January 22, 2012
Rev. Carla Randle
The Bible in the Basket
I chose this Scripture today because it makes me giggle just a little bit. Sometimes in Scripture we read the story that is as we imagine the story that isn’t recorded, and this is one of those stories for me.
“When they finished everything required by God and the law, they returned to Galilee and their own town of Nazareth. There the child grew strong in body and wise in spirit and the grace of God was on him. They found him in the temple. Every year Jesus’ parents traveled to Jerusalem for the Feast of Passover. When he was 12 years old they went up as they always did for the feast. When it was over they left for home, the child Jesus, stayed behind in Jerusalem but his parents didn’t know it. Thinking he was somewhere in the company of pilgrims, they journeyed for a whole day and then began looking for him among relatives and neighbors. When they didn’t find him, they went back to Jerusalem looking for him. The next day they found him in the temple, seated among the teachers, listening to them and asking questions. The teachers were all quite taken with him, impressed with the sharpness of his answers. But his parents were not impressed. They were upset and hurt. His mother said ‘Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.’ He said ‘Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I had to be here, dealing with the things of my father?’ But they had no idea what he was talking about. So he went back to Nazareth with them and lived obediently with him. His mother held these things dearly, deep within herself and Jesus matured, growing up in both body and spirit, blessed by both God and people.”
I like those images in my mind where maybe Mary wasn’t quite so measured in her response to him and that communication gap is so evident between a 12 year old and his parents.
Before I start in on my charge today, which is to share with you about James Fowler’s Stages of Faith related to adolescence, let me share with you just a little bit about myself. Because this is the first opportunity that I’ve had to share in this capacity in this congregation. I have come to CUC over the last year to serve you and the youth of this church of the Director of Youth Ministries. I love my job. It’s the best job in the church, but don’t tell anybody cause they might want it. It’s a fantastic place to be, to walk alongside teenagers as they grow and they learn and they ask and they challenge me. It is an honor to serve the youth of this church. Before serving here at CUC, I served for about 10 years, kind of up and over a church in metro Denver and then in the middle of that I had an opportunity to go back and renew some educational goals and become a school psychologist. So I serve a high school just down the street as a school psychologist working there on a fulltime basis. All told, I’ve been in youth ministry for about 20 years. 15 years ago this month I was ordained as a pastor, and I’ll tell you, as a Baptist pastor. But that’s okay, if you want to make that face. Make the face, I know the face. It’s alright. I’m not that kind of Baptist. I didn’t even know about that kind of Baptist while I was being Baptist. I didn’t know. I had no idea. I had a couple of people ask me after the 8:00 a.m. service. Do you believe in that inherency stuff? I said I didn’t even know about it. I just thought it was how it was. Because, I was a kid and that’s how I grew up. But I had an opportunity to serve and to grow within that tradition and I’m very pleased to be here among you today.
And so I’m charged with the task of coming up with a way of looking at James Fowler through the lens of adolescent faith development. James Fowler wrote a very academic work related to stages of faith and how we as people progress throughout life. He didn’t think that we just came to be in faith and we stayed where we were. Sometimes we do. But we’re not supposed to. And he kind of took and looked at some other psychologists and people who were looking at how people develop and progress through life and he combined their thinking with his thinking and his research to come up with these stages.
Now Justin spoke last week about one of those kinds of areas related to children and that was mostly Stage One and Stage Two. Where I picked up is a little bit of Stage Two into Stage Three. And what we have the benefit of is that we have James Fowler, who did his work in the early 80s, but then about 20 years later, there was this wonderful swell of research related to brain development, which really reinforced what Fowler was thinking, that we grow and we continue to grow, especially during adolescence. We learned in the late 90s that there’s a huge amount of brain growth that shows us that really, the teenage brain is growing and developing at the same rate or similar rate as little guys – little toddlers that we see and watch and measure their growth. We’ve got little growth calendars and check lists and we do all that for our little guys, but we forget that as kids grow and they become teenagers, that they are in fact growing in a very similar way. They sleep like infants and toddlers. They eat like infants and toddlers, and they get fussy like infants and toddlers.
And it’s a part of that growth. It’s exhausting to grow at that rate. In particular, the part of the brain that is growing – well, there are a couple of parts – but the part that is really kind of unique to this stage, and it was new learning in the 90s, is the frontal lobe, and hopefully, when it grows, people develop reason and decision making. This is why sometimes we don’t make the best decisions as teenagers and young adults, because this part of the brain is still developing. It’s a part charged with executive functioning which is just a fancy way of saying organizing and planning and coming up with structure. We see this in toddlers as evidenced when they line up their little Matchbox cars. They line them up. Because they’re organizing the stuff around them. Or their crayons or their Goldfish crackers, or whatever it is that they like. They line them up. They organize the stuff around them. Youth, adolescents, they don’t organize the stuff around them. We know that. Wouldn’t it be nice? In fact, what they’re doing, is they’re organizing the thoughts that they have. The beliefs that they have. And the way that they understand the world around them. So it’s an internal sense of organizing, of sorting, of looking through and trying to figure out what fits where. That’s the charge of the adolescent brain.
