Sermon Archive
You're Only Young Once
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 24 November 2002, the Feast of Christ the King and the Commissioning of Jamie Sutherland as Youth Coordinator
It was 1969, Newcastle United were playing Ujpest Dosa (I think that's how it's spelt) in the Inter Cities Fairs Cup final first leg. I, as a thirteen year old, arrived in Newcastle with a coach load of supporters from Cumbria. We were a little late and found the terraces full. Standing at the back I couldn't see a thing - everyone in front of me seemed seven feet tall. Luckily they spotted me and, lifting me over their heads, they bundled me all the way down to the front to a perfect position where I could see Newcastle score all their goals. The problem came at the end; I couldn't find my coach party. I wandered the streets of the city for about an hour and half before at last I found them. Travelling home from what should have been an exhilarating experience I was instead consumed by embarrassment and misery that I had delayed everyone for so long.
You're only young once - thank goodness! The trouble is that we all too easily see the days of our youth in soft focus. Of course, as we adults struggle to pay our way, perhaps to raise our own children and eventually to cope with the ravages of ageing and physical decrepitude, not to mention the thousand other things that cause us stress, it's easy to look back on childhood as a time of blissful innocence and irresponsibility. But I invite you to spend a few moments trying to remember some of the experiences like mine in Newcastle. What was it really like to be a child, to live without the longer perspective and thicker skin of adulthood, when things we now take for granted seemed new and frightening.
Were you afraid of the dark, and of the snakes and other monsters that lurked at the end of your bed? Do you remember feeling singled out for mockery or stigma by your classmates? Do you remember how you felt when your parents argued, the excruciating boredom of having to sit politely and listen to adult small talk - the sense of restriction, confinement by petty rules and obligations? Do you remember exams and spots and all the other confusing physiological effects of growing up, coupled with the constant sense of insecurity, wondering whether you were an acceptable, attractive person? In short, do you remember how stressful it was to be a child?
And what of faith? Can you remember your earliest experience of the Christian faith? Was it positive or negative? And if you grew up in contact with the church, who were the key people, what were the special experiences and events that allowed your sense of God to come alive? Was it home, Sunday School, perhaps even St John's Children's Service on a Sunday afternoon?
And how did you make the transition from you as a 5 year old, content to accept the assurances of adults, to you the 15 year old, exasperated by authority figures? And when, young or old, you had to face real crisis, bereavement, illness, or the realisation that life poses hard questions that do not admit of simplistic answers, where did your resources come from then? How did you emerge from this still believing?
Ours is a world with a split personality when it comes to children and childhood. It is more and more aware of the need to protect children from a whole range of dangers on the one hand, whilst on the other it absorbs them all too quickly into an adult framework of consumerism and sexuality. It wants to teach them about pluralism yet it is increasingly out of touch with the moral reasoning and fundamental values of the various faith communities that make pluralism desirable in the first place. Open-minded believers can collude with this. For whilst we want children to share our faith yet we are painfully conscious that it is faith that has too often been the cause of inhumanity and enmity.
All this leads me to conclude that children and young people nowadays need more resources not less to cope with all this. That since we are indeed only young once it is crucial that we store up in childhood some of those basic rations that will feed us in adulthood. This then is one reason why I am proud that we have appointed a Youth Coordinator. It is one of the ways in which we model our claim that we take children seriously. Not, of course, so that the Youth Coordinator can do all the work for us - the task of encouragement, care, protection, education belongs to us all.
We are only young once, it is true, but we are only old once too. I've joined various conversations over the last few months where people have pointed out, quite rightly, that if a Youth Coordinator why not a Coordinator for the Elderly? People are living longer and there is a growing number of active elderly as well as dependent elderly. Surely the church should seek to engage with the particular challenges associated with believing in old age.
This is true. And it's why a group from St John's recently joined others from St Cuthbert's to explore together appropriate ways of offering spiritual accompaniment, holy friendship to the housebound amongst others. But if I have to set priorities here, and I do, then I would suggest that our priority in terms of providing extra staffing is the young rather than the old. This is not because the housebound are unimportant, far from it, for they provide through their prayers and their steady faith a powerful force for good. We do already, of course, offer resources to this age group, through pastoral visitors and home communions, but we must also recognise that these are people who have already grown to adulthood in the church. They have done a lot of their growing up in faith and they have acquired some of the resilience they need precisely because of the foundations laid in their youth.
Mind you, the very young and the very old have certain things in common. One is that they can be equally invisible, equally inconvenient. Just as we can be irritated by a child's clumsiness and noise, so we can be irritated by an old person who does not hear very well or who walks too slowly in front of us down the street. Most parents will cherish some horror story of a hotel or restaurant that ostracises children; but it can be just as hard for an elderly person with particular needs to find a true welcome. Children are ignored, powerless, patronised, I suggest that the elderly, particularly when they live alone, can be even more vulnerable.
Today's gospel reading catalogues whole groups of similarly powerless and invisible people. Those struggling against an unfriendly environment with nothing to eat or drink, people far from home, or who are too poor to buy clothes, or sick, or in prison. It is a list with an uncomfortably contemporary ring. But what is surprising about it is that it is amongst these people that Jesus suggests we will find God. God, the unknowable, the source of all being, is to be found amongst the invisible. And the irony is that so long as we continue to allow them to be invisible to our society God will continue to be invisible to us. It resonates well with Jesus' other surprising claim that if we do not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child we cannot enter it. In other words that children are not merely important in themselves as each one precious to God but that they are one of the ways God lead us all towards the Kingdom.
Here we touch the heart of the gospel, the essence of the so-called Kingship of Christ (that traditionally we celebrate on this last Sunday before Advent). I say 'so-called' because Christ is unlike any king our world has ever known. In God's Kingdom the last come first. Brokenness and vulnerability are not merely inconvenient extras, special dispensations given to the occasional member of an otherwise exclusive club; they are a prerequisite for membership. They are dominant, central features of what it means to be God's people, to be authentically human. For brokenness, vulnerability, failure and shame are embraced by the very being of God.
In worldly terms, this is a disturbingly inclusive vision. In Christ's community those who are otherwise counted weak, despised, powerless or socially and economically invisible, become transformed instead into living signs, pathways into the dynamic and unsettling life of God.
So, our church's children, by their very nature, give us a special gift - they point us to God. In return, the gift we can give is to embody for them the love and acceptance of God. One day, please God, they will be able to look back from old age and, because of what we gave them, to celebrate the God who knew them in their mothers' wombs, their constant companion from their youth upwards.
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