Sermons: The Learning Community
Rev. Kathleen Ellis
12 September 2004
As we saw just moments ago, a good portion of our
congregation is engaged directly in our program of religious education for
children and youth. This makes teaching one of the most rewarding volunteer
positions here at Live Oak. Teachers get to explore their own religious ideas
through lesson plans and conversations with children and youth who are
creatively developing a foundation for a spiritual life. Though we are not all
destined to become teachers, I have come to understand that the best way to
learn something is to try to teach it to someone else.
What about the rest of us? Why is this important? Well,
I have two primary answers to that: First, we have an interest in the
development of all of our children into thoughtful adults who embody values and
challenge those of us who are set in our ways. Second, we have an opportunity
to keep exploring religious ideas throughout our lives.
Let’s turn for a moment to Mary Pipher, author of
Reviving Ophelia and other books. Mary Pipher reminds us that
“Raising healthy children is a labor intensive
operation. Contrary to the news from the broader culture, most of what
children need, money cannot buy. Children need time and space, attention,
affection, guidance, and conversation. They need sheltered places where they
can be safe as they learn what they need to know to survive. They need jokes,
play and touching. They need to have stories told to them by adults who know
and love them in all their particularity and who have a real interest in their
moral development.”
The family is the basic
environment to provide these things for their children. The church can be a
shelter for families in nurturing and supporting them in this effort. We
support public schools—or at least 61% of the 7% of Austin voters who turned out
for yesterday’s school bond election. It is vitally important that we also
support our Live Oak families through high quality religious education—at a lot
more than 7%!
This morning, as on every Sunday morning, we are all
engaged in religious education. That’s easy to say when we consider that just
about every subject under the sun has a religious component. Ideally, we are
encouraged to think a little, to feel a little, and through these means, to
learn a little. None of us is too old to learn, no matter how much we may have
gained in wisdom through many life experiences. We need all ages to provide a
rich learning environment where we benefit from the collective experiences of
friends, acquaintances, and guests.
We are uneasy about the materialism and superficiality of
modern culture. As a result, we yearn for a deeper inner life and a more
profound personal experience. We bring these spiritual elements with us and
they grow like layers of delicate tissue around a precious and fragile gift. We
owe it to our children to ensure that they, too, have a community in which they
can begin to understand joy and sorrow, life and death, pain and compassion,
cruelty and fairness.
Consider these three letters
from a little book called Children’s Letters to God:
Dear God,
What is it like when you die.
Nobody will tell me. I just want to know, I don’t want to do
it. Your friend Mike
Dear God,
Are boys better than
girls. I know you are one but try to be fair.
Sylvia
Dear God,
If you know so much how come you
never made the river big enough for all the water and our house got flooded and
now we got to move.
Victor
[Children’s Letters to God, compiled by Eric Marshall & Stuart Hample]
These next letters are written
by children to their pastors: [quips from internet]
Dear Pastor,
Please say a prayer for
our Little League team. We need God’s help or a new pitcher. Thank
you. Alexander (age 10, Raleigh)
Dear Pastor,
Who does God pray to?
Is there a God for God?
Sincerely, Christopher (age 9,
Titusville)
Dear Pastor,
Are there any devils on
earth? I think there may be one in my class.
Carla (age
10, Salina)
Dear Pastor,
How does God know the good people from the bad
people? Do you tell Him or does He read about it in the newspapers?
Sincerely, Marie (age
9, Lewiston)
The questions children ask are
among their most endearing — and frustrating — qualities. I remember asking
lots of questions and learning not just answers but something about the
grownups, too. Some grownups were patient and knowledgeable. Others would
pretend to know the answers … or brush my questions aside. It didn’t take long
to learn what kinds of questions should never be asked: about religion, money,
or sex. But then, there might be one adult who would look you in the eye and
tell you the Truth about Things.
One piece of truth comes
from a letter Paul wrote to the congregation in Phillipi. This was Paul’s first
established church. Phillipi was conveniently located on the main east-west
road in the Roman Empire. To paraphrase, he advised them to think about
whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable. If there is
anything worthy of praise, he said, think about these things. “Keep on doing
the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the
God of peace will be with you” (Phillippians 4:8-9)
Some people remain grounded in
their faith for a lifetime—including many of our children. Some people decide
to stay or go for reasons of peer pressure, family expectations, or political
considerations. Others move from one faith to another or within their faith to
another sect or denomination that is more compatible with their individual way
of interpreting the world.
Eric, an eighth grader, said,
"Religion doesn’t mean much to me – going to church; but I sure can stop and
wonder about things. . . .
. . . like we do in science class when we study
gravity or atoms and molecules and fission and fusion, that kind of stuff. Then
I’ll wonder how all that got going. Is there a God? Did He get it all going?
Are there other people somewhere in the universe? I guess you just wonder about
that kind of thing – and a lot of the time I stop myself and ‘get back to the
basics,’ like my dad says you’ve got to do, and leave the ‘dreaming’ to others.
But when there was this
accident right near us, and the driver got killed, and we saw her being taken
from the car – they had to cut her out, she was ‘glued in,’ a cop said – you had
to stop and ask why that happened to her. And it wasn’t her fault. A drunk guy
crossed over the white line and smashed into her, just like that!
