Luke 5:1-11
Our Gospel story today made me think of youth ministry. When it comes to youth ministry a lot of congregations feel like the soon to be apostles in this story. We’ve done that, we’ve tried that and we don’t seem to be landing many fish. It gets frustrating. I think that’s probably why the apostles were willing to take a break and let Jesus use their boats as a platform for his teaching. They were just tired, quite literally tired, of working so hard and not seeming to get anywhere.
So what was different this time? This sounds terribly simplistic and very Christian cliché but I think the difference is that this time they did it with Jesus. Certainly Simon, who of course becomes Peter, is convinced that the difference is Jesus. In fact he finds the whole thing more than a little scary. Keeping Jesus as a fishing partner still is a pretty scary concept. But it’s a successful concept so we really need to deal with it.
So how then do we find the inspiration to cast out our nets one more time in the places we’ve fished before? That comes back to a simple concept that I see throughout Jesus’s ministry. Today we call that concept relationship.
Ministry is about relationship. Our life in faith is about relationship. We are told that when 2 or 3 are gathered together God will be among us. I would suggest that when 2 or 3 of us are gathered together we need to figure out relationship. As I was writing this sermon I was listening to one of my favorite music acts Jimmy Buffett. There’s a line in his song “Fruitcakes” that says “Relationships. We all got em, We all want em, what do we do with them?”
Think about it. When you hear a young person say “Stop treating me like a little kid” they’re talking about relationship. When they say “I want to be treated more like an adult” they’re talking about relationship. When they tell us that we haven’t made them feel the holiness of our worship, when they tell us that we haven’t made them feel a part of the community of faith, when they tell us that we are not touching their hearts, challenging their intellect and inspiring their souls, in other words when they tell us that we are boring them, they are talking about a failed relationship.
Some folks start getting nervous when they hear youth ministers talking like this. It sounds like I’m about to turn the church over to the kids. To their kind of music and their kind of language. To create something that will be totally alien to many of the older members of the congregation. But that would simply create a new failed relationship to replace the old. No, rather what I want to suggest is that we all remember that relationship is a two way street. If you’ve ever been in a relationship, whether professional or romantic or whatever, where you were expected to give and give and give and the other person never gave back you know just how horrible that situation can be.
Relationships must be a two way street if they are to succeed. So the relationship in a church between all the members must include all the members. That means it can’t be totally youth oriented but it also can’t be totally adult oriented. Now it might surprise you who I think needs to take a least part of the responsibility for this, in fact the group that I think has been given too much of a free ride in the equation.
Relationships must be a two way street if they are to succeed. So the relationship in a church between all the members must include all the members. That means it can’t be totally youth oriented but it also can’t be totally adult oriented. Now it might surprise you who I think needs to take a least part of the responsibility for this, in fact the group that I think has been given too much of a free ride in the equation.
I’m talking about the youth. That’s right young people I’m talking to you. You need to understand something. This isn’t the adults church. At least not theirs only. You were in all likelihood already baptized into the body of Christ. At that moment you became a member, you were invited into the relationship that we call a community of faith, a church. What happens here on Sunday and every other day is just as much yours as it is theirs So are you making your voice heard? Are you asking questions? Do you know why we do all this stuff every Sunday? Do you understand why we say somethings, what we mean when we say them? You ought to, because some of what goes on here is a statement of who we are, what we believe and what we claim we are doing out in the world when we leave this place. So if you don’t know you need to ask.
Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Assuming that St. Mark’s Episcopal church in Leroy New York is about average there’s a fair number of the adults sitting around you who don’t know the answers to your questions. You see we learned to say it when we were young and we’ve been saying it for years. There’s a comfort in that, don’t get me wrong, there can even be some profound spiritual value in that. The problem is that it leaves you with a little sharp irritation in your mind just the way getting a stone in your shoe hurts your foot. So part of your responsibility to this relationship is to ask those questions so that the adults can finally eliminate some of those little mental and spiritual stones from their lives.
Now at this point I anticipate at least a few adults thinking “Great Jay, now you just dredged up a whole slew of questions that I’m going to have to deal with!” Yes, I have. And some of you are realizing that you just might be, you ARE one of those people who don’t really know the answers to the whys and wherefores. So you’re really NOT looking forward to being asked one of those questions. So here’s my question to you.
