By Counsel and Example

Matthew 22:15-22, I Thessalonians 1:1-10

October 19, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Did you watch the debates on Thursday night? I have to admit that the most intriguing character in that debate for me was not Bob Schieffer or Barack Obama or John McCain; no, it was Joe the Plumber! After listening for an hour and a half to both candidates talking to Joe, I felt I knew the guy (though I have since discovered he wasn’t exactly who he seemed to be), and I felt sorry for him as the candidates used him to batter each other back and forth, and as he must have tried to sort out truth from fiction in what they were promising him. I began to spin out some other people that Senators Obama and McCain might address and I began to imagine how each of them would talk to those rather different from “Joe.”

This weekend in churches and synagogues and mosques throughout this country, the Children’s Defense Fund has invited people of faith to consider a “Children’s Sabbath,” an opportunity to consider the state of children in our nation and to consider how people of faith relate to children and act on issues that affect their lives. As I considered this political season, and even more our lives here as those who nurture children in faith, I was so struck by Paul’s observation that the people of the church of Thessalonica had become an example to people across the whole of what we now know as northern Greece, an example of those who work out their faith in their lives, who labor in love, and who are steadfast in hope. He talked about how they strove to imitate their teachers in the faith as well as to imitate Jesus. And he rejoiced and gave thanks that this joy and love, faith and hope they lived had caused others to come to faith and so share this joy, this love, and this hope.

It occurred to me that this is what we are called to be for not only the children of this church, but all the children of the world. We are, de facto, examples to them, teachers of them even if we never utter a word of instruction. Children absorb what they live, not just what their teachers teach them. They hear the news; they listen to adults talking; they see how we spend money; they look at advertising; they voraciously consume content on the Internet; they observe how adults interact with one another. All of this molds what they think and who they become. What are we as adults in the US in 2008 and in the Church of the Redeemer teaching our children by our example?

So in the spirit of Joe the Plumber, I want to offer up to you this day two children from my past and consider how people of faith impacted their lives.

First, meet Chandelier. Yes, that is her name. I knew Chandelier in Baldwin, Michigan in 1984 when she was in 9^th grade. I was the pastor of the church in the next town, and since I was employed half time by a small church and did not make a living wage, I worked also as a substitute teacher in Baldwin’s high school. Chandelier, a student in an English class where I regularly subbed, is African American, at that time from a family deep in poverty, the child of a working single mom with 3 or 4 children. She was a very good student, partly because her mother, a woman of strong faith, cared deeply about education and sought to help her children move out of poverty. Her family lived in substandard housing, with no indoor plumbing and inadequate heat for Michigan winters which often featured below zero temperatures. Our local Habitat for Humanity chapter chose Chandelier’s family as the recipient of a house we were building, and so I found myself putting up aluminum siding beside Chandelier’s mother and then helping her learn how to maintain their first plumbed bathroom. As many who work on Habitat projects experience, Chandelier’s mother was continually amazed that people she did not know would help her build a house for her family, but she was not amazed when we told her our faith called us to this work. She understood completely. She hoped that Chandelier and her siblings would see and learn and so themselves come to a joyous faith wherein they would themselves be examples to others of laboring in love and being steadfast in hope.

Halfway across the country in Norwell, Massachusetts in 1998 I met Matt. Matt’s family did not attend our church, but they lived in our town and Matt came to our youth group. We had a very large youth program in Norwell and over half the teens who attended were not from our congregation. Norwell at that time was a town where many people with high-income jobs in the Boston area were building large homes in a formerly rural town in easy commuting distance to Boston. The town was almost entirely white, as were the schools, and of a fairly high socio-economic level. Interestingly enough, there was a large drug and alcohol problem in the schools, because of teens who had lots of money to spend and often inadequate parental supervision as parents worked long hours and took vacations without the kids. I learned a new term from the school social worker: trophy children. The parents of these children seemed to value them most for what they could accomplish to bring glory to the family name: athletic trophies being worth the most.

Matt would probably have been described as a trophy child. Some friends convinced him a good way to get a different experience of life would be to come to our youth group on Sunday nights and also go on the annual work trips to places like New York and West Virginia. Our talented youth pastor, Rob, and other adults who worked in the program gave Matt a different vision of what was valuable about his life. He saw how they spent their time and money and was moved by the people of much lower incomes than his parents with whom he interacted on the work trips. Instead of falling into the easy traps drugs and alcohol and endless parties and buying sprees that too many of his peers in town succumbed to, Matt found different priorities in life, partly because of people in a church of which he was not a member and in whose faith he had not been nurtured.

I don’t know what has happened in the lives of Chandelier and Matt, because I left their towns while they were still children. But when I work with church folk and children, I think of them, because there are more Chandeliers and Matts in every town who need the example of adults of faith, love and hope. When I think of them, I wonder:

· What would our society look like if we believed our children were created in the image of God and therefore neither expendable in the gun violence of our streets, nor simply potential consumers for unnecessary and possibly harmful products?

· How would our local, state and national representatives, senators, mayors, judges, alder-persons and presidents act differently if they truly understood that they are examples that can and will be imitated by the children of this country, if they thought about how their policies and practices affected the current group of Chandeliers and Matts who cannot vote, as much as they think about Joe the Plumber who can?

· How would our national economic priorities be different if we understood this?

· How would church folk respond to children and parents in our towns if we understood our role as examples and therefore evangelists for one thing or another in everything we do and say?

What an amazing group of children we have in this church, and I know you love them all very much! There are equally amazing children all over greater New Haven, indeed all over the world. When Jesus was challenged by the Pharisees with that coin, he gave a surprise response: Give to the emperor what has his face on it, but give to God what has God’s face on it. That would be everything that God has created, including you, including our children. Perhaps the most famous quote associated with the Children’s Defense Fund is Marion Wright Edelman’s question, “And aren’t they all our children?” What a call we have to be those who by our counsel and example, as the baptismal service says, help children to discover the joy those Thessalonians knew and lived. By the way we live and speak, by the way we treat them and each other here and everywhere, to show forth lives filled with works of faith, labors of love, and deep wells of steadfast hope. When they see that, like Chandelier and Matt, they will see and understand God working in the world more profoundly than in any theological teaching we give them.

Although from time to time when children are brought to baptism, parents will choose godparents to stand with them, in our tradition the entire congregation is understood to be godparents to our children. We make a little response at each baptism where we say we promise these children our “love, support and care.” That’s nice, but I’m beginning to think it would be better to use the words the Book of Worship sets aside for sponsors of older children and adults. It’s on page 34 at the front of the hymnal if you want to look it up. The question is this: “Are you ready, with God’s help, to guide and encourage this person by counsel and example, in prayer and with love, to follow the way of Jesus Christ?” Think about what that says, and then I’m going to ask it again. If you think you are ready, like those Thessalonian Christians, then the first response is “I am.” The second response is the rest of your life.

Are you ready with God’s help to guide and encourage all our children by counsel and example, in prayer and with love, to follow the way of Jesus Christ? I am. Amen.