1/26/58

Scripture: I Samuel 3

Text: Genesis 1: 1; “In the beginning, God.”

The Scripture lesson of this morning recounts the story of a youth who was serving an apprenticeship in the Hebrew temple. It was not a time of particular inspiration, but his tutor, Eli, knew the rules and customs that Samuel was to learn. Interestingly enough, though, Samuel found more than routine. It may have started with what appeared a dream, but Samuel heard God speaking to him! And he listened! What he heard was not entirely pleasant, but it was a firm kind of righteousness. Eli’s own sons had become careless and willful and had blasphemed God without any rebuke from Eli. And so the divine voice assured the young Samuel that there was trouble ahead!

When Eli got the report of Samuel’s experience, he accepted it at face value. Word got around that Samuel was to be, indeed was then, a prophet. And so he was regarded by the Hebrews from that time on.

The God of things as they are does not confine revelation to the aged and the long-experienced. Insights into what is right and good in the sight of God may come to the young as well as to the old. Experience will serve to test the validity of an insight, but vision is for anyone ready to receive it.

Experience has tested one basic tenet of religious faith and crowned it with validity. And that tenet is this: that God is the beginning. The Bible, in the book that is placed first in the arrangement of its 66 books, namely Genesis, start with the phrase, “In the beginning, God.” That is the proper and right point from which to begin.

Samuel began there. When old Eli perceived that something was coming to Samuel that was not Eli’s voice, he advised the lad to listen to the calling of the Lord. And Samuel had no hesitancy in accepting what came to him as from God; for God was the beginning of his youthful life and thinking.

Our Master himself (Jesus) was learning so fast when visiting the temple at the age of 12 that he astonished the elders with his questions and his understanding. He took for granted the Father of his spirit. And his life leaped ahead on that basis.

It is a good place to begin; indeed it is “the” place to begin! And all of us --- young and old --- do well to keep in sight of this truth. For it is not only the point at which to begin; it is the point from which to proceed, going ahead into all of the range of thinking and experience that is our future.

This is the second Sunday of Youth Week. It may have some significance for those who consider themselves young. But I have no doubt that it is especially significant for those of us who are enough older to have a concern for the youth whom we love and in whom we place so much of hope and expectation. Our young people are very important to us.

We hear a great deal about the difficulty and the discouragement of youth. “Juvenile delinquency” is a term that we are not allowed to forget, because there is thoughtlessness and perverse action on the part of some young folk, and there is concern about it on the part of many who are distressed over it. And the impatience and mistrust of many young folk are a sore frustration.

But there is a marvelous lot about young folk that is good. There are hosts of them who throw their thought and influence and actions into the direction and causes that seem to be wholesome and constructive. And these deserve recognition, appreciation, and cooperative encouragement.

It is a reassuring experience to sit in with a group of young folk who are making their own plans for a youth rally or conference, to hear a group of teenagers set their teeth into a discussion of what is right and wrong; to sense the purpose that motivates their eager look ahead; to sense the seriousness with which they face the choice of vocation.

[For two of three years now, there had been held, at the Chicago Theological Seminary, a vocation retreat for high school age young folk who are at least exploring and inquiring into the possibility of full-time church related vocation. For several days, they consider, and ask questions about the ministry, Christian education, missionary service, and related vocations. The director of the last such vocation retreat at the Seminary, Rev. James S. Caskey of Chicago, told the Seminary alumni that he had never seen a group of young folk of such apparent high caliber as the youth who, on that weekend, asked serious questions about the ministry as a possible life work.]

Now, we are not to shut our eyes and minds to the painful fact that there are those who are rightly judged to be delinquent children and youth. Neither may we turn our back on the foolishness and perversity that, upon occasion, turn up in those who are not usually delinquent. And we who are somewhat older need not suppose that our young people are blind to the “delinquency” among some parents and senior citizens, nor to the occasional “falling from grace” that they see among those who are, for the most part, leading respectable lives.

Young folk are like older folk in that they make judgments on both their contemporaries and on the generation that is older. It is essential that they be recognized for what they are -- people.

Not so long ago, John S. Wood, while serving as a youth secretary of the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, wrote an article in a National Council publication which he titled, “They may be young but they’re church members too.” His viewpoint is a healthy tonic.

