GROWING UP
A Sermon on Ephesians 4

I love church camp! As a boy I never got to go to camp, but when I grew up a bit and we moved to Memphis, I went each summer to Youth Camp at DuBose Conference Center near Sewanee, in East Tennessee. One summer, we built some wooden benches, so we could sit up off the ground when we had our nightly campfires. I remember that, up in the mountains, it got pretty cold at night, even in August. Ah, those early morning showers!

I loved it last summer and again last week, when I got to go to All Saints’ Day Camp at our own Bishop Claggett Center every morning, to sing and dance with campers and counselors. And I loved church camp in the first parish I served as rector. The first thing I did during my first week in that parish was to be a part of Vacation Bible School. Four acres of land surrounded the church, so we held VBS right there. I loved Vacation Bible School that first year and the second and every year after that. A month or so after the second summer’s VBS, right after I returned from a family vacation, I got a letter from the parish’s senior warden. It began with words like these: “I didn’t want to disturb your vacation and I hate to tell you this, but…there are some members of the parish who have written to me about you. They want to have a parish meeting and review your ministry.” I did NOT love THAT.

During that parish meeting many grievances were presented. Some of the grievance points were well-taken. Afterward, I tried to make some changes in response to what was said. But some of the complaints felt totally inappropriate. One complaint was about my insisting that we would not remove the pulpit from church during the Advent and Christmas seasons, so that a fresh-cut Christmas tree could replace it (I had a smaller tree placed next to it instead). Another complaint: I never wore my clergy collar or “proper” clothing during Vacation Bible School (Instead, I was in a VBS t-shirt, shorts and sandals).

There was one grievance presented that evening, nearly eighteen years ago, that was particularly painful. It had to with one of my children. Most Sundays, my daughter would run up to me, with a big smile on her face, at the exchange of the peace. She usually did this so quickly that I was still inside the altar rails of that little church. And here was the offense to some people, the unforgivable sin: that Hannah would be so irreverent as to run inside those rails. In allowing it, they implied, I was not a good parent.

“We must no longer be children,” our lesson from Ephesians says. Yet Jesus told his disciples that, unless we change and become like little children, we will not enter God’s kin(g)dom (Matthew 18:3). Jesus loved it when children came to him. Frankly, so do I. But it is not children that the writer of Ephesians, probably St. Paul, is talking about here. He’s talking about adults, grown-ups who are not acting their age. It is childish things, Paul says in that beloved thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, it is being childish that we are to give up when we grow up into adulthood. Being child-LIKE, not child-ish, is what Jesus wants of us, if we are to join him on his journey and seek to follow him. It’s about the wisdom to know the difference.

Some say that, in the Episcopal Church, we take God seriously and the Bible seriously, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously. I like that idea. When we do get too serious, we can become childish. We might get angry and anxious when we’re overly serious. We may become controlling and rigid. We can get down or depressed, and it may feel too hard to lighten up. That’s why I like church camp. At church camps and vacation bible schools, we can more easily lighten up and laugh at ourselves. We have permission to sing and dance a bit, while we learn not to take ourselves so seriously. If we as a human race would just stop and play and pray and pay attention to God – if we would just all go to church camp! – we just might grow up to be a little bit more like Jesus.

But seriously…what else might it mean to grow-up? What’s it like to “come to maturity, to the measure of the full stature” of Jesus? What does it look like to “grow up in every way into Christ?” Perhaps more than anything else, to grow up into Christ is to face the free-floating fear that tries to permeate life. I don’t have to tell you we live in a distracted and addicted, orange-alert world. All those invitations throughout the Gospels to “fear not” and to “be not anxious” have new meaning in our day. Throughout his life Jesus speaks words of peace, calming storms, healing souls. I have often prayed his wise and grown-up words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Let the anxiety of the day be sufficient unto itself.” Each day, Jesus teaches us, has more than enough fear and anxiety in it without borrowing any trouble from tomorrow (Matthew 6:34).

Two modern writers have also taught me much about growing up in an anxious world. A decade ago Daniel Goleman, someone who makes connections between science and meditation, wrote a best-seller called Emotional Intelligence. In that book he suggested our emotional quotient (EQ) may be a better predictor of success and maturity than our intelligence quotient (IQ). Goleman says EQ can be measured in two ways: our personal competence (being more aware of and managing ourselves) and our social competence (being more aware of and managing our relationships). Being emotionally grown-up, then, is learning to be smart about our behaviors and the behaviors of others – and getting help with all of that, when needed. One example of emotional intelligence would be found in the following conversation between a doctor and a patient. Patient: “Would you give me a prescription for some valium? I have a dinner party for 40 tonight.” Doctor: “Cancel the party.”

Another modern “growing up” teacher was a rabbi named Ed Friedman. During his lifetime Friedman went so far as to suggest that our anxious 21 st-century world can actually be toxic to religious and other leaders. Chronically anxious societies and families, he said, are reactive, rather than responsive. They want a quick fix, rather than allowing time for things to mature. And they displace or shift blame, rather than place responsibility where it belongs.

Here’s a story Friedman told about blame displacement: “In a middle-sized New England town the parents of a five-year-old girl were having trouble keeping their daughter in her own bed at night. She screamed ‘uncontrollably’ when left alone and constantly disturbed her parents’ sleep by insinuating herself between them. After sending their child to a therapist, they concluded that the ‘cause’ was a horror movie…shown at a Halloween party by a day-care center to which they had been sending her.

“After the child had visited the therapist for three months, they proceeded to sue the day-care center, even though the parents of all the children had been notified and been asked for permission slips in advance. The day-care center