April 29, 2007

At the time of our Confirmands birth, Charles Barkley was one of the superstars of professional basketball. He was the MVP of the NBA in 1993. He is one of four players to score

20,000 points, and have 10,000 rebounds & 4000 assists. The other three are Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt "the Stilts" Chamberlain, and Karl "Mailman" Malone.

Barkley's vitality and tenacity earned him a nickname as well: Sir Charles. Sir Charles had attitude, before "attitude" was even an expression in its contemporary context. Barkley was one of the bad boys of basketball, at least by the standards of a decade ago, easily surpassed by a new generation of angry young multi-millionaires playing the sport today. Barkley, back in his controversial prime, when playing with the Phoenix Suns, made the remark, "I am not a role model." Nike, for whom Barkley was also under contract, capitalized on this notoriety and made a commercial in which Barkley says to the camera, "I am not a role model."

The commercial clip then unfolded with an action shot of Barkley dribbling the ball around the floor. He stops and again says, "I am not paid to be a role model." More dribbling, stops again, "I am paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court."

He then dribbles downcourt with the throwaway comment, "Parents should be role models." Caboom, he slam dunks the ball and concludes, "Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids."

Well, he makes a point. Worth considering. Parents should be role models. Nevertheless, in spite of Sir Charles protest, he is a role model as well. That's why Nike paid him millions of dollars. If Charles Barkley wears Nikes, so will you. We want to walk in Sir Charles' footsteps. If not a role model, he is at least a fashion or footwear model.

What Barkley is saying is he does not want the responsibility of modeling morality and character. It is what we want. We are nostalgic for the time when sports heroes, celebrities and politicians modeled the values we all held in common and wanted our children to have.

Never mind this nostalgia is fat with fantasy. The Babe liked his brew long before Bonds was popping steroids. Barkley's comment concludes this no longer exists. We no longer live in a society where the secular culture, including the sports world we worship, supports the values we as Christians think are important. If it ever did.

Will Willimon, the prolific religious writer and longtime chaplain at Duke University, now a Methodist Bishop, writes he realized secularism had finally triumphed when the movie theater in Greenville, South Carolina, announced it would stay open on Sundays. This was in 1963, thirty years before our present Confirmands were born.

Willimon is suggesting that Greenville, S.C., was the last pocket of resistance against the wave of secularism in our society. When Greenville fell, the last "blue laws" fell from the books. "Blue laws" were the name for those rigid community rules through which the Church imposed its morality upon the culture. Stores would not be open on Sunday, remember? Theaters closed. "Blue laws." They do not exist any more. Our Confirmands grew up playing soccer on Sunday mornings, as the Church exists as an island in a sea of secularism.

Look around. You may be weird in your neighborhood to be in church this morning. Fewer attend church, and those of you who do, attend less often. If this concerns you, and I hope it does, take heart. This is the condition that existed 2000 years ago when the Church was founded, and first began confirming persons into membership.

You see, back then Confirmation came in the form of baptism. The first Christians had no opportunity to be baptized as babies, so as adults they attended baptismal classes, the conclusion of which they were confirmed into Church membership by the rite of baptism.

Baptism was an acknowledgment that the Church is different from the world. The values we hold are different than the values of the world. Christians live by a different standard of behavior. In the world all things are permissible, which means role models are not necessary. In the Church not all things are permissible. When we join the church we renounce the standards of the world and pledge our loyalty to the ways of Christ, who is our role model.

The baptismal waters symbolize this, serving to wash away the world, putting off the past, and cleansing us for the future. Anointing the forehead with the sign of the cross says, "We belong to Christ." It means we know and accept we were called to different standards than the standards of the world.

As Christians we go forth into the world conscious of a great Commandment, to love God with all of our heart and soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. No one else does this. I might add, we are empowered by this as well.

Early on the Church began to baptize children because parents said, "We want to raise our children in the Church. We want them to know Jesus as Lord, and the way of life and values which that imposes upon us." So children were baptized, too.

Which was the parents' promise to raise their children in the church, according to the teachings of the Gospel, until the children themselves could take on for themselves the responsibility for Christian life, which came at the age of Confirmation, at which time there could be another ceremony proclaiming their acceptance and affirmation of this. What we are doing this morning.

