INTERGENERATIONAL CONGREGATION: When Your Children Ask You (17th Sunday after Pentecost; Exodus 12:21-28; September 11, 2016)

When Your Children Ask You

17th Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 12:21-28
September 11, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Five core values. It sounds familiar. Mission statements, core values, strategic goals: all of them fancy phrases that sound like they were invented by consultants who are trying to justify their high fees. Church management, like its older sibling business management, churns out jargon. Every few years the latest thing comes off the presses and soon everyone is talking the latest language.

I sound pretty cynical, I know. But I've been around this business long enough to have gone through several earth-shaking, paradigm-shattering management fads. They tend to blend together. Oh, what is it this time? Development paths? Well, all right then! The higher-ups are all excited, or at very least it is clear that they expect me to be excited. And, who knows? Maybe there is something useful to be gained from the re-packaging and re-branding.

I actually heard a church administration consultant say something useful. She was talking about staff supervision, but I think it applies to any part of our institutional life: staff job descriptions, budgets, or program development. She said, "It's not the document that counts; it's the conversation."

We have a statement of five core values. They are themselves the product of a lot of conversation, some of it in the planning committee, some of it in the Administrative Council, some of it among anyone in the congregation who was interested and available. The statement is good, as good as anything I've ever seen, but the statement doesn't really count. It's just a document. It only counts if it spurs us to conversation and if we let the conversation carry us forward.

The five core values statement grew out of the questions that we asked several months ago. We shared the responses early this year on lists posted around the sanctuary. Then you tagged the statements that rang most true for you with sticker dots. Then the planning group sorted the statements and arranged them by theme. As we did that we realized that what we had was a statement of what we value in First United Methodist Church. The list is not a referendum on our programs or proposals for future ministry. It’s a list of what is important. Programs come and go. So do pastors. Values are more permanent.

And they are helpful when we know what they are. They can guide us as we make decisions. They can help us understand ourselves and explain ourselves to others. They can spur our ministries forward as we imagine what these values would look like fully enfleshed. They can give our shared life greater focus without constraining us to a tight agenda that would be out of date by the time it was drafted and published.

I struggled a little about the order of presentation, but this week at least is settled, because we begin a new Sunday School year and present Bibles to our fourth graders. That's pretty intergenerational, I think.

The Bible doesn't spend a great deal of ink talking about children. In the ancient world children were mostly invisible. Stories about children were mostly stories about the early detection of an adult's character and fate. "The boy is the father of the man" was a popular way of saying it.

But there are a few times when children come into view in ways that actually take seriously their need to learn the culture of faith, their need for identity-formation as members of the people of God. Our reading this morning is one of them.

The passage is part of a larger unit of the text that remembers the deliverance of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. At the center of that story is a meal--the Seder meal, or Pesach--and at the center of the instructions for the meal is a reminder that children need to understand why this ritual meal is celebrated.

Unlike the Christian ritual meal, the Eucharist, the setting for this Jewish meal is in the homes of the community's families. Three or four generations were gathered at the Seder. In the story this meal would have been new to everyone at the table, but later when they "enter[ed] the land that the Lord [had] promised to give to [them]" there would have been layers of experience. The oldest generation would remember decades of Seder meals. Their memories would trace their own path from when they themselves asked the questions through their maturity as adults and parents to their place as the guardians of wisdom in their families and communities. The youngest children might well have been agog at the unusual actions taken in preparation for and participation in this meal. They might indeed have asked the question, "What does this ritual mean to you?"

Later in the life of the Jewish people, the rituals around Passover were standardized and part of that process included providing a place in the ritual itself for the question. It was expanded until, in one version of the ritual, one of the children present asks:

Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights, we eat either leavened or matzoh; on this night--only matzoh. On all other nights, we eat all kinds of herbs; on this night, we especially eat bitter herbs. On all other nights, we do not dip herbs at all; on this night we dip them twice. On all other nights, we eat in an ordinary manner; tonight we dine with special ceremony.

In this model of religious education, how does a child become a fully-participating member of the community? By fully participating in the ritual action of the community and by being allowed to ask questions of adults who are prepared to give appropriate answers.

This question--and its presence in the Seder meal--is a token of a total approach to religious education. There will be questions all along the way. "Mama, Jimmy had pork chops last night. He said there were really good. Why don't we ever have pork chops?" "Papa, Louisa's family has a Christmas tree decorated with pretty ornaments and colored lights. On Christmas everyone gets presents. Why don't we have a Christmas tree? Why don't we get presents?" "Rabbi, why do we have to learn Hebrew?" Good questions, all of them. And the community expects that any adult would be able to answer them or take the asker of the question to someone who can.