And so we hold Fowler’s research and the brain research, and here we are. Justin touched a little bit on Stage Two faith and because in our American school system, we pick up at the end of that Stage Two in middle school. Our middle school youth, 6th, 7th, 8th grades, depending on where they are, and how they’re developing, are in that Stage Two. They’re looking at bargaining. They’re trying to understand the relationship between themselves and God. If I do good, then God does good. And everything is great. There’s this sense of power that comes and there’s this bargaining that happens in the sense of justice and equality and all of those good things. God, of course, will be fair to me if I only do what God asks. And of course, I’m going to do what God asks.
And so that is a part of Stage Two. I have an example of my Stage Two. This is the Bible in the basket. This was the Bible that my grandmother had given me when I was about 7. I had no idea what to do with it when I was 7. So I put it on the shelf. Because that’s where Bibles go, usually. By the time I was in Middle School, the Bible had moved to this very basket. It’s broken, it’s the real life basket that was by my bed as a kid. And I thought – I had a Sunday School teacher that challenged us to read the Bible every day. Okay. I was in Stage Two faith. I looked at that authority figure – I loved my Sunday School teacher – they knew a whole lot more about God than I did. And so I thought I would do exactly as I was asked. And so I took this Bible every day and I read a chapter. I started at the beginning in Genesis and I read all the way through to Revelations. One chapter every day. That’s my bookmark – kind of gross now, but I did that every day. It took years. There’s a lot of chapters, but that’s what I did, because I rocked Stage Two. I was right there. I was good. I did what I was supposed to and said “Okay, God – here I am – I’m reading. It’s all good.”
And then there was a shift. There usually is a shift from one stage to another. For me, that shift happened when I was in Middle School and I was commenting to someone at church about how I had rocked Stage Two. I was reading my Bible in my basket every day. And he said, in this very casual tone, “Oh, you read a chapter a day?” “Well, yes, I do. I don’t understand anything but I’m reading it every day. And that’s what I think God wants. I’m reading. I don’t know the names, I have no idea where these places are, their marriage rituals are kind of crazy, I don’t get it. They’re sacrificing and killing animals – I’m sure that’s why I’m vegan today.” I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand it. I hoped that getting through the Old Testament – the Old Testament is long. I thought once I got to Jesus, it would be easier. And it wasn’t. There was all this stuff about parables and miracles and stuff – I didn’t get it. And then Paul – what’s he talking about? And then you end up with Revelations. What a let down. You go through all of this and you leave it more confused than when you started.
But I was there, rocking my Stage Two, doing what I’m supposed to – here I am. And this person says to me “Oh – a chapter every day?” “Yep, a chapter every day.” “Oh, it’s too bad because when you just read a chapter, you miss the themes and the stories and stuff.” And he went about his business and I was dumbfounded. I had no idea there were themes in the Bible. I didn’t catch on to them because I couldn’t figure it out. Well, stories – yeah, there were stories but I didn’t get that there were big stories. I didn’t understand it. And what he did was, he allowed me – forced me in some ways – to make that shift from my Stage Two, that I was good at, into Stage Three, which made me have to acknowledge that other people read the Bible differently. I had no idea. I felt that’s how everybody did it. I thought everybody had a Bible in a basket next to the bed and they read it and they were all confused – just like me. I didn’t realize that there were other ways. And so I began my search in Stage Three faith. And that was to answer the question, what do I believe? What do I believe? That is the guiding question in Stage Three faith. And so I began to look around. I looked to the people in my life to try to help inform me about what that might be. I looked and I watched. And listened a little bit. But I watched and I looked.
And that’s what adolescents in Stage Three faith do. They look around. It’s like a Hermit Crab that doesn’t fit in their shell any more, so they shed that Stage Two shell and they’re looking for a Stage Three shell. And so they’re trying it on. They try on the fancy ones. They try on the grungy ones. They try on the jock ones. They try on the pretty girl one. They try on the smart one. They try on all these different shells to see what fits. What makes sense? What faith will I own?
In lots of ways, this stage is called “unexamined faith”. Taking on faith and looking like faith and talking like faith – but not really owning faith. Not really being able to articulate what that faith means. Saying I belong here and I do this. I don’t really know why, but that’s how it is.
I prefer to look at it as manikin faith. It’s the time in our lives when we go to the mall for hours on end and look and we watch and we know that if we buy the outfit on the manikin, we’re all good. And we’re going to look good and we’re going to look like everybody else. And so we buy the outfit on the manikin and we put it on and we wear it around and we look good. Until it doesn’t fit any more. Or styles change or people look at us funny. Or, our BFF, our best friend forever, starts wearing something different. And then we have to shift and we have to look and we’re looking for a new manikin, a new style, a new way of being, of looking, of living. And that’s a rhythm that happens throughout Stage Three faith – of looking and trying to figure out what it means to live this thing called faith. To understand this concept called love. To serve and to worship and to be. And so, when we look at that we understand that sometimes in Stage Three, young adults, young adolescents, they kind of go in a direction that we’re not happy about. That we get concerned about. And on the most negative extreme, that’s what gang behavior looks like. Gang affiliation. “Hey – I need a group. I can be in your group. Alright, it might not be the best group, but at least I have a group.”
