Charles
Koch was the Boy Scout leader with my father when I was stuck on a badge that I
just could not get. Though I tried and tried, the information would not
stay in my head. So I made a cheat sheet. And when my father asked
me the questions, I thought real hard, pressing my temples to indicate my deep
concentration, dropped my head to my feet under the table where my pre-recorded
answers had been carefully placed. Immediately after I beat the odds and
secured the badge, Charles Koch took me aside and said, “Mike, I saw what you
did and that is not who you are. I’m not going to tell your dad.
But you do not need to cheat like that. Don’t do it again.” In his
own gentle admonishment, Charles Koch held me accountable in a way my parents
never could and modeled for me character I’ve never forgotten.
Mrs. Stieglitz, a 2nd grade teacher at the local school who was
not my homeroom teacher and not even one of the members of my local church, but
she sent me a birthday card every year to let me know I was loved and cared for
by people who were not my parents.
My local church pastor, Rev. Kenneth Roedder, walked into Sunday
School class while I slumped in the oversized chair in the youth room.
“Mike,” he said, “I was so proud of you out there.”
“What?” I said in disbelief. My dad, my high school
baseball coach, had been harangued enough by my mother to put me in two
successive games with the score tied and the bases loaded. No lie. Each time I had given up a grand
slam home run. “What? Rev, I gave up two grand slam home runs out
there. Two in the same week!”
“I know, Mike, and I was so proud of you because after those
home runs were hit, you didn’t give up.” That was one of the first days I
remember thinking that maybe God did not think like I thought, that God’s eyes
were different than mine. Rev. Roedder told me something my parents never
could and reminded me that he had character values far deeper than wins and
losses.
The Search Institute has been an organization that for over
60 years has been listening to young people to determine what makes for their
healthy growth and development. In so doing, The Search Institute
developed an understanding of what makes for healthy adolescent life. What
they found is that the number one indicator for healthy adolescent life were
adult relationships, other than a young person’s parents, who express care,
challenge growth, provide support, share power, and expand their
possibilities. The Search Institute
referred to these adult relationships as developmental relationships. I have made copies of a
publication from The Search Institute that details what it means to have
developmental relationships with young people. And the 40 Development Assets considered
necessary for children ages 8-12 are also available.[1]
I think developmental relationships are a big part of what it means to be church,
a community of people who come together out of a strong sense that our journeys
inform one another, feed one another, nurture one another, give life to one
another, even hold one another accountable. Somewhere along the way, a
huge shift occurred where the Christian Church became obsessed about belief
over and against action and practice. What that translated to with our
children and youth was getting them to believe all the right things rather than
mentoring them into adulthood by the way we express care, challenge growth,
provide support, share power, and help them expand their possibilities.
The
Search Institute relates that young people have a better chance for a healthy
adolescence if they receive support from three or more non-parent adults.
My life is certainly a testimony to this truth. Boy Scout leaders, public
school teachers, my local church pastor, and church members all provided
support for me in a way that my parents just could not have done so.
Because if part of growing up is necessarily showing your parents and the world
that you are growing into the full independence and maturity, there is certain
advice you just cannot hear, certain support you just cannot receive, and
certain roads you cannot travel just to prove you are not your parents. It
is critical that there are a community of voices, a diverse group of
experiences, and several different models of a faithful life so that our young
people might see all the faithful choices that are available to them.
To acknowledge this truth, that we are not self-made, that a healthy adolescent
life requires a community of people to surround and support us, is such a
strongly counter-cultural statement in a country where we are forever crafting government
policy based on the silly notion that we make it on our own.
And this mentorship is found in our Scripture verse for
today. The Bible knows none of this nonsense about the faithful hero or
heroine who makes it on their own. The young girl, Mary, perhaps 12 or 13
years old, learns by the angel Gabriel that she will conceive a son and give
birth to a promised child. Immediately, Mary runs with haste to hear the
wisdom of her older cousin Elizabeth. Families in ancient Judaism were
probably much more like our Native American sisters and brothers, siblings and
cousins, who have an extended understanding of family than the nuclear practice
European immigrant culture has come to define as family. Mary needs help
translating the activity of God in her life. She needs a mentor to help
her translate the meaning of all this in her life. And rather than
dismissing Mary’s wild telling and translation out of hand or telling Mary she
is crazy, Elizabeth affirms Mary’s experience and asks questions herself--so
that they might both wonder together what is happening in their age.
What a gift this is to young people when they come across a
mentor who affirms their experience, who does not answer all their questions
for them, but joins with them in asking questions of deep meaning in which they
both may immerse themselves in wonder, curiosity, and reflection.
Elizabeth asks, affirming Mary, “Why do I have this honor that the mother of my
Lord may come to visit me?” Immediately, Mary breaks into a song of
liberation, an acknowledgment of how God’s justice breaks forward in the world
when we can affirm the power we see displayed in our young people. In so
doing, Mary is able to affirm the story of how God has acted in accordance with
the truths known by her ancestors. Elizabeth affirms Mary. Mary, in
return, affirms the Jewish God of justice, defender of the poor, the lion of
Judah, who roars against the rich.