Why don’t you know the answers? I am absolutely NOT picking on you here. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that I’m not prepared to answer any and all questions from our youth. I’ve been an Episcopalian virtually all of my life. I was baptized exactly 28 days after I was born. So this is it, this is what I know, this is what I’ve done when it comes to faith and religion and church. About 20 year ago I answered a call to be a teacher and mentor to young people. Virtually immediately they started asking me questions. Questions about faith and church. Questions for which I didn’t have the foggiest idea what the answers might be. And that made me feel bad because it made me feel stupid and insufficient. No one likes feeling stupid and insufficient. Which is why we as adults too often come up with the “answers” that our young people hate so much. You know the ones. “Because that’s the way we do it. That’s the way we’ve always done. Because I said so”.
So how should we answer these questions?
Well in true and good Episcopal fashion our eyes will immediately travel in the direction of the clergy. I mean why not? They’re supposed to be the experts, right? Let me say that while that our ordained brothers and sisters are a wonderful resource they are not, should not, must not be the only resource.
Recently I read an article about what it means to be an expert. Being an expert, the article said, has very little to do with intelligence or education. Have you ever heard some one’s expertise being referred to as just “book smarts”? It means they lack the real life quality of something called experience. It is the experience of faith that everyone in this room has that gives us all some level of expertise. Experience is an ongoing process. That means that current experience has some value. That means that the experience of our younger brothers and sisters has value in the equation of what we as the church are attempting to create. It also means that the experience of years already lived also has experience. But neither is complete without the other.
As an example let me look at the experience of being a 16 year old. I don’t know if we have any 16 year olds in church this morning but compare the experience of that person with my experience of being 16 year sold back in 1974. In 1974 we certainly did not have cable TV, we might have just gotten our first VCR. A computer in the house? No way. In fact hand held calculators were still pretty much cutting edge technology. There was no AIDS epidemic for that 16 year old to worry about. Life was much slower and less programmed than the average life for a teenager today. So our 16 year might be excused for thinking that I don’t have much useful to tell them about being 16 years old. In fact somethings are pretty much exactly the same. The physical processes, a great many of the social issues are not all that different in just 24 years. The relationship issues between the genders that I see among our young people looks a great deal like what I remember from when I was that age.
In the same way the church has been through a great deal in all these years. Not just in our lifetimes. Think about it the experience of Christ’s church in the world is one of an organization that has survived almost two thousand years. We have survived, and continue to survive, governments that want us dead and eradicated from the face of the earth. We have survived natural disaster and the fall of civilizations. Great powers have come and gone and the faith has continued on. Banged and bruised and occasionally shamed when we do not live up to the ideals that we claim. This faith has carried forward not only the church but the individual members who have faced down great personal challenges, catastrophic health issues, financial disaster, heartbreak and even death.
It is our combined experience, both past and present that offers our faith the vitality to continue on, to give us strength, to give us direction, to give us support in hard times. It is that combined experience that helps us to find the answers we seek and also to confront us with questions. Especially the ones we may seek to avoid, the ones that we don’t think we can answer on our own.
It is from of all of that that the direction of youth ministry must arise. You were wondering if I was going to make it back to youth ministry, weren’t you ? It is out of accepting the questions, of drawing on the experience of the past and honoring the experience of the present. By bringing all of that together in the presence of Christ we can find the way forward that calls upon the wisdom of the mighty cloud of witnesses that has gone before us without ignoring the witness of those who we called to care for today.
I will take just a moment here at the end of our time this morning to remind you that you are not alone in this process. As your diocesan youth missioner I can tell you that the purpose of all the diocesan programs is to return your young people to THIS community a little more experienced in the life in faith. Our goal is always to work with you to prosper your young people in widening their experience of what it means to be an Episcopalian in western New York, to be a person of faith and a follower of Christ in the wider world. For us to be able to help you we need you, both adult and youth alike, to make the commitment to come and share your experience with us. Join us at camp starting with Sleep Away, Junior High and Senior High. Think about the possibilities of a mission trip like the one being planned for this summer, Happening weekends and so much more. That’s more of the church waiting to be experienced, more questions to be posed and answers sought. And make sure that there is no barrier to your younger brothers and sisters in gaining that experience for this community of faith.
In the end what I have to offer you is an invitation. An invitation to a larger experience as we work on learning to fish together in the presence of Christ.
Amen.
February 7, 2010
St. Mark’s Episcopal LeRoy NY
Stories Are My Life 
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