On a much more palatable, and the kids in the mall all carry the same shopping bags, walking around looking the same with the hair the same, same outfit. It’s kind of that spectrum. It’s that need to affiliate, the need to feel like it’s okay. The need to know that this person and this person – they look like me. And so I must be okay. Creating that community. It’s like that with faith, too. Here we are. We’re a faith community. And so when youth are looking for that manikin to follow, guess where they’re looking? Cause they’re not looking at the mall. They’re looking at us here. They’re trying to figure out what it means, and this is the tricky part.
And I know, this is my first time up here in front of you like this, and I should be all nice and warm and fuzzy and good job, great – but I need to challenge you. I need to ask you to stop for a minute and think. Because when our young people are looking for manikins – when they’re looking for that Stage Three, who am I going to be as a person of faith – they’re looking at us. They’re looking around and they’re trying to figure out “what are we doing? Why are we doing it? How do you do it? What is that like?”
Now, it’s easy to say, well, Carla, they’re looking at their parents because, of course, parents are the first and the most important guides in that faith journey, and yes, research does back that up. That in fact, how parents portray that faith journey and how they live that life, is of prime significance. They are the first and the most important Christian educators that a young person experiences. Yes. But they’re not the only ones. In fact all of us have that hand and that charge. We are given that responsibility to help provide wonderful role models and examples and manikins of faith for young people to try and to look at. Sometimes, in very subtle ways, sometimes in important ways, and we would like to think that that whole adage of “do as I say, not as I do” – it didn’t work for us, it’s not going to work for them. Right? They look at how you live your faith to understand what you think about faith. How you feel about faith. It’s not as if God sends a Text message to every 14 year old and says “Hey – take a couple of years off. Don’t bother with that whole church thing. You don’t really have to go. You can just stay home – the Broncos might be on, there might be an early T-time – don’t bother, you don’t’ need to go. And that whole mission and service thing – well – that’s kind of messy and it’s really hard and – don’t worry about it – you’ve got plenty of time to do that.”
God doesn’t do that. He doesn’t give us a pass. And so, our charge is to do this alongside one another. To live out that faith, one with the other. To truly be an inter-generational community where we accept one another for where we’re at in that faith journey and then progress throughout. It can be difficult. Sometimes it’s hard. If you don’t know a teenager’s name, what do you do? You can ask it. It’s alright. What if they look different than you might have looked when you were a teenager? Thank goodness they look different. I grew up in the 80s, I’m really glad they look different than I did. That was not pretty.
It’s understanding that sometimes you have to take a little bit of that. So my advice – smile first when you see a teenager. Smile at them first. They won’t break. It’s okay. If you don’t know their name, ask. Ask them where they go to school. What they’re interested in. What they like. Compliment them, even if you have to dig hard – compliment. Please ignore the way they’re dressed. Please ignore what their hair looks like. Please ignore the music that they listen to you. Because all of those are marks of the generation, not somebody’s character and just let it go. It’s alright. Styles change. It’s okay. Pray for them. Pray for them when you see them. Pray for them when you don’t see them. Pray for them when you go by a school. Pray for their teachers. Pray for their parents. Pray for their grandparents. Pray for them when you drive by a soccer field and there’s kids all over playing a game. Pray for them. Open your spirit to what they have. Open yourself to explore the gifts that they have to offer us. Open yourself.
And in so doing, you have an opportunity to receive from them a gift. Because truly, if you want to know what CUC spirituality looks like, what our faith is, what we believe, how we act, where is the best place to look? Look at them. Because what they’re doing is mimicking you. They’re mimicking what they see. They’re mimicking what they hear. It’s not the church of the future. They’re this church, now. Look at them looking at you. They live what they see.
And with that is a great responsibility and it’s a huge honor. It’s an opportunity to pattern and to show. One of my favorite memories from years ago – I was at a church meeting, and the strategy was, if you stood up at one of the meetings, maybe it would go faster. It didn’t really work. So we were there, and one of our middle school Sunday school teachers was standing there and he was trying to get comfortable. He was kind of standing [casually] and he was just listening. And there was a 14 year old boy behind him and 14 year old boys don’t always fit in their bodies. He was kind of tall and he was trying to look normal, but he didn’t know what to do. So he saw the teacher in front of him, and he did the pose and he stood there like the teacher. If I had had a camera, I would have taken the picture. Because there he was – he had figured out how to stand in a church meeting. It was a big deal. Church meetings are scary. They are. They are. He figured out how to stand at a church meeting. It’s simple and yet profound. And so, as we look at the ways that we can share our faith with the world around us, let us not forget to look around us here in this place. Be aware and be open.