January 15, 2012

Rev. Justin Spurlock

“Intuition is my Friend”

Our Scripture passage today, obviously deals with children. Mitch gave it away with the song, I think, so you’re already up to speed on that. Our Scripture comes from Matthew, Chapter 19, verses 13 through 15. It says this:

“One day, children were brought to Jesus in the hope that he would lay hands on them and pray over them. The Disciples shooed them off. But Jesus intervened. ‘Let the children alone. Don’t prevent them from coming to me. God’s Kingdom is made up of people like these.’ After laying hands on them, he left.”

Let’s consider how we’ll apply these words of Scripture to our lives this morning.

Life….finally. Steve kicked off this whole year last week with this idea of life…..finally. We can live as a church, as people, we can get moving with our lives now that we have some stability here as a church, as a staff, that we’re all transitioned out. We’re on the cusp of maybe coming out of the financial crisis that has taken place over these many, many years. Maybe – and we’re looking, saying “Life…..finally”. It might be there.

And in order to propel us towards that, Steve started talking to us last week about the stages of faith and the wheelbarrow, and that if we would just jump in the wheelbarrow and let it take us where it will, believing that we can get across, that many, many great things will happen. That if we’re willing to just jump in and go to that next place.

My job today is to tell you about how it all begins. I’ll talk about children and faith development. Now here’s the thing. This is not just a message for parents, although it’s a key thing for parents, grandparents and anyone interacting with kids. But it’s also something for you. Because the things that happened to you as a child in your faith development, the faith stages you go through as a child, still affect you now and need to continue affecting you now in some ways. So I want you to be attuned today to this whole thing so you can understand your own faith development as a child. It will help you in interacting with children today and help you and propel you into the next stages of your faith right now as an adult.

Here’s some basics that I want to give you about child faith stage development. And really, Fowler, the guy who we’re taking this from – he’s a researcher from back in the 70s – he put the stages of faith together – I’m taking two of his stages and putting them into one for you. He has Stage One and Stage Two and they both involve children. The first is children ages 3 to 7, and the second one is 7 to 12. I’m combining these for you to make a shorter sermon because you don’t want to be here all day long. That’s a lot of it right there.

But here’s the basic things I want you to know. Ages 3 to 6 – the key thing in this stage is imagination and intuition. Children in this age are encountering so many new experiences and they’re just kind of feeling it out. You just go with your hunches and your emotions and you just live it because you have no idea. You have no true knowledge with anything, so you just kind of go through it. And you’re using your imagination to try to understand reality.

Next thing, ages 7 to 12. This is the age where you go “fantasy and reality are not the same thing. When I have a tea party and I have an empty cup, that’s not the same thing as eating.” And kids make that transition and they go from having imaginary friends to saying “no, real friends are better.” And they make that shift and when they do that, everything that was part of this mythical, fantasy world that they used to love, they get kind of “too cool for school” and they say “I’m too old for that now.” And that’s their whole mentality, that I’m too old for this thing over here and I want to know what is real. What is true about the world and boy, that should hold true all of the time. And when it doesn’t, wow – that’s not fair.

And so these are the kinds of age groups that we’re talking about. Tea party world, imaginary friends and life’s not fair, it better be real, it better be perfect all the time and I should get the same thing as the other person gets. That’s what we know about children.

Now I want to tell you a story about a big mistake I made about seven years ago. I was working at a church in Fresno, California. I was just kind of beginning, doing children’s ministry and stuff, and I hadn’t quite figured it all out yet. So we did a children’s sermon in worship and I called all the kids forward, they all gathered around me, and we were doing a series in church that day about the founding stories of our faith. So we were talking about Genesis. Adam and Eve, apples, snakes, trees, the whole bit. I gathered the kids around me and I get my bag of apples. And I start out with “What if I told you one of these apples is poisonous?” And then I kind of jumped into the story of Adam and Eve. And I’m thinking that I have a great object lesson here. At the end of this, they’re going to understand that Adam and Eve shouldn’t have eaten that fruit. That was a bad idea. Well, I get to the end, I’m feeling really good about it all and I say – I have all these apples, I’m just going to hand them out to the kids, right? Big mistake. I mean every kid was like whoa, they’re pulling back, like I’m not touching that apple. Stranger danger!!! This was bad. And in that moment, I went Oh – I’m like four to five years beyond where these kids are because this object only had one meaning. That one meaning that I assign in any sort of abstract thing that I wanted to take from it was lost on them. And I probably ruined apples for an entire generation of kids.

