1/29/61

Scripture: Ephesians 3: 7-21

Each year, for many years, the turn of the month from January to February has been known in the churches as Youth Week. It begins on the last Sunday of January and continues through the first Sunday of February. It is the church’s way of emphasizing the place of its young members in the life of the Christian church and of the community. And it is young peoples’ way of emphasizing their own sense of belonging to, and participating in, the Christian enterprise.

Often the young folk take part in leading public worship on the first Sunday of youth week. Here and there one hears of a church where some member of Pilgrim Fellowship, or other youth group, preaches the sermon in his church on that Sunday. Or a group of young folk take responsibility for bringing the message.

During the week there may be other Christian Youth Week activities, such as a radio presentation or some community service project. In many communities a united program of recreation, sociability, study and worship marks the last Sunday of Youth Week. That has been the usual pattern for some time in Wisconsin Rapids, and is the plan again for next Sunday when an inter-church group will be gathering here. The Church as a whole is interested in the young folk of its family. And young people are eager to be full participants in the church life.

A year ago, it was firmly called to our attention that young folk should be drawn into the whole life of the church more effectively than ever. During the season, our young people participated in summer youth conferences which emerged with written recommendations to church boards and pastors that young folk ought to be put to work at the responsibility and in the planning of church Boards.

Our own church has made some progress in this direction during the year. Heads of the Senior and Junior Pilgrim Fellowships have been meeting as members of the newly-formed Church Council. When the annual meeting of the church was called to order, some 6 or 8 Pilgrim Fellowship young folk were present and ready to participate. The annual meeting brought a decision of church members to eliminate the old ruling of this church that voting should be limited to members 18 years of age or older. Now the voting is open to all members.

Young people have taken the initiative in cleaning and arranging the recently-acquired house at 340 3rd Street South for use as a meeting place for the High School age church school class and for Pilgrim Fellowship meetings.

In addition to making their offerings at Sunday school and at Pilgrim Fellowship meetings, some of our young folk make their own individual pledge of financial support to the church budget for home and mission giving. It comes from their allowances and their job earnings.

It is worth noting these evidences of accomplishment, and of progress, on this Youth Sunday. The young folk are precious to the life of this church. And the church has an importance for their lives.

A great deal of planning and suggesting has gone into preparation for Youth Week this year. The United Christian Youth Movement has carefully prepared material to be used as widely as possible. It reminds us that Youth Week is an annual observance, held nation wide, emphasizing “youth work and unity in Christ.” It is sponsored by the United Christian Youth Movement, and is observed through denominational channels as well.

This year’s observance is the 18th under these auspices. It has as its theme: “Into all the world together.” Young folk are not the exclusive holders of this theme. Much of the Women’s Fellowship thinking and activity revolves around the same theme. But young folk have especially adopted it in order to strengthen the purposes of the United Christian Youth Movement. These purposes are:

1) To help young people realize their responsibility as churchmen, and to help the church see the vital importance of its ministry to youth.

2) To strengthen the unity of Christian youth throughout the nation, and

3) To help challenge young people, and through them their elders, to realize and manifest their concern and responsibility for people and for churches around the world.

Christian church youth are often the quickest cooperators on the scene! They readily think in terms of the theme “Into all the world together.” And the world into which they go -- where we all are! -- is not all nice. We might like to think of it as a smooth round globe with peaceful blue oceans, green fields, reliable rivers, majestic mountains, congenial people. Unfortunately it is not all of this.

The young folk have devised a poster which has some sober realism in it. At the center of the poster is a multi-colored, rough-edged globe superimposed on a background which represents snatches of several languages. Each language is saying the same thing: “Into all the world together.” But that world is in bad shape. In fact the official interpretation of the meaning which the poster is intended to convey is this:

“The world is in bad shape. Any real understanding of our human situation leads to an appreciation of the ultimate peril in which we live now --- and under which we shall likely have to live most of our lives in the even more perilous years ahead. A symbolization of life’s rough, rasping edges is thus more realistic than a portrayal of the world as a smooth, completed, closed circle.

“Notice, too, how the theme has been restated in so many languages; as a reminder of the rich diversity in the human fellowship, and of the world-wide nature of the Christian church; as a reminder, too, of how our ‘Tower of Babel’ divisions cause us to travel different paths even when we are trying to serve the same cause or communicate a common truth; and as a reminder, ultimately, that what we have to proclaim is not ours, but a truth that worketh in and through us.

“As we think in terms of youth week, it is important that we remember that the gospel must speak fresh and new to each generation. In each age and clime and culture we must come to understand what God would say to us in terms of our own here and now.”

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred near the end of World War II, insists that the most important thing to understand about God is that He speaks to us in terms of our own “here and now, not in tasks beyond our scope and power, but in the nearest thing at hand.”

Young people have been learning a great deal about what is near at hand, “here and now.” Of course the news of distant places is near at hand, here and now -- especially news that is startling, even alarming. The state Pilgrim Fellowship chairman just recently addressed a letter to local Wisconsin PF groups, beginning the letter with some of the screaming headlines --- “Tribesmen in assault on Swedish UN forces in Congo!” “Krushcev voices new threat in East Germany!” “Violence and Terror in Laos!” “Castro Screams Tyranny!” This is the broken and bleeding world in which we now live. Anyone knows that it is as near as the newspaper, the radio or the TV set.

