Confirmation Sunday
By Charles Rush
April 25, 2010
Phil. 4: 8-9
[ Audio
(mp3, 4.0Mb) ]
u may wonder why I'm showing you all these pictures of space on Confirmation Sunday. Any idea why?
None of these
pictures existed when I was your age. In elementary school, we all watched the
first rockets shot into space. Before that, we could only imagine what it
looked like.
I've been thinking a lot lately about
sending you into the world. You happen to have been born into an age with the
most rapid transition in the history of our species which is about the last 100,000
years. I can't tell you what to expect because the truth is, we don't really
know what comes next.
When they first
published this photo of earth, people marveled at it the world over. It is very
hard for me to describe this, but our collective consciousness changed. We were
no longer just ‘in the world', we became aware that we
are on an island, a speck of dust in the macrocosm that is so big we literally
cannot comprehend it imaginatively.
Since I was
your age, the world's population has doubled, also frankly hard to actually
imagine. It was 3.6 billion then and
we've recently passed over the 7 billion mark (according to the World Bank).
Here is another thing that is
amazing. I was able to get that information in about 10 seconds. When I was
your age, I had to walk over to the library, get out a couple books, turn the
pages and write it down on a scrap of paper and walk back to the church. The
information had to be pretty important because it took a minimum of 30 minutes
of my time.
Not only is 7 billion hard to imagine
but it will surely bring about social changes that are relatively profound.
Currently, scientists believe that we will eventually reach a stasis world
population of 5 billion because that is what they think the world can sustain.
In the past, these population reductions have happened because of a complex
interaction of natural disaster, war, disease, and changing social attitudes
about our families. Each of them, periodically, makes rather dramatic impacts
for a season.
I'm old but I'm not all that old.
When I was your age, we not only didn't have the internet, we didn't have
personal computers. It would be ten more years before a bunch of college
drop-outs, one of them Bill Gates (who dropped out of Harvard) started working
on that project.
We not only didn't have cell phones,
we didn't have cordless phones at home. Every phone had a line to it.
We hadn't decoded a line of the
genome. In fact, we'd only discovered
DNA a little more than a decade earlier. We didn't even really possess the
technology to parse a strand. In the past 20 years, by the way, we've
identified markers for more than 2000 diseases. If you look at the bar chart
that tracks our discoveries, it shoots straight up.
When I was your age, no one had ever
heard of stem cells because they had just been discovered and we had no idea of
the healing potential that they possessed which is likely to become practically
miraculous in their ability to cure in your lifetime.
No one thought it possible to clone
anything…
Since you were born, we've invented
the ipod and digital music, Artificial
liver, a Fuel cell bike, self cleaning windows, a Virtual keyboard, Toyota's Hybrid
Car, the thinking shoes with a built in microprocessor that decides how
soft or firm support the wearer needs, laser guided missles
accurate within a couple feet, solar panels with commercially viable generative
power, YouTube, digital underwater cameras, the Nintendo magic wand, a car that
drove 3,100 miles on a gallon of gas, a robot that learned to ride a bike, the
subatomic particle accelerator that will help us understand a whole new level
of micro-reality and novel insight about the first moments of the universe,
rubber train wheels, smog eating cement-
buildingsthat will clean our air, translucent cement
you can see through, and a process to take all the carbon out of a coal burning
plants that calcifies it into rubble
that you can use for building foundations,
I
could keep reading that list for several hours, all of this was happening while
you were goofing around with your friends on the soccer field…
Here
is the thing. We estimate that our total knowledge base, our collective
knowledge as humans has doubled every twenty years since 1900. The sum total of
what we know about the world (from 100,000 to the present) doubled every twenty
years in the last century.
We
believe that the sum total of our knowledge base is presently doubling every
decade now. So we can't really tell you
what the world will look like during your lifetime. We can only safely predict
that the changes you will live through will be, frankly, unimaginable from
here, probably both good and bad. So I will spare you the platitudes and
verities that you usually hear on these occasions.
What
we can give to you is what we know to be true. We know that the values of our
faith tradition are reliable guides for your life, whatever comes next. We've
been exploring them, living them for more than 3000 years. You will need them
in your life in order to unlock the ‘higher reasons' for which we were created.
This is the way, not just to exist, but to live abundantly Jesus taught us.
Love,
compassion for those who
suffer,
forgiveness,
understanding- especially when
people are different from you,
integrity of character,
being truthful with yourself and
with those around you, so that you really know yourself
believing in yourself-
especially when others don't,
doing the right thing- especially
when people around you are all talking compromise and you know their wrong,
treating others fairly and
with respect and dignity- especially people that are poor and marginal,
having a sense of justice
on a social level,
paying attention to the
things that make for peace with your family, your friends, our world.
Being
grateful to be alive, grateful for those people around you, and thanking others
who have blessed you
Being aware so that you see the mystery and the wow (awe) of
our world.
Enduring
frustration, setback, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power and keeping
a faith alive so that you don't completely come unglued.
Constantly
growing and becoming, even from really bad mistakes and learning to ask for
forgiveness when you've hurt other people and doing the things you have to do
to get reconciled with others.
When
you are living this way, you get the privilege of being loved because you are loving other people. The Bible says that this kind of
love is stronger than death. I'm glad you don't know that yet, but you will.
We
want you to become authentic men and women. We want you to become the real
deal.
My
prediction is that you will be leaders in the world when you grow up. We are
pouring a lot of education into you. You have a lot of talents. People will
look up to you for guidance. They will defer to you to set the tone, the
direction. It is doubly important for you to become humane. We need women and
men with moral and spiritual substance.
As
you know, our world is already over filled with the boneheads you see on “The
Jersey Shore” and “Survivor” and “Rehab”.
I
know that some of you are thinking that you are done with the church
obligation. Your parents made you go to church up til
now and after confirmation, your gig is over.
The
truth is, you are just starting out, on a spiritual
adventure that will last the rest of your lives. You can do some growth on your
own, to be sure, but the actual reason that we come to Church is to remember
where we want to be headed, to surround ourselves with other people that will
help us grow into people of substance, to be a support to others and to be
supported as we develop our families. Wise people stay in touch with their church for their moral and
spiritual health, like they stay in touch with their doctor and the gym for
their physical health.
We
want you to all of the potential that God has placed in you and to use it for
something good. In order to do it, you will constantly grow and develop. I'm
looking forward to it.
Up
until now, we've been doing and doing for you which is
appropriate because you were children. Today, we recognize that you are not
children anymore. You are becoming young men and young women. And we need you
to start giving back. This year, we did a little bit of that serving the
homeless at Bridges, serving the homeless at Home First. In a little while, you
will be doing a bit of giving back when you serve communion in the church. We
will be expecting more and more of you as you grow through High School and
College because real leaders serve other people. They make the world a better
place because of what took place when you
were in charge and you had the
power. No one modeled that better than Jesus.
At
the beginning of the year, I sent you a piece from Marianne Williamson's book
“A Return to Love”. I read it to you again today in closing:
"Our
deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest
fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our
light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask
ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?
Actually,
who are you not to be?
You are a
child of God.
Your playing
small doesn't serve the world.
There's
nothing enlightened about shrinking so
that other
people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all
meant to shine, as children do.
We are born
to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not
just in some of us, it's in everyone.
And as we
let our own light shine,
we
unconsciously give other
people
permission to do the same.
As we are
liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Ladies and Gentlemen, let your light
shine. Amen
© 2010
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