And the reason I tell you that story is that that is how kids learn about faith. For the good or for the bad right there. They hear a story and they hear an adult telling it and depending on where we go with it, that shifts their entire view of a story of God, of people, and it all comes down to this word. Trust. Children, for the most part, intuitively, trust adults. It’s by nature. It’s that hunch that you know the world better than I do, so I’m going to trust you.

Now the problem with that is, as adults, don’t we feel lost when it comes to faith? I talk to many of you about your children, about faith and what I hear back is “Oh wow – I feel overwhelmed about trying to raise my kid in the faith, about talking to my kids about God, about prayer, about all these things.” We feel overwhelmed because we’re in our own stages of faith and we’re going through a journey and we just don’t always know. Right? We always have all this doubt and we don’t know – what if I tell kids this and then later on in life they go that was stupid. What’s that going to do to them?

And so the thing I want to push on you is this. Kids trust you. You as parents, you as grandparents, you as family members, you as authority figures, teachers, coaches, piano teachers – all those kinds of things that kids do with you as adults, they implicitly trust you. When they look at you, that’s the image they have of God. That scares some of us, right? And especially as my role as a pastor, I have a lot of times, especially the younger children, will look at me and sometimes ask me this question. “Are you Jesus?”

Wow – that makes me feel good. But no, I’m not Jesus. But for any explanation I give them, it doesn’t matter if I tell them no I’m not Jesus, in their heads, Jesus is still me. Even if I’m not Jesus. Does that make sense? And for you all, interacting with kids, God is you. Because their only way of relating to this figure is through you. The way that you love, the way that you accept, the way that you listen, the way that you discipline, the way that you ignore, the way that you …fill in the blank. All of those things affect the way that they see God.

Now that’s a big load to throw on your shoulders. I know that. If they think God is like me….oh man. But once again, children implicitly, intuitively trust. They overlook a lot of your flaws and go “my mom and my dad and my grandpa, my grandma – they love me. They listen to me. They care for me. God has to be like that, too.” And that trust comes about.

Now here’s the thing, though. As we get older as children, we begin to assign some other qualities to ourselves, to others and to God. Because as we get beyond that “everyone loves me and cares for me”, we get to the point where we go “it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes people get mad at me. Sometimes I get in trouble. Sometimes I do the right thing.” And that other part where sometimes other people get stuff that I don’t get. Sometimes that person got a gift and I didn’t, or sometimes a teacher yelled at me because I was talking in class, but four other people in class were talking and they didn’t get in trouble. What’s going on? What’s wrong with me? And they become this kind of person who wants the world to work in a logical orderly perfect way. And so that whole “it’s not fair” comes out. And it all comes back to trust. If we’re trusting adults to be adults, to essentially be God-like in our lives, and it doesn’t always work that way – we as kids have a hard time. It creates anxiety for us.

And then children get to this point where they want to begin bargaining with God. “I will be a good person if you do this for me.” Right? “Maybe if I pray enough, God will get me a new bicycle.” Of “if I pray enough, maybe my parents will buy me an iPad.” That’s where kids are at, and frankly, many of us hold those same ideas all the way into adulthood. And many of us, even some of us here today, are still trying to bargain with God, thinking that God works like Karma and if I do bad, or if I do good, that’s how God’s going to do to me. And we get kind of stuck in that place and what can happen, what might happen, is that we look at it and go “I’m not good enough and that’s why God doesn’t do good things to me.” Or “I was good enough and God failed me.” And that can project all the way on into later life.

