Reflecting on Youth Sunday

Our youth-led Sunday service that happened yesterday started at Passport Camp in early June.  One of the unique features of Passport is that the students who participate take an active role in preparing the worship sessions that we all attend each night.  Every church group gets assigned one afternoon session of worship prep during the week.  They work with the camp pastor and worship leader to develop the prayers for the night, practice reading scripture in front of a large group, learn songs to lead in worship, and write liturgies and response prayers.  The students who help plan these elements do them later that evening in the daily worship service.  

As someone who feels strongly about involving teens in the life of the church, this is one of my favorite elements of camp.  Our students always come away from these sessions energized and empowered.  They feel capable.  They feel like leaders.  Our group that attended Passport this past June talked a lot about worship prep and participation when we were debriefing.  They’ve all participated in our church’s worship services before - May Memorial is a congregation that has always supported our youngest church members reading, praying, singing, and leading in worship - but this group loved the act of planning through an entire worship service together.  “Carlisle, we want to do this kind of stuff more often.”  

In July, we had summer youth meetings at Dunkin’ Donuts and started to talk about what it would be like for the youth to plan an entire church service from start to finish.  They talked about how they could give Passport testimonies, serve as ushers for the offering, choose the hymns for the day, and write the prayers ahead of time - just like they did at camp.  When I asked them what scripture we should build around, they remembered hearing Passport’s 2023 summer pastor, Jessalyn Brown, preach on the parables of the lost things in Luke 15.  

So we studied Luke 15 together.  Over several more Dunkin’ coffee meetings we practiced lectio divinia to dive into the passage.  I brought some pages from commentary websites for them to look through.  We explored websites with collections of prayers and hymns that revolved around that particular scripture.  They came up with their central message that they took from the scripture - “God cares for all of God’s children equally.  It doesn’t matter what you’ve done or where you’ve been.  God just wants you to come back home.”  

On Sunday, September 24, your May Memorial Youth Group led worship from start to finish.  They planned, worked carefully to choose a scripture and each element that would go with it, went through hymns, practiced a lot, and yesterday - they preached God’s word to a mostly full sanctuary.  I am so incredibly proud of them and I’m so grateful. 

I’m grateful that Passport is a regular part of the cycle of our youth ministry.  Our teens grow and thrive there.  They feel safe there.  They see a diverse group of men and women lead in worship and in ministry there.  They are given unique opportunities to be the hands and feet of Jesus and to lead a group of believers in worship.  They hear that their voices and skills are essential to the Kingdom of God.    

I’m grateful for our church’s investment in our young people.  One of the incredible beauties of a church our size is that we know each other.  You all have watched these teenagers grow from nursery toddlers to proclaimers of God’s word.  They have spent their lives knowing that this is a safe place to grow and be.  They had some experience with reading and doing things in front of their church family because that’s the culture here.  This was a bigger task than they’d taken on before, but knowing the love and care you all have for them made them brave.  I’m profoundly grateful to be a part of a church family that gives its youth this kind of experience.  What a gift - as a young person - to know that the people in your church family (many who have more years of experience than you do) care about what you have to say, listen when you talk, and are willing to be led by you in worship.  

This is discipleship.  This is the Kingdom of God.  

Made to Need Each Other

I was fifteen the summer that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the gulf coasts of Mississippi and Louisiana. I remember watching TV with the rest of a horrified nation as the news about it got worse and worse.  The levvies failed, entire homes were washed away, the loss of human life was staggering.  The next time my youth group met, it was all we could talk about - how could we help?  We considered raising money or collecting things like clothes and diapers.  Everything there was such a mess, and it just didn’t seem like there was much we could do about it.  

A few months later, we were all at a youth group meeting, and our youth pastor - a wonderful man named Harald who went home to be with Jesus a few years ago - asked us how we felt about taking a trip to Mississippi in the summer of 2006 to help with the rebuilding process.  This wouldn’t be the summer camp or short term missions that we had grown accustomed to - the work would be much harder; we’d probably have to sleep in disaster relief trailers or tents; it was further from home than most of us had been before.  We all agreed and Harald and several other youth pastors from the area spent months coordinating a group of about 150 of us to go for a week in July.

