. The Minister came up to her and said, "Don't you realize that unless you are born again and immersed in the waters of baptism, you will not be saved?" The woman stood firm, saying, "My great-grandparents were Presbyterian, my grandparents were Presbyterian and my parents were Presbyterian." This annoyed the Baptist preacher. "That is a very poor argument", he replied. "What would you be if your grandparents and parents had been idiots? She was confused for a moment and said, "Baptist?"

Well, all of you confirmands are here this morning, in large part, because you were born into a family of, of, of… people who wanted you here this morning. Whether you knew it or not, whether you would admit to it or not, somebody has been looking out for you for the past 13 years, sometimes shadowing your every move. When you would have walked right off the end of the building, they were there to grab your hand and gently bring you back to safety. More than that, they were looking out for you in other ways. They put you in school and made sure that you learned how to read and study on your own (more or less). They made sure that you got to know your extended family and showed you what respect and love is all about. Before you could walk or talk, they began taking you to church so you could learn the spiritual tradition that nourished your grandparents, your parents, and now you. They made sure that you had enriching experiences in the summer at camp, or on vacation. Some of you have already traveled more than most people will in a lifetime. You have lived a pretty enriched life and someone, usually your parents, were there in the background, making sure that you didn't get hurt, structuring all of these wonderful opportunities, being there to pick up the pieces and bandage the wounds when you did.

Part of what we want to tell you today, and acknowledge in a public way, is that you are no longer children any more. You are very young adults. And from here on out, we are going to be pulling back more and more. You are going to get more responsibility to stand on your own. Your parents are going to give you more and more independence. I know that right now, part of you has been waiting for more freedom for what seems like an eternity, that it is hard for you to appreciate what I am about to say. Before you know it, you will be on your own, and wishing for a little more structure.

You are at the front end of a spiritual adventure. I want to emphasize that this is the front end… I know a lot of you are secretly hoping that your religious duty is done and now you can sleep in on Sunday or stroll up to the Bagel Chateau. I'm actually expecting a lot more than that.

Years from now I want to open a letter that says "Dear Dr. Rush, everything is great here at Duke." Scratch that, we don't need any more letters from Duke. "Dear Reverend Rush, Everything is great here at Wake Forest. I have just finished reading John Milton's Paradise Lost for my British literature class in which Milton seeks, in his words, "to justify the ways of God to men" and to show the cause of evil and injustice in the world. I thought you would be glad to know that I stayed up until 3:00 in the morning discussing Milton, Evil, and God with some people in my class. The book started slow but now I can't put it down. Sincerely yours, Timothy Loh, Molly Kaye and Claire Cummins.

We love you and we cannot let you grow up to be ignorant, so you are not done. This spiritual adventure of life that you are on has been traveled by too many deep thinkers before you. You simply must draw from their wisdom: Plato, St. Augustine, Aristotle, the novelist Flannery O'Connor, the great Jewish thinkers Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel. Each of these people had a running debate with God all of their lives. They were shaped by faith; But they also questioned their faith; They raised questions to God, sometimes angry questions to God about the inequities of life. And eventually, they found themselves making affirmations about life they never would have predicted from the outset.

I want you to travel with them, even though some of them have been dead for centuries. They have too much to teach you. A number of you asked questions about heaven. What is it like? What is the after life like? That question consumed Dante Alegheri, 689 years ago and he wrote a whole book "The Paradiso" to answer the question for himself. You can learn a lot from Dante. You need to draw upon the wisdom of the thousands of profound thinkers that preceed you on this journey. They will help you become wise. You know, you cannot think profound thoughts unless you read profound thoughts. We cannot let you grow up intellectually and spiritually feeble, with just athletic skill and access to a big pile of money. That is why, you can count on me to stay after you, to tease and cajole you, until you are fully in dialogue with great thought.

You are on a life long journey to discover meaning and purpose for your lives, to find peace in yourself, to find love with others, to find a rest in God.

Now, in our little culture right around here in Metro New York, we have led you to believe that all there is to life is achieving material prosperity, that if you are rich enough, everything will just take care of itself. You've probably seen the T-shirt that says ‘He who collects the most toys, wins'. That is a dangerous and beguiling partial truth. There is nothing wrong with prosperity but it does not constitute a goal that will bring you true fulfillment.