[from an interview by Robert Coles, in The Spirituality of Children]
My step-daughter Karina learned
to ask questions at her Unitarian Universalist church. She had a different
response when she took her questioning attitude on a visit to her grandparent’s
church. The Sunday school teacher said, "God inspires people to great
achievements, like finding a cure for cancer."
Karina asked, "Why doesn’t he do it now?"
The teacher said, "That’s not for us to
understand."
Karina was getting mad, now: "What kind of God
would make us wait? And by the way, why do we have cancer anyway?
The kinds of spiritual questions Eric and Karina asked tend
to be timeless. Why should bad things happen to some of us and not to others?
The scientific part of us wants rational answers but another part of us knows
that the mystery will continue. Though we think about what is true and
commendable, we’re not really sure what that means. All we know of truth is
what we’re able to comprehend or intuit,
If you happened to catch Chuck Freeman’s radio show Soul
Talk on Thursday, you heard his interview with Gary Schumann, whom Chuck
described as a lawyer, runner, and free-wheeling thinker. Gary, also a member
of Live Oak, sees religion as an emotional state that he can access most readily
on his bicycle or on his daily runs. Doing something he loves lifts him out of
the ordinary where his mind can wander through infinity toward truth as he
perceives it.
Can you imagine yourself as child? During your infancy,
the person who held and fed you was your whole world, your God with all power
and all knowledge. If you had been totally deprived of that kind of nurture,
you would have failed to thrive. Your curiosity about the world led you to
examine specks of dust in sunlight or crumbs on the floor, your toes, and
everything within reach. Learning comes most naturally through spontaneous
play.
Maybe you sang or danced, as
children often do, unembarrassed by your audience. Maybe you explored the world
of nature by playing in the rain or snow or bringing home a wounded animal.
Maybe you acted out adult life with friends or with dolls and stuffed animals.
These early experiences of self-expression and exploration of the real world
helped form the basis of your understanding about God, the universe, and
Everything.
Whatever you did was probably
encouraged or discouraged by adults. Some kids are shamed out of their
spontaneity, yet some kids are bold enough to remain free spirits. Some kids
persevere in spite of terrible lives, yet some kids buckle under minor setbacks.
Is this not like adult life as well?
You began life’s journey as
children and "the child" still lives within you. You sometimes asked "childish
questions" that revealed remarkable maturity and wisdom. You might say that
your questions exposed the "old one" within you.
When I was a child, I needed a
place to ask questions about religion and the ways of the world. I needed a God
who heard my prayers, because I had been taught that God would do that at any
time or place. In my early church, my own questions did not get much respect.
One reason I felt comfortable with Unitarian Universalism arose from my desire
to find a place where I could continue to test the answers I had found to
religious questions. I felt affirmed and nurtured through the joys and sorrows
of my life. I had discovered a safe place for people of all ages to explore
ideas about God and other mysteries of life.
Dorothy Day remembered her
"childish questions." She believed her pilgrimage began when she was seven or
eight. After school one day her mother was telling her about children who were
dying because they didn’t have enough food. And Dorothy was about to eat a
doughnut. She asked why some children have doughnuts and some don’t. Her
mother looked sad, and resigned, and maybe even embarrassed that this is the way
the world is.
Dorothy sat there for a while,
then handed her doughnut back to her mother and asked her to send it to some
child who was hungry. Her mother said she couldn’t do that because the hungry
children were so far away. Dorothy put the doughnut down. She wondered if
maybe God could help them find someone nearby who needed food.
A couple of years later, Dorothy
was walking with her father when they passed some beggars on the street. She
asked him if they could go and buy something for them—maybe some doughnuts! He
said no, we’re in a hurry. She remembered the sadness she felt, still wondering
why some people have so much and some have so little.
Dorothy’s family was
Episcopalian, but they went to church only now and then. Dorothy decided on her
own to read and pray and try to figure out what God wanted her to do about the
world’s hunger. Eventually she converted to Catholicism. She and Peter Maurin
founded the Catholic Worker movement to serve some of the needy people of New
York City. As an adult, Dorothy felt like the same person she had been as a
little girl. She kept asking questions of her parents, friends, and mostly
herself for sixty years or so. She had found what was true and commendable for
her.
Some people are not natural born
skeptics like Dorothy. They may never think about religious questions until
they experience what some folks call a crisis of the spirit. It can happen at
any age—a major accident or illness or death. Usually it starts with the death
of a pet or a grandparent, which is relatively easy to explain. Or it might be
something nearly incomprehensible, like hundreds of children and adults dead in
Beslan, Russia or reports of genocide in Darfur. Crisis may even be
"self-inflicted," such as the mid-life realization that your self-identity is
not what you thought it was.
The spirituality of children is
not so different from our own. We may be a little more sophisticated in our
answers but the questions still reside in our hearts.
Eleven year
old Ralph writes, "Dear Pastor, I liked your sermon on Sunday. Especially when
it was finished." (age 11, Akron)
And so I
shall bring this to a close, with the assurance that our pilgrimage, begun so
long ago when we were young, will continue to bring opportunities to teach and
to learn throughout our lives.
Amen
Copyright
©2006, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church.