But other things are near, too. If the youth of New Orleans or Little Rock are plagued by problems of the integration of racial access to schools, transportation facilities, the young folk of Wisconsin Rapids could be saying, “It’s no concern of ours, for we don’t have the problem.” However, the youth of our own church and the youth of an American Indian chapel got together a week ago on the level of acquaintance with each other and worship together. At least that is an introduction to one facet of living where we are and in the presence of “the nearest thing at hand.”

Last season, our young folk became keenly aware of the conditions under which migrant labor lives during the harvest of some of this state’s crops. Housing facilities are limited and sometimes primitive. Care of children is largely lacking. All sorts of equipment is needed for distribution by the few hardy, and devoted, souls who attempt to serve the needs of migrant workers. Our young folk made up a number of simple hygiene kits, collected some clothing and recommended other ways to be of service to this ministry that is only 25 or so miles away from us here in Wisconsin, and in every summer harvesting season. So long as there is a seasonal concentration of transient migrant workers, concerned people have a ministry to perform. Dr. Stanley U. North mentioned this ministry to those of us who studied at La Foret in Colorado last summer. He described a few of the conditions he had seen in some of the labor camps in California during the fruit harvest. “Do you know,” he demanded of us, “how those people live while they work? Why some of them live like pigs! In fact, I’ve seen them, literally, housed in swept out hog houses!” “And,” says Dr. North, without regard for his own blood pressure, “I was mad!” Well, that is but one of the here and now problems to be dealt with in our time. And both the youth and the maturity of our generation have to tackle the problem and stay with it until substantial improvement is made.

Some of the youth of our church in the state have experimented with work camps where a variety of young folk live together, do needed manual labor, contribute their own services, and learn common endeavor and common worship.

Which perhaps brings us back to our own worship together here on this Youth Sunday. We have not followed it, but there is a worship service planned by people in the United Christian Youth Movement. It features that poster picture of a jagged-rough world on the first page. It continues with a couple of the hymns we are using today; with the Scripture selection from Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians which Marianne Fesitz read for us today. It includes prayers from Africa, India and Egypt, and a litany on the Work and Worship of the Church.

And so, led by the efforts, the participation, the thinking, the purpose of young people, we worship today in the spirit of prayer. A youth leader from Angola lifts the prayers of the people for the villages and cities of that land and other lands. Since God has placed us in families, we pray for our families. Not alone do parents pray for their children, but the youth pray for their parents; that Christ may be Lord of all their spirits. Remembering the God whose will and work created this earth, we pray for our work; in office, in shop and factory, in school, at home -- wherever it may be -- that it help to heal the broken world rather than break it further.

We pray for the church --- not alone our church, but the Church of Christ universal; that members and pastors, learners and teachers, may exalt Christ as lord of all. And, of course we present our own aspirations and desires before the throne of grace asking that in our will, in our speech, in our action, we may exalt Christ as Lord of all.

Here we remember what the church means to us, and what we can help to make it mean to others. It can be a pillar and ground of truth, the mother of saints in all ages and in all lands. In the church we are surrounded, not only by our friends and fellow-worshippers of the present, but by the great cloud of witnesses, the noble army of martyrs, the goodly company of prophets, who have praised and glorified God and dedicated their lives and efforts to performance of His righteous will.

Here we remember the goodly heritage given to us, and give thanks for our own opportunities to work and worship in the church. We are grateful for all means of grace by which our bodies are made temples of the divine spirit and our minds instruments of truth. For with these implements we go out to mend our broken world and build it anew.

Here we perceive the need for spiritual unity in the church, and nourish the hope of its accomplishment, and take the stops we believe are right toward that ideal. In order that we may be repaired ourselves, and rededicated to usefulness, we ask deliverance from the neglect of those benefits offered us in Christ; for slighting the love of God; for blindness to the need for love among us, His children.

We pray for deliverance from the coldness and indifference toward our missionary work that carries the spirit and message of Christ’s gospel out into the world, near and far. We seek salvation from the sentimentality and insincerity in worship which covers our lack of zeal for truth and our unwillingness to practice the truth that we perceive. It is disastrous to trifle with our own souls, or with the souls of others.

Amid the change and unrest of our times, our church needs, and we ourselves need, to be cleansed and renewed by the Holy Spirit. We are under obligation to take a full share in social reform, the healing of the sick, the clothing of the needy, the enlightenment of the ignorant, the freedom of the enslaved, the feeding of the hungry.

In the light of God’s purposes for his people, we seek release and freedom from our harmful prejudices and confining fears toward the problems of race relations, of economic justice, of equal place in our society for men and women. These problems plague our lives as brutally now as they ever have. The problem of race relations is so serious with our nation that it may well be an Achilles’ heel, inviting our cultural downfall, unless we can discover, and bring about, great improvement in our time. Economic justice demands an understanding of the problems, not only in the labor-management field, but in the agricultural area where laborers are defenseless, small growers squeezed, and taxpayers caught with the necessity to pick up the tab until better ways are found to solve our problems.

The church must be zealous in laboring for the removal of oppression and injustice; and for the promotion of righteousness and peace. The church we love may take its place in those national movements which exalt the name and purpose of God above every other name and magnify it all over the earth.

Here in this fellowship, we pray that those who lead in the thought and action of the church, and those who join together under that leadership -- young and old alike -- may be given hearts and minds open to the guidance of God.

Let us pray:

Gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy Holy Christian church. Fill it with truth and with peace. Where it is corrupt, purge it; where it is in error, direct it; where it is blind or superstitious, rectify it; where anything is amiss, reform it; where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, furnish it; where it is divided, bring it together. O thou Holy One, make it the instrument of Thy will, for the sake of thy son, or Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

AMEN

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 29, 1961.