Our little culture here, tells you over and over that if you just succeed academically, all the doors you need to open will open magically. There is nothing wrong with going to Georgtown and Yale. I hope you do, but that is not enough either.

Our little culture here tells you that if you are well liked and hang with the right people and get invited to all the right parties, you will be happy. As a group, you are very gifted in this area. I expect most of you to become really important leaders in a very few years. But being popular is not enough either.

You will need substantial spiritual values, wise meaning and purpose to get through all of life. Why? There are disappointments out there, big challenges: accidents, tragedies, death. There is injustice and some of you will be victims of it. There is loneliness and illness, breakups of good friendships and marriages. Parts of it are very hard as any older person will tell you who has lived through it. And money, and education, and popularity and power do not shield you from these realities. No, you need spiritual substance to embrace all of the joys and the hardships.

So avail yourselves of the great thinkers (our tradition) as you go through life. They are guides who have already gone through it themselves and can offer you insights. This year we started with one great thought, the 23rd Psalm. One thought. You memorized it and in the course of time, it will move from the head to the heart. Years from now when someone dies, you will find yourself saying it out loud and it will mean something more, something different to you than it does now.

No, you are on a journey from here and the spiritual challenge of your life is to develop meaning and purpose as you go. Here I want to answer two questions you asked, though I have to say that these were some terrific questions and I'm sorry I can only answer two. Mr. Vigilante asks God, "Why do we have to die?" And Ms. Kaye asks "Dill all of the things that were written in the Bible really happen, or did you just use them as the medium to get across the message?"

Why do we have to die? I can only answer that partially. A span of a few years helps to focus our attention on what is important. In our youth, we do not see this as readily. It seems like there is too much time on our hands. That is why, one of the most consistent refrains from young people, from the beginning of the earth to the present is the following. "I'm bored, there is nothing to do." We have too much time on our hands.

Despite the fact that you have game boy, cell phones, text messaging; despite the fact that most of you have traveled more than whole village your grandparents grew up in, that is still the most frequently heard complaint in our land.

Your spiritual task, your life task is to develop meaning and purpose for your life. Now if you knew, you absolutely knew that you would live to be 26. If you absolutely knew that your life was already half over, you wouldn't be bored any more. You would fill your time. You wouldn't waste it. You would change your priorities too. You would think differently and you would become more mature and deeper as a person. Carpe Diem. You would seize the day.

Most of us don't think about the brevity of our lives. We are like lightbulbs rather than lasers. You may know that lightbulbs and lasers contain the same amount of energy. But lightbulbs are beaming off in every direction, whereas lasers are focused to the point that they can cut right through metal. Spiritually, the challenge of our lives is to develop substantive focus, character.

And Ms. Kaye, you ask a great question, some of those things happened in the Bible, some of them did not, but your instincts are good that what we should pay attention to, how we should use the Bible, is to stick to the message that God wants to get across, whether they happened or not. The truth of the Bible is not principally about what happened way back when, it is how shall we then live now.

The truth of the Bible is that the way of meaning and substance is love, compassion, forgiving one another, sharing our lives in community and support, searching for truth, learning the things that make for peace, having the courage of your convictions and doing the right thing even though all of your friends aren't going to support you and some are even making fun of you. The true way you develop spiritual depth is having a reverence for the world, exposing yourself to the mystery of nature, spending some time serving those that are impoverished and in need. The true way you develop spiritual depth is to have integrity and honesty and to become a person that others can trust and depend on. The true way you develop spiritual depth is to become a fair person and to work for a just world where everybody can find their place and realize the potential that is within them. The true way you become alive is to dream and pursue your dreams as the adventure that they really are and transform the world around you and make it a better place.

That is the message that God was trying to get across. That is what we hope that all of you get caught up in. This is the direction that you are pledging yourselves today. This is where you want to go, with each other for this leg of the journey. And we genuinely hope that you get it better than we did. I'm sure you can. Take the blessing and live the blessing. And may God's courage and strength bear you up as you go. Amen.