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Called
Children’s Sunday
Matthew 4:18-25
Jesus calls his first disciples from their narrowly defined but typically Galilean lives. They are fishermen, the sons of fishermen, the grandsons of fishermen. Their world is narrowly defined to their families and their work and the towns in which they live and the sea in which they fish. And then Jesus comes along and calls them away from all that. When James and John follow him, they not only leave their nets behind, they leave their father behind. Jesus invites them to a world larger than Galilee and a family larger than blood and kinship. And in a whirlwind, they go from their small lives as fishermen to the disciples of a man who heals the sick and casts out demons, who turns the world upside down wherever he goes. They find themselves across the sea in Syria and Decapolis, among Gentiles and sophisticated Romanized Jews. The change is dizzying.
But at some level they wanted it—wanted it badly—else why would they have left everything they knew and understood in order to follow a man who simply said to them this enigmatic phrase, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
The calling to which Jesus calls us is always away from the narrowly defined world in which we tend to live, and into the larger world with its challenges and responsibilities; always away from family narrowly defined as those with whom we share roots or kinship and into family broadly defined as the people whom Christ loves.
For those of us who are parents, that’s a responsibility we take seriously—to train up our children so that when the time comes they can leave the safe confines of home and family and step out to take responsibility for themselves and for others in the larger world. But we also know that we have some ambivalence about that. At some level, we want to keep them with us, to keep them safe and to keep the family unit we’ve developed intact and set in amber. And the child at one level doesn’t want to leave, either, to enter that world where they have responsibilities and they don’t have that parental safety net to fall back on.
That’s also a dynamic at work as we raise our kids in the church. We spend a lot of time and money and love to bring these kids up in the faith, through baptism and Sunday school and confirmation and youth programs and mission trips—and then off they go to college or to jobs or the real world and maybe they occasionally check in with us on Facebook. It’s a bit of a loss. We often don’t know what happens with them. We wonder if the church left a legacy, if the Gospel made a difference in their lives. So let me tell you a story.
I was associate pastor and youth minister of Concord Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, DE in the early and mid-nineties. This was the age of Goth and Grunge Rock and the X-Files. I had a lot of good kids in that group, but one particular kid stood out—Lauren. Lauren was adopted and proud of it. She said that she knew her adoptive parents really loved her because they chose her. Her parents didn’t come to church, and she’d chosen entirely on her own to participate in confirmation and become part of the youth group. She was bright and pretty and a member of the swim team at school. She was there for every youth event, particularly if it involved helping others. She was particularly interested in the clown ministry I had going and became my clown assistant, learning a lot of the skits. She was Sara Caitlin’s baby-sitter. She was a regular with the youth group when we’d serve at Peacemeal, which was a ministry that provided meals and services to those with HIV/AIDS. Back then, as I’m sure many of you remember, that was almost certainly a death sentence, and those young people had some eye-opening experiences that caused them to grow up a bit faster than normal.
When our family moved to Bethesda, Lauren stayed in touch. She went to college about five miles from us at American University. She theoretically attended my church—that is, she did like a lot of kids do in college, she showed up at church once in a blue moon when she hadn’t been out too late the night before. She met an older lady at church with health issues and became her friend and a bit of a caregiver to her, the same way she used to help the folks at Peacemeal.
Lauren graduated and moved to San Francisco, becoming a public relations professional. She is highly successful now and has her own agency. But her heart has continued to stay with serving others in need, particularly children. She does a lot of pro-bono work for charities, raising millions of dollars for causes that help poor children and children with disabilities. She goes to a Presbyterian Church in Oakland. But not only that, her spirituality matters to her. She has become one of the most spiritual people I have ever known. She has kept her Christian faith but expanded it with Eastern practices and spirituality. She is now a professional yoga instructor and last year she travelled to India to study for a month under a prominent Maharishi, or spiritual leader. It’s not exactly the normal way you and I would stay spiritual, but it works beautifully for her. She is one of the most amazing and beautiful people anyone could meet, inside and out. And she constantly says that it’s because of that youth program she started in 1994 at Concord Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, DE. Because of that program, the world has become her home, and the place where her values and compassion are actively making a difference.
Jesus has a wonderful parable that we traditionally call, “The seed growing secretly”(Mark 4: 26-27):
And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows– how, he knows not how. “The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head.”
The seeds we plant here today with this service, the seeds we plant with confirmation and youth group and mission trips and who knows what all—they sprout secretly, inside the child, we know not how. But they bear fruit, the fruit of the Kingdom, fruit from the seed that by God’s grace we have had the chance to plant; fruit for the world.