The group that I was assigned to was supposed to replace a storm-damaged and rotten roof in a house that belonged to a really sweet older lady who brought us cookies and lemonade the day that we showed up to start work.  I can’t recall a week in my life that I’ve worked harder than that week in Biloxi, Mississippi in July of 2006.  I had done some mission projects that required light construction before, but the leader of that group taught me how to operate a circular saw, the right way to spread tar on roofing paper, and the correct number of nails for each shingle so that the finished project would pass a building inspection.  

I probably don’t need to tell you that, as a sixteen-year-old, I didn’t walk into this experience with the carpentry knowledge to do this work.  I had to be taught and corrected every step of the way.  By the end of the week I was doing alright, but the man who ran that work site was incredibly patient with all of us.  There’s no doubt in my mind that an experienced roofing team could have finished that job faster, but I’ll remember standing beside that house when the disaster coordinator declared that our roof had passed inspection for the rest of my life.  

I had been given an opportunity, as a very young person, to be the hands and feet of Jesus. 

I’ve been thinking about it all week, and I think the word I want to use for my second core value is mutuality.  It’s a word I first learned in high-school biology as we were taught to think about the natural cycles in the earth’s environment.  Every part of God’s good creation has a job and all the jobs depend on each other.  

That’s how I feel about church, and the work of the church, and the week that I spent roofing a house in Mississippi:  We desperately need each other to survive. 

There’s a lot that we’re called to do as God’s people.  We’re called to share the Good News, to feed the hungry, to welcome the outcast, and to be a part of righting the things that have gone wrong in our world.  That’s a tall order, and it’s a calling that runs in direct opposition to the stories our culture tells us about success.  

Our culture says that we should be entirely self-sufficient - that everything in our life should be about doing whatever it takes to take care of ourselves as efficiently as possible. It tells us that money, power, consumerism, and individualism are the best ways to make a life. 

I think God’s way is different and better for us.  From the laws for communal living in the Old Testament, to the prophets’ cries for justice, to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, to Paul talking about the necessity of the body of Christ, I think God’s design for God’s people is a life of interconnectivity.  We were made for community and made to depend on each other.  

I think we see beautiful examples of this in our local church.  It takes an entire body of believers to keep things running.  Some people are called to preaching and teaching.  Some are called to hospital visitation or serving on the finance committee.  Some are called to preparing and serving food.  We all have different skills and talents and God says that each one of them is vital to Kingdom work. Every piece of the puzzle is crucial.  

In this process - in the working out and practicing of these gifts - we learn how to take care of each other.  We do things like offer to give kids a ride home from church and show them that there are adults who care about them.  We schedule a meal train to make sure that parents who have brought their new baby home from the hospital have a freezer full of casseroles.  We rake leaves and mow grass for folks whose mobility isn’t what it once was. We see a need in our community and decide that we can meet it with our combined skills and knowledge. We serve and love each other and the world through our words and our actions.  We pass on this knowledge and this kind of life to the next generation as we show them how very good it is to take care of each other. 

I don’t think I can guarantee that this kind of Kingdom life is always efficient or that we don’t make mistakes as we learn to do it.  It would be faster and simpler for several high-capacity people to run everything and make every decision.  But that’s not what Jesus calls us to.  Jesus calls us to figure it out alongside others who are figuring it out too. 

It’s a little bit bonkers to do something like hand a sixteen-year-old a nail gun and a box of roofing nails.  She’s never done this kind of work.  She’s a little bit afraid of the ladder.  She’s going to need you to show her something more than once before she gets it right.  

But maybe it’s worth it anyway. 

Maybe she’ll learn that she’s more capable than she knew.  Maybe she’ll get to hug the lady whose roof she helped fix and realize that she can serve God and serve others even if she’s not a professional.  Maybe she’ll realize that her hands, her work, her voice matters to her church and to the whole body of believers in the world. 

She might just realize that a life lived in community, taking care of others and letting others take care of her too, is a better option than chasing money, or a big house, or thousands of Instagram followers.  

Mutuality. Connection. Serving and being served. Life in a big, messy, holy community.

A life oriented towards worshipping God and being with other people made in God’s image.  It’s what God made us for.