What is the place of young folk in the church? Probably many of us have heard that “the young people of today are the church of tomorrow.” Well, undoubtedly they are such, but they are also the church of today, or a part of it, just as any others are a part of the church. Some political orators speak of “today’s youth as tomorrow’s citizens.” True, but only part of the truth! For the truth is that billions of expendable capital and millions of the nation’s labor force are represented in those who have not yet attained the voting age of 21. And they exercise a far-reaching impact on the morality and general culture of the whole society. They are a major part of the nation’s armed forces. In effect, they are citizens today. They are a part of the church now. And fortunately there is a growing number of folk who know it!

This is not to say that there is no place for their own group activities. In a church like ours the Pilgrim Fellowship is important for their own planning and expression. The church school classes for each age grouping are as essential as are the various adult groupings of church life. But all of these are a part of the church as a whole. The church is truly one body, and it is questionable that there should be, in some quarters, a separate “youth church” parallel to, and separate from, the so-called “adult church.” This is reflected in the policy regarding Congregational students at the University of Wisconsin. There, for some years, though there is fellowship and discussion and activity in the United Student Fellowship, the students have been invited to worship at First Congregational Church in the normal family-wide experience, rather than to set up a separate “student church.”

We need a full sense of partnership in the church as well as in the family and in the community. Age has experience that is of value to youth provided that it is not over-cautious. Youth has enthusiasm without which experience may fail to go ahead. The community needs both.

Of course enthusiasm can easily become impatience. And impatience is a youthful virtue when it refuses to accept as a final answer that “this is the way we’ve always done things.” But impatience can be a youthful sin when it refuses to consider implications and relationships and undoes years of work, by prideful self-assertion. Youthful impatience and enthusiasm can be good, or harmful; but we have enough confidence in our youth to believe that they will try to keep these traits really beneficial.

Within this recognition of community, church and parents, through counseling, have to accept the risk of considerable decision on the part of youth. Sometimes young people will make a wrong decision, and hurt will come to them and to others because of it. Even in the more matured adult-to-adult dealings, we have to concede this if we are to make work the democratic progress upon which we have learned to depend. We need to grant to the other person the “right to be wrong” before we can begin to work with him.

Some years ago, a young student was included in the delegation speaking before a Presidential Committee planning a White House conference on children and youth. The student was no silent partner, but was given his own turn to speak, and this was the first time that youth members had been included in that right. When he finished speaking, he was called aside by Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, then president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. “Your situation as a youth on this committee,” said the Negro leader to the student, “is much the same as our situation as a minority race in the nation. We don’t want to be left out. Nor do we want to be included if it means losing our own identity or accepting a paternalistic attitude toward our participation. To be tolerated is almost worse than to be excluded. We just want to belong like anybody else, with the same right to be right or wrong, good or bad, ourselves, and at the same time a part of the larger whole, contributing to the larger good.”

Perhaps that states it for any minority group --- whether it be a racial minority or a youth group who feels that it is a minority in some meeting. To be one’s self, and to be accepted as such, is what one asks, basically.

Now of course there are areas of difference in which it is not easy for members of one group to understand those of another -- whether this be observed in the affairs between nations, between men and women, between races, between creedal groups or between youth and adult folk.

There are probably parents who long for the “good old days” when a teenager went into the garage and came out with the snow shovel or the lawn mower. Now, one perplexed father says he never has any doubt as to where his son is: he’s in the family car! The only puzzle is -- where is the car?

Of course it is just possible that junior likes the car for its convenience just as senior likes it for the same reason. A minister once told me that he had observed himself in a little incident that came near being the height of foolishness. He had concluded a wedding ceremony at his church and the bridal couple were going around the block to a place that had been made ready for the wedding reception. The minister and his wife went to their own car and got in. He drove around the corner, found an open space, parked, and helped his wife out -- all before he realized how few were the yards he had driven and how foolish he had been not to leave the car parked right by the church and walk, with his wife, to the reception around the corner! Some of our habits of old and young can bear the light of reexamination!

A great deal of the rebellion of youth, and not a little of the intractability of adulthood, can be mitigated by more willingness on the part of parents not to be so busy with their adulthood that they forget to be father and mother, and on the part of kids not to be so intent on their own pursuits that they forget to be sons and daughters. Blessed be those who remember that the creator placed them in families for the good of the human race, including their own benefit.

It behooves adults and youth alike to recognize that there is a certain amount of questioning, inquiry, perhaps rebelling, and certainly idealism involved in growing up. The teens have been called the formative years. There are a lot of things that are pretty well formed in a life even before teen age. But the teens are a time of fast growth in body, mind and outlook. Not only a teacher, neighbor or parent knows this; but any high school senior knows it when he gives 5 minutes of thought on how far is the distance, and difference that lies between his present self and the guy or girl he or she was four years ago upon leaving eighth grade and entering high school. How fast one can, and does, learn in youth!

