Someone was overheard complaining, “Every year I plant my roses in front of my house and every year, the neighbour’s stupid dog digs them up.” Whereupon another commented, “Well, I’m not so sure about the stupidity of the dog, but I do wonder about the intelligence of the person who keeps planting the roses in the same place.”

Nehemiah 8:1-10
Psalm 19

I intend to offer some thoughts today on the place of youth in the church. Now this can be a touchy subject, because
1) talking about any one subset of a group such as - for example - the men, ethnic minorities or the young can be taken as implying something about the corresponding groups: the women, the Anglo-Europeans or the old -- or because 2) some might say "Hey, who are you calling old? Are you saying I'm not a youth?"

Well, I'm going to leave it to you to decide which category you inhabit.

It's a generalization to say that the old care about the past and the young care about the future. It makes sense because the majority of an older person's lifespan has been spent in the past and the majority of a young person's lies in the future.

BUT it's still so much of a generalization as not to be that helpful. It's based on the assumption that each group is primarily motivated by self-interest which is not true of every individual.

For example an adopted teenager may care deeply about questions of the past, because of a longing for identity.

A grandparent might have great concern for the future of the Church, of society, of the planet when he looks at the hopeful eyes of his grandchild.

[I suppose my reason for leaving this part out was because I'm not convinced that any but the exceptional few, even in the Church, are motivated most of the time by anything other than self-interest -- and yet I lacked the courage to say so straight out in this my first sermon to this congregation. To say it as written would have been coy. Besides, the whole question merits more thought. After all, I've not actually conducted a statistically sound study on the subject.

In the Nehemiah passage the Law was read aloud to ALL of the people, not just the men, but also the women and any children old enough to understand (and stand up for six hours straight).

King David in Ps. 19 celebrates God's revealing of Himself through nature AND the Law. The Law, Torah, doesn't refer only to all the rules, but to the whole story of God's interacting with people, especially the Family of Abraham, especially Israel, as given in the first five books of the Old Testament (pretty much David's Bible).

It does include the rules, though, too and so we should remember that somehow David found delight in "Do not boil a goat in its mother's milk", "Do not shave the corners of your beard", "Do not make a coat of two kinds of cloth.". At this point in the history of God's relationship with Humanity we do not have the same focus on these matters, but I believe David understood something, though I'm not sure what, about how these conveyed the character of God and His concern for us. Again it's not our focus, but there is benefit to the study of the Law for this reason.

So at the renewal of Jewish life in Jerusalem in Nehemiah, it was important to re-orient everyone, adults and youth, by recounting what God had done for them in the past, thereby also reminding them of His expectations for them – and not just say “Okay, we’re starting over. Forget everything in the past.”

In David's case he found joy in the Law (in Ps. 19. In Ps. 51 God's righteousness brought him sorrow in light of his sin, causing him to call out to God to RENEW his joy in v. 12).

Nehemiah's people reacted with weeping, probably out of a sense of failure in light of God's standards. But they were instructed not to remain in that despair, but to receive God's Law with joy. They were not to stop at looking to their past history of God’s goodness and their failure, but to move on with hope and joy in what God intended for their future and in so doing find the strength to accomplish it.

Guilt does not empower us to obedience. But it brings us to the point of receiving Grace, which brings us Joy, which does empower us.

-- or possibly they were weeping because they had to stand through a six hour sermon with no jokes.

[In the 10:30 service I added that, in fact, I had begun with a joke, i.e. taking off my watch and putting it before me on the pulpit.]

Luke 4:14-21

I found the Gospel reading fascinating because of how it differs from Mark and Matthew’s versions.

Because I believe all four Gospel writers to be inspired by God, I conclude that Mark and Matthew were not deceitful or mistaken in giving the impression that the people of Nazareth thought Jesus was a presumptuous local boy, getting too big for His sandals. I suppose there was an element of that.

But Luke gives us an expanded version, one that is more nuanced, as we like to say and indicates that there was more to their offended feelings than that.

He says that after Jesus read from Isaiah and even made something of a Messianic claim, the people were amazed and all of them spoke well of Him. Yes, they were amazed that He was a local boy, but at this point their reaction appears to be positive.

This would seem to be a good place to stop. So why doesn’t He? Instead He tells them that they are going to say something which they actually have not said yet – and which they are NEVER recorded as saying, not even in Mark or Matthew’s accounts of this.

Is this divine mind-reading or is Jesus just shooting fish in a barrel, because He grew up there and He knows what His townspeople were like? I think it’s safe to assume that they were not especially evil people, but were regular God-believing people who lived their lives in the relatively honest way that most of us do. Did Jesus even know that at the end of this they were going to be attempted-murderers?!! That they would try to kill one of their own people – just for something He said?