The Jewish people live a multiple-generational and even inter-generational life. Children learn from adults about the how and the why of their way of life. Adults reconnect with the deep meaning of that life through the experiences of children. Adults bring rational thought and mature emotion to the relationship; children bring the magic. Both are needed. Each generation must show the next their way of life and tell about it as well. Show and tell is at the heart of religious education. The adult generation must not allow this process to fail. The Jewish people are not allowed to not teach their children.

We're not so different:

As a congregation we value the relationships that are formed between different generations which nurture each person's spirit and create a sense of belonging.

We are a congregation that aspires to inter-generational life. We value inter-generational relationships for at least a couple of reasons. It is in fact a biblical value, one that is most often taken for granted, hardly ever noticed, but almost always present. It is also part of our own experience in families. How does someone become a Caldwell? You can be born into the family or you can marry into it. But then, what? You become a Caldwell by living with Caldwell's (which is the principal reason there are so few of them). You learn (and contribute to) the specialized dialect of English spoken by Caldwell's. You listen to the stories told at family gatherings. You do what the Caldwell's do.

There aren't any classes you can take; there are no books to read, no websites with links to the knowledge you hope to acquire. Being a Caldwell is caught more than taught. To date, there is no known cure, only treatment to help you live a relatively normal life in spite of it. Maybe you this sounds familiar.

We value inter-generational relationships. And for good reason: they are the principle means by which identity as a Jesus-follower is formed. Just as the Jewish Seder imagines Jewish identity being formed by conversation between the elders of a family and its youngest members, so does the Rite of Baptism imagine Christian identity being formed by the relationship between an infant being baptized and her parents and baptismal sponsors:

Will you nurture these children in Christ's holy church, that by your teaching and example [that's just a phrase that means "show and tell"] they may be guided to accept God's grace for themselves, to profess their faith openly, and to lead a Christian life?

we ask. And the parents and sponsors reply "I will".

As important as Sunday School is and as useful as a Sunday School class might be for some things, to put the full weight of our efforts at forming Christian identity on it is simply doomed to failure. Consider this: Suppose that parents brought their children to Sunday School every time it met from birth to age eighteen. Never mind that we don't start classes at birth and haven't had a Senior High class for years. Add up the hours that each child would spend in a Christian Education classroom setting. How many years would a child have to go to public school in order to accumulate the same number of hours? Just think about that for a moment.

When I do the math, here's what I come up with: One hour a week for 34 weeks for each of 18 years comes to 452 hours of Sunday School. Divide this total by 7 hours a day of public school and we have an equivalent of 65 days of school. This year the sixty-fifth day of school falls on December 6. To summarize: weekly attendance at Sunday School for eighteen years yields the same amount of face-to-face classroom time as attending Kindergarten through the first week of December. The good work that the Sunday School does is simply not enough.

There are historical reasons for our relying on Sunday Schools to do the Christian Education heavy lifting. There are also reasons to see that we need a different model. And, after all, we've only had Sunday School for two hundred thirty-two years. It's not as if we've always had it!

What if we took inter-generational relationships seriously as the main carrier of education? What if we moved from the more head-centered focus of the classroom to a more relational understanding of education? What if we put more focus on households as the place where most identity-formation happens? What if we asked of each ministry of the church that it foster forming inter-generational relationships on purpose and not simply as a happy accident? What if, for example, when we have a church cleanup day, we put together cleaning teams with three generations wherever possible, and not necessarily three generations from the same family? What if parents knew when they brought their young children with them to church, that there would be other adults, especially older adults, who would be willing and even eager to sit with those young children? What if parents were free to worship as grownups knowing that their children were safe, loved, and fully participating?

The culture of our community often works against forming deep inter-generational relationships. Parents and grandparents go to work or "work" at retirement while children are segregated with their own cohorts in schools. Parents and grandparents sit in the bleachers and watch as their children perform in sporting events. Neither of these scenarios gives much time for forming relationships. And what about the many, many families who do not have grandparents living nearby or the grandparents whose grandchildren live a half-continent away? What if we could help those "orphaned" generations get together and come to value each other? What if there were someone who could explain to me what Pokémon-Go is all about?

What if coming to church brought people into a space where these relationships were valued and where the work of transmitting and transforming culture and identity were on the agenda? What if we extended the length of our morning gathering to include time for generations to learn together around the theme of the worship service?

What if? What if? Well, you can keep this going! And, if an answer that embodies our core value of inter-generational relationships emerges, grabs you, and wrestles you to the ground, you may well have become the custodian of a Bubble-Up ministry. Let's talk!

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