For Everyone Born, A Place at the Table

All parents have rules and policies in their houses, and it’s probably true that teenagers push back against the majority of them.  One policy of my mom’s that I’ll never forget, and that I actually loved was this:

 Your friends are always welcome here.   

It didn’t matter how many people I wanted to invite.  It didn’t matter if we wanted to stay up until 3:00 AM.  It didn’t even really matter if the friend was a kid that my mom thought was kind of obnoxious.  As long as I cleared the schedule with my mom, my friends were always allowed at the house.  No matter how loud we were, or how much food we ate, or how many expensive recliner chairs we broke (sorry, Momma!) 

My mom had an open door, open refrigerator, pull-up-another-chair policy.  It was a wonderful way to grow up, and it’s the way I want my son’s friends to feel at our house.  It is also one of my top core values as a pastor.  

One of the things that called me into ministry is the wide-open, bottomless, audacious love of Jesus Christ. There is no person, no creature, on this planet that is not beloved to the God who created them. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that this is a concept that we’re barely able to wrap our human minds around.  We can’t help but like some people better than others. Because of personality, proximity, or any other number of reasons, we have people we get along with and people we don’t.  We divide people up into categories because of who we are. 

But not Jesus. 

Jesus, with a calm assurance that came only from being God Incarnate, was able to see and adore the image of God in every single person.  Men and women.  Jews and Gentiles.  The influential and powerful as well as leprosy-ridden social outcasts.  Every single person Jesus encountered was welcome to be with him, touch him, and follow him as one of his disciples.  

If I believe (and I do) that Jesus, as God-with-us, is actively redeeming all things and will eventually bring them into the fullness of what they were created to be, then one of my top priorities has to be creating space for everyone.  

As I’ve reflected on this idea, I’ve come back to the final days’ of Jesus earthly life over and over again.  Of all the things that Jesus could have done in those last few hours, he washed feet and he served the Passover meal to his friends. The thing that tightens my throat and fills my eyes with tears every time is that Judas ate too.  Jesus washed Judas’ feet too.  Jesus had to know who and what Judas was at that point, and he was still welcome at that table and in that room. 

Last week, Pastor Michael wrote about Jesus being his number one.  He said that Jesus is the lens we have to use to interpret all of the rest of scripture and that striving to look like Jesus is the best work we can do. I wholeheartedly agree.  One way that I think we can do that is by making sure that everyone is welcome at our table.  

There is a lovely communion hymn written by Shirley Erena Murray, and the first verse goes like this

For everyone born, a place at the table /For every born, clean water and bread /A shelter, a space, a safe place for growing/For everyone born, a star overhead 

I am convinced that making space at the table is high and holy work.  It’s work that all of us made new in the love and grace of Jesus Christ are called to.  It’s also work that isn’t easy.  It requires us to ask hard questions of ourselves and our own beliefs.  It might make us uncomfortable and mean that we have to build bridges to people, families, and communities that we don’t understand very well.  It might mean that we have to practice what love looks to others in our actions before we feel that love. 

There is no person or church who will get this right every time.  We’ll make mistakes.  We’ll hurt peoples’ feelings and probably have our own feelings hurt.  Some stuff will get broken and the floor will probably be sticky because a kid (probably mine) has spilled something on it.  We’ll have to offer and receive forgiveness.  

But this work is worth it.  

It’s worth it because a big, open table with room for everyone is what the Kingdom of God is all about. It’s a table and a community that doesn’t care where you’ve been.   

Do you have different ideas about God than I do?  Pull up a seat, and let’s talk about it. 

Do you vote differently than I do?  You are welcome here. 

Are you the kind of person who makes jokes about bursting into flames if you cross the church’s threshold?  I promise that won’t happen and you should come in anyway.

Is your understanding of love, or justice, or any other big words different from mine?  How can we start walking towards each other? 

If this sounds crazy and impossible, it’s because it is.  The gospel is outlandish.  A love and a redemption that includes everyone doesn’t make any kind of human sense. It doesn’t have to, because with God all things are possible.  We can accept this wide, wild love and trust that the Holy Spirit will iron out all the wrinkles.  We can continue to fling open the doors and shout that there is room here.  

For everyone born, a place at the table.