Children are in the Church because raising children in the world is not only a parental responsibility, it is a community responsibility. Children have always been a part of the Church. We welcome them into our community, and pledge to be role models for them. Which means Charles Barkley can relax. We will take responsibility for showing our children what Christian faith looks like, by the decisions we make, by the way we relate to one another and to them, by the way we live our lives and give away our lives. Thank you very much sports heroes and movie stars, prima donnas and politicians, we will do it ourselves.

What this means for us is that each adult member must ask, "How can I be a part of the nurturing and caring for the children and youth of my church?" Blessedly, many of you provide models for this as you volunteer to teach Sunday School, sign up for Vacation Bible School, coming soon, serve on the Christian Education Board, we have 4 openings, labor in LOGOS, when we had that going, counsel at camp, and so forth.

Bottom line, we all must be creating the loving and caring community where the children can see and experience what the Christian faith looks like. Or we can opt to run with the parents who say, "We don't want to raise our children in the Church because we want them to make up their own minds about religion." Which is about as dumb and lazy as it gets.

We do not raise our children in a vacuum. Children learn what the world is about and their place in it from the communities in which we place them. They learn, like sponges, from television, movies, video games, shopping malls, playgrounds, streets, schools, from wherever they are. To raise a child in the Church is to give them a choice, another option, another environment in which to soak it up. The time will come when the child will make up his or her own mind, go his or her own way.

If the choice is to reject the Christian way, the young adult will at least know what he or she is rejecting.

Someone was writing about Confirmation and made the interesting point we did it wrong. He said if we take baptism seriously, when it comes to Confirmation we should not ask the question, "Do you want to join the Church?"

No, instead we should ask the Confirmand the question, "Do you want to leave the Church?" Which is to acknowledge these children have been a part of the Church ever since their baptism. We have raised them, done our best to impart the faith. Now they are of the age to make choices for themselves. So they should be asked, "Do you want to stay or do you want to leave?" Then we can close our eyes and pray they stay. For we love them and don't want to lose them.

Children learn from the environments in which they are raised. Robert Livingston, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at U.C. San Diego, writes about how hard it is to change one's values once a child reaches adolescence. He maintains a person's world view is established by mid-adolescence. After that we process information through these grids (biases) we have set in our minds. So though we may receive new information, the way in which we will interpret it is already determined.

Livingston points out the child's tremendous capacity to learn. During childhood the brain is constantly building circuits to process information from the world. In the first six months a child's brain doubles in size. By the age of four it has doubled once again. All this information flooding in, being processed, building the framework to interpret what the world is about, who we are, what is important, how we are supposed to live as adults.

By adolescence, according to Livingston, the process is pretty much complete. The rate of metabolism in the brain drops in half. We are no longer so smart, so quick, so able to remember or learn new things.

In sum: by adolescence we are pretty much the product of the experiences and the environments we have known up to that point in our lives.

It is the Church's job to teach and model what it is we believe. No one else is going to do it for us. This is why we are here. To be planting opportunities for lives of faith in our children. We baptize them into the Church, and confirm them, so they may experience a community of love and forgiveness, of grace and growth, of tolerance and diversity, which is different than much of the world they will experience.

If we do our job, our children will know the difference, and will be fortified and free to make their own adult decisions, God help them.

A reporter took a video of the Barkley commercial to a Los Angeles public high school in a rough neighborhood. He was curious as to the students' reaction. They viewed it and then were asked, "Who is your role model?"

A seventeen-year-old black boy named Tyrell Bird said, "For me my role model is my grandmother, and my pastor, and the men in my neighborhood."

Jose Meza, a sixteen year old, said, "Your role models are the people that you know." The other students confirmed Jose's observation. They named as role models their parents and teachers, their grandparents and older siblings, their godparents and Sunday School teachers. Not one kid in that class named an athlete or an entertainer.

So Charles Barkley is right. He is not a role model. You are! We are the "living stones" upon which the next generation will stand. If we model our faith, our children will know the love of God. If we do not, God will still be at work. It's just that, God will have to work harder. Let's do it for the Lord, and our children.

AMEN.