Now many of you, as children, face some pretty big obstacles as kids. If you are a child who watched your parents go through a divorce. You see kids blame themselves all the time for that. They say “what did I do?” You see the bargaining perfection thing. This is not the way the world is supposed to work. Maybe I did something wrong that messed this up. Or maybe grandma dies or a parent dies and they heard the adults around them praying and so they were praying to God that grandma would be healed. And grandma dies. They either blame themselves and say “I must not have been good enough.” Or they go “that God is not dependable.” And that’s kind of where we are left in childhood a lot of times. Trying to wrestle with that question.

And those questions will either propel us to reject most of belief – not faith – but belief systems – conventional belief systems in society, or it propels us to go into this whole guilt complex where we’ve established a faith where we say “I’m not good enough, or I’m always trying to be better so that God loves me and forgives me and does the things that I want God to do.” We’re very familiar with both of those routes, most of the time. I think in our own journeys, we probably have tended towards one or the other. Some of you may have navigated somewhere in-between in a healthy way.

And so, what do we do with this? What does it mean to interact with children? What does it mean to look at our own lives and the child inside of us and think about our own faith futures. Well, here’s some things you need to know about. Some faith needs of children.

First of all, story, story, story, story is the most important thing for children. Hearing stories from the Bible. Hearing stories from your own life as you share stories. Stories of goodness and value and meaning with kids. These are the things that help kids process and understand life.

Kids are not abstract. Back to the apple at the beginning. Those kids around me, talking about poisonous apples – they’re only idea of it was that one of theses apples was poisonous and I’m not eating it. There was no abstract meaning concept principle that came off of that, but don’t eat Justin’s apples. If I had just told the story and left it with Adam and Eve, fruit and a snake, they would have said “Ah, there’s a God who interacts with humans and there’s evil in the world.” And it wouldn’t have even been that abstract for them. But that’s what they would have gotten as far as our adult understanding goes. They would say “there’s a story, I’m in awe of it, it’s fascinating.” There’s this whole world out there and they want to come at it with all the questions we come with. They wouldn’t be asking was there really an Adam and Eve? You don’t ask that when your four years old, most of the time. Maybe you have some genius children who are way ahead, but usually, four year olds don’t ask that.

By the time you get to 9 or 10, sometimes you get some kids going “wait a minute, something’s off here. How did human beings have kids and then they have siblings - did they marry their siblings – that’s not good.” And they begin putting the pieces together and begin saying “something’s not right about this story.” But for the most part, kids just hear the story and are fascinated by the story. And it motivates them and they want to be that character in the story. When kids hear the story of Noah and the Arc and the flood, they don’t think that story ends with billions of people dying. They don’t hear that part of the story. Some of you just realized it’s part of the story – I just saw that on your face. They just think God was there for Noah and his family – God saved Noah. And that is a good story for them. It’s good for them to hear God was there in the midst of some flood. God showed up and gave them a way out.

And so the stories are very formative. When they hear stories about you and your family and your upbringing, and you share good stories about other people that you know, it builds a whole system of meaning for them that they can trust. They can kind of wrap their arms around it and hold on to it and say that’s what life’s about. That’s who God is. That’s what it means to be a good human being.

Next thing. This is that whole thing I’m throwing on your shoulders. Be a good role model. Love kids. Look them in the eyes. Listen to them. Stoop down on their level to listen. I know some of you parents are saying you do that all day long. Give me some rest. And obviously, as a parent, your entire world cannot center around your child 24-7. You have to have a break. But for all of us, when we see children, not just our own, find a way to get down on their level. When you do that, they feel valued and you’re not scary up here. I’m tall, kind of big and hairy and stuff, so I can be kind of scary to kids and so I get on their level and look at them and talk to them. I become safe and they trust me and I become this person they feel is nice. And if that’s their concept of me when I’ve gone away, I’ve done a good job. If they can feel Pastor Justin is nice. I’ve done a good job today.

When we’re interacting with kids, when they’re not quite doing what they’re supposed to, this is where it gets messy. What am I supposed to do with a kid? That follow up afterwards – the 10, 20, 30 minutes later, depending on their age and coming back to them and reinforcing the fact that their love – that you are there for them, that part is key. That is that whole role model thing. Be a good role model.