There is an apocryphal representation of Jesus “instructing the rabbis.” And some artists have portrayed the boy Jesus as Teaching in the Temple. But the stress in Luke’s story is simply on Jesus’ early interest in the spiritual matters that control all of living. A better title for picture or story is: “Jesus learning in the temple.” In the course of their instruction, Jesus was asking questions of the teachers, and he was answering the questions they asked of him. It was like the usual teacher-student situation. What astonished the teachers was the extraordinary eagerness and penetrating kind of inquiry in Jesus’ questions. Jesus had not gone to the temple at Jerusalem with overbearing confidence to lay down the law, but with the eagerness of an open mind and straightforward spirit. [Luke 2: 41-51].

Jesus turned out to be a rebel of splendid stature. That is, his rebellion was constructive. He had a cause. And his followers of today, youthful and mature alike, need a cause!

One of the causes to which some earnest-minded people of today are giving themselves is some hard study of the application of ethics to their own vocation. Here and there, doctors, lawyers, teachers gather, when they can budget a few hours of time for it, in study groups, asking quite frankly, “How can I grow in the knowledge and practice of what is right in my profession? I’ve heard about righteousness in my church all of my life. But then I go out of church on Sunday and spend six more days of the week just being the sort of person I think I have to be in my job. How can I make ‘right-ness’ come alive as the guiding and controlling force of my vocation? And, first of all, how can I reach a more satisfying understanding of just what is right?”

Business executives sometimes gather in little groups to study ethics and their businesses. Is the course of training which they prescribe for their salesmen, and their personnel managers, the kind of thing they really want? Or is there a recognizable standard of right and wrong that will improve their whole business approach?

And there are labor leaders concerned with the same thing.

Believe it or not, there are politicians, who are conscientiously and purposefully giving their lives to the practice of politics, as a means of leading citizens rightly, who are glad to meet with our students in the field of ethics, to hammer out a workable ethics of politics. It is not easy; and it is necessary; and some of them know it well enough to give a lot of time and thought to it.

The cause of developing a Christian sense of vocation in one’s own calling is a cause that urgently needs attention, for it is long overdue.

The world of science needs young men and women with immediate insistence -- but not just in a technological sense. We’ve had too much of that already. We get to the place where Americans can proudly boast that every person can take a Sunday afternoon ride in the millions of automobiles we have and then in the stress of war we turn the factories and techniques to manufacture the machines that wipe out great swathes of people and place. We had advertisements long since -- many years ago -- which told of airplanes that could carry us from any point in the world to any other point on earth in 60 hours. Now we travel much faster than that! Yet we turn the planes to bombers with which we can reduce major cities to shambles.

When sulfa drugs first appeared, with which 100,000 lives a year might be saved from pneumonia alone, something marvelous had occurred. But the same scientific techniques that produced sulfa drugs had to be used to perfect a device that killed 100,000 people in a Japanese city in five minutes. If we had not done it to others, there were others who would like to have done it to us first.

The cause of right in our professions, our businesses, our politics, and our scientific progress is one of the most urgent necessities we can imagine. And we can but hope that today’s youth will rally to the cause with enthusiasm, taking up the task where small groups struggle with it now and making small groups into mighty crowds of intelligent concern.

All of us may well be concerned over a way of thinking that has inflated the $64 question into the $64,000 question! Life is hardly that simple in its progress. It is still necessary for kids and their parents to make good by patient, persistent, effective work in school and college and on the job.

Begin with God, and go on from there with the patient, persistent preparation that uses His guidance for real achievement. The fellow who remarked that his son was finishing school and was “now willing to start anywhere, just so long as it was at the top, had a lot to learn.” He shouldn’t expect to take any satisfaction over a successful son unless the young man, with his encouragement, were willing to start where he could learn the lessons that are absolutely essential for those who will lead in business, or manufacturing, or the professions, or anywhere else.

It is time for all of us to consider our serious problems of this time not as “youth problems” or “parents’ problems” or “social workers’ problems” or “police problems” or “church problems” alone, but as our problems. It is time to begin with God, and, after the beginning, to continue with God in the search for the good life.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, January 26, 1958

Wisconsin Rapids, February 4, 1968