So I suggest that at this point they were amazed and speaking well, but were harbouring the cynical thoughts Jesus mentioned. But why stir up these thoughts and why make it even worse, as He goes on to do?

Luke’s version shows them getting angry when Jesus points out that God works in the lives of Gentiles as well as Jews. They were probably happy to hear Jesus proclaim this 600 year old message that God wanted to free captives – and even say that it was being fulfilled in their time. They would conceive of themselves as captives, under Roman occupation. Amen, kid, preach it!

But no, Jesus’ fulfillment of that prophecy would go much, much further and in a way that His people did not like.

I hesitate ever to answer dogmatically questions about WHY Jesus did any of the baffling things He did, but I will suggest two ideas about this:

1) It wasn’t to get Himself killed, because that was slated for later and so He escapes this time, but perhaps it was to get the ball rolling in that direction.

2) His people in hearing the Word of the Lord over and over each week for decades in some cases had some sense of God’s vision for the future, but tended to interpret it over and over again the same way according to their upbringing and saw this much [small hand gesture] of the vision. Jesus wanted to expand their minds and ours to way beyond that [wide hand gesture].

The Law, the O.T., the prophecies needed to be heard and to be honoured. Jesus did not come to throw them away – they are still in our Bibles—but He did come to move them even further in the same direction. That is so obvious to us now, looking back, but His contemporaries found it very hard to see how it was so. I contend that we would have the same difficulty in their sandals.

I Cor. 12:12-31a

What do we learn about the place of youth in the Church from the Body analogy of 1 Cor. 12?

We learn that the place of youth is to be valued, respected, listened to, because that is the place of every believer in the body. As Matt pointed out on Wed. it does not say “Each of you is a part of the body IF … if you do this or that or have accomplished this or that.” It just says that the believers hearing that passage were the Body of Christ and each a member of it.

But conveying to each person the sense that they are valued and listened to is not easy, when sometimes people have not only differing but conflicting ideas about an issue or how things should be generally.

A quick suggestion: each of us should try to distinguish carefully our matters of preference and comfort from those matters of conviction and truth – and even then choose carefully which of those matters most – which hill to die on, as some say. Out of love for one another we can learn to surrender on the matters of preference. I would suggest that that is an important lesson to teach our young people and it’s best done by example.

But that distinction isn’t always easy and we are still left with difficulties in listening to one another.

It calls for maturity – which I define as accepting responsibility for oneself and being able to defer one’s own comfort for a greater good. Babies cry as soon as they are hungry. Adults learn that often the meals we wait a longer time for are better. But we don’t blame babies for crying; we nurture and teach them.

Now in addressing maturity in the VFTP I think I gave some people the wrong impression, which I did not intend. I may have sounded as if I *want* some people to die in the next ten or fifteen years.

So I will try to state it in a more positive way. What do we all want – what is our vision – for this church 10/15 years down the road? Let’s imagine that all of us will in fact still be alive and here at that time.

What do we hope for the young people among us today? We hope that they will be living faithfully for Jesus. Maybe they will be serving Him on the mission field. Maybe they will be serving Him in a so-called secular job either here or in another town. Maybe for various reasons they will choose to worship with another church family. As long as they are faithful to the Lord, we can live with that, right? But honestly we hope that they don’t *all* do that. Our vision is that 10/15 years from now L---- O--------- will be here with her millionaire husband, raising their well-behaved quintuplets in this Sunday School, right?

And the fact is that – to use myself as a safe example of an older person – statistically speaking, it’s more likely that L---- will be alive than I will be. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be listened to, just because I’m on the downward slope, but when we picture L---- sitting there in the future with her quints, certainly we need to be listening to her now and not waiting until the day she meets the millionaire.

Summary

1) Neh & Ps. 19. We need to hear our history -- the story of God's relationship with us -- which, of necessity, will normally be passed on from the elders to the younger and let it have its effect on us.

2) Luke. We need to hear God's vision of our future, which may come through the mouths of the next generation, which may challenge our previous boundaries. This may not always go well, but I guess we can't expect to do better than Jesus did.

3) Corinthians. We need to value and respect both.

1 Cor. 13

Of course the I Cor. 12 passage leads us into the “better way” of I Cor. 13, that of love – not just worshipful feelings for God, but practical respect and mutual submission for each other.

So concluding in generalized terms let me say

“If I am a wise, older person who has worked hard for my Lord and church for decades and if I have a deep appreciation for all the beauty and pain of our Christian history and how that has been thoughtfully passed on to us, but have not love for those who just don’t seem to appreciate all this – or me, I am nothing.”

“If I am a zealous, young person full of passion and a burning desire to impact the world for Christ and a willingness to make waves for the Kingdom, but have not love for those who just seem to be standing in the way, then I am clanging cymbal or a jangling guitar.”

Love one another. Love one another. Love one another.