The Golden Rule. As kids get older, this thing makes sense to them because of the whole justice perfection thing I was talking about. They can wrap their minds around doing something good for someone else because they say “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And there’s a little selfishness built into that for them. And that’s okay. Kids are egocentric. Heck, most of us are egocentric. Right? The idea of “if I help someone or do something good, maybe something good will happen to me.” There’s some good in that. I’ll mention some of the bad that can happen with that. But there’s good in it. You can help a child say “Hey, you’re on a mission. You can do good. You can be like God. You can be like Jesus when you do something good for someone else. Because you want them to do good back to you.”

Next thing. Be willing to talk about difficult concepts. I have conversation after conversation with parents and grandparents about adults avoiding religion and faith and spirituality and talks with their kids because they’re afraid of what they’re going to say and what they’re going to mess up. And I understand that to some degree. The thing I need to push on you, is have those conversations. It’s okay to look at a kid and say “I don’t know.” It’s okay to look at a kid and say “Here’s my opinion, but other people have other opinions.” It’s okay to let them know about that. In fact, that helps to build their faith. When they can say “Mom and Dad don’t have the answers. They don’t always have to be right.” That helps them think they don’t have to know. When they hear you say “other people think differently and that’s okay”, they think maybe they can accept someone else too, and it sets them up for some amazing things in their later faith stages that some of us in here didn’t quite have a good experience with.

I personally grew up in a tradition that was pretty narrow in who was right and who was wrong. It was clearly defined. There were people who where them, and there were people who were us. And if you were them, you didn’t want to be them. That was bad. And it took me years to get over that hump. And even though cognitively I’m far, far away from that point now, emotionally, that can kick in for me in an argument with someone. Especially about faith and belief and spirituality. I can get in a circle and a discussion and feel you’re the enemy right now because you disagree. And I have to pull back and say “I know better than that.” But it can still, and it does, still affect me and often affects a lot of adults.

Here’s the thing. There’s a little child inside of all of us. And part of that little child is full of awe and wonder and fascination. We come here into this sanctuary today, some of us, with a little bit of awe. With a little bit of fascination, thinking “God might show up to me today. I may connect with another human being. I may connect with myself. I may connect with the cosmos. I might just make a connection with God.” But we also come in with that whole bargaining thing, too. Even though we may or may not be cognitively past it. We still feel if we do the right things, God’s going to reward us with some amazing thing. But here’s the thing. I want you to go back to the first lesson about being a child. God loves you, cares for you, listens to you, no matter what. It’s the lessons we try to teach children, but it’s the lesson that we need to continue to learn over and over and over again. God is here for you. When times get rough, God will be there for you. Maybe not in the way that the nine or ten year old expects God to be there for him or her, but God is present in your life. You don’t have to bargain with God. God’s going to be there no matter what. You can trust God.

Now. Do that for a child. In fact, do that for many children. Not just the ones you’re related to. You are a part of Columbine United Church. We have tons of children running around here. They’re probably running around downstairs right now, for the most part. Actually, I’m not down there so they’re all being good and sitting still today. But when I’m down there, they run around for the most part. Part of being a church, part of being human, is saying my job is to help other children. It’s that we are a community. We are raising a generation in the faith. And so when you’re walking around this place, don’t just look up here. Look down there and see who all these knee-biters are down here. Get down on their level and just say “hello”. They may freak out and hide behind that parental leg of theirs and grab on, but if you do it week after week after week, they will warm up to you. And eventually, you will become this person, this constant in their life who becomes another role model for them.

And here’s the thing. All kids, by the time they graduate from high school, if their faith transition, going into college or young adulthood will be successful – children need at least eight solid faith role models in their life. Eight. I see some you counting right now. Eight. At least eight. That’s what provides the stability and the diversity that they need in order to enter into the next faith stages well. And if you think about your own life and your own faith, you probably, occasionally, go back to some key role models in your own life whose ideas, thoughts and the way they treated you and treated other people, continue to be an example to you, even now. It may have been a parent. It may have been a grandparent, a pastor, teacher, coach – but these people are essential and you all are essential to our children here in this place.

So as you go out today, pay attention to the child inside of you. How are those faith questions? How’s that trust? How’s that bargaining going for you? Remember, God loves you. Jesus is there for you. And do that for children that you see around here and in all of life.