Harvard Graduate School professor, Robert Kegan, writes of
meaning-making as a lifelong process that begins by rightly going from one pole
of independence to another pole in dependence, back and forth, growing in
depth. This lifelong process is about a tension between how we are
connected, attached, and included on the one hand and how we are distinct, autonomous,
and independent on the other. Growth only happens in meaning-making,
Kegan believes, from a safe place, what Kegan references as a place of
embeddedness. In these places of embeddedness, a crisis in meaning
can lead to new discovery and growth. And the ultimate depth in
meaning-making is found when a person can hold being connected in full tension
with being independent. When that
balance and tension is held, a person knows themselves to be interdependent.[2]
What is meaning-making if not the journey of an individual in
faith, a community of people tied together by common stories and myths that
transcend generations?
As I read the story of Mary of Nazareth and her older cousin, Elizabeth, I see a teenager who is brought to a crisis in faith by events that call upon her to do something far beyond her years. To meet this challenge, Mary turns to a trusted adult and mentor who is not her parents. Elizabeth helps her understand herself as not only belonging to a tradition in which she is embedded but also reminds her that God would indeed single her out for a courageous call to imagine the possibilities for her own life.
Mary remains with Elizabeth for the first few months of her pregnancy as a safe place for a young woman living out a courageous call. Where we have often missed out in the telling of this story is not recognizing that all of our young people are waiting to hear that God calls them to a depth of growth in interdependence and courage. Mary of Nazareth ends up being the place, person, and mentor--the place of embeddedness--for a son who grows in interdependence and courage.
Most often, however, as The Search Institute indicates,
adults other than a child’s parents are necessary for a
healthy adolescence that leads to their growth in meaning-making. Today
we gave three powerful girls family story Bibles as a way of saying we are
invested in their lives. In a couple
weeks, we will do the same for two other powerful girls. What we might find, in bringing the
generations together in this way, is that our children, in return, might speak
courageously in a way that helps us to move to an even deeper place of
meaning-making.
But this task is before all of us beyond giving children Bibles.
We should be seeking ways we can all be mentors or call upon mentors within the
faith community. We are all called to be church. If the church
looks like us and serves only us every Sunday, then we have fashioned God into
our image.
The Search Institute offers practical ways we all might take
action to mentor children we see in our wider communities, in our faith
communities, particularly during this time of Co-Vid. First, ask what
they are doing at home as a result of the pandemic. How are they being creative? Ask them what kind of goals they have set for
themselves during this difficult time?
Tell them you believe in them and that life involves risking and
sometimes failing. Ask them how they
feel about things in the world right now.
Really listen to them and let them know you really do want to hear what
they think. As a church, let’s find ways
they can contribute to the church and lead out in significant ways. Finally, during this time of Co-Vid, ask them
to find ways other children are being creative during Co-Vid, what people in
other cultures are doing creatively.[3] Imagine these five girls always looking back
on this time when they knew they were held and grew in love.
This is the challenge of what it means to be church—that we
might provide mentorship and a place of embeddedness so that every generation
might speak courageously of God’s activity in the world. Our young people
face challenges in the world like no other generation before them. They
need us—to let them know that preceding generations found ways to walk a
faithful path, to grow and evolve as the earth itself faced annihilation, to
overcome when violence and war threatened to divide and destroy us. We
might be very surprised then to turn around and see God acting through them to
speak with a strong voice, getting connected, and moving in the world with
courage.
Advent begins at a time of night . . . at midnight . . . when
all the hope has been drained out of the world.
In our present age, pandemic, climate change, and the worship of
violence and death can make us wonder whether God is at work. Our children need mentors who, in faith,
expand possibilities. And so I leave you
with the beautiful poem written by Puerto Rican poet, Aurora Levins Morales,
one of the Elizabeths of the world.
She titles this poem, “Va’havta,” translated literally from the
Hebrew, “and you shall love . . .” a reference to Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, verse
5, “and you shall love the Living God, your God with all your heart, soul, and
might.” Va’havta:
Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your
shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of
empire:
Another world is possible.
Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
There is more bloody death in their hands
than we could ever wield, unless
we lay down our souls to become them,
and then we will lose everything. So instead,
imagine winning. This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer
streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,
that the old man under the bridge and the woman
wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,
and the children who suck on stones,
nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their
shelter.
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.
Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.
When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.
Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely
credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of
greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast
fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to
have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.
Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.
Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live[4]
I think that is such a beautiful poem, one I knew I had to share
when we presented Bibles to these young girls.
Because it is my most fervent wish that we will help them to know the
Heart of the Living God, expand their possibilities, and mentor all of them into saying, “May my soul
magnify the Living God.” May it be so.
Amen.
[1] https://www.search-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DevRelationships_framework_english01.pdf. See also the 40 Developmental Assets for
Children 8-12, https://v.fastcdn.co/u/73824624/35782706-0-8-12-English25580171.pdf.
[2]
Robert Kegan, Evolving
Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Boston:
Harvard University Press, 1983).
[3]
https://www.search-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Coronavirus-checklist-Search-Institute.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Kent%20DR%20with%20COVID-19&utm_content=Kent%20DR%20with%20COVID-19+CID_92726a4a94ef6645c44036ffd3316568&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Building%20Developmental%20Relationships%20During%20the%20COVID-19%20Crisis
[4] Aurora Levins Morales,
“V'ahavta,” Aurora Levins Morales, July 25, 2016, http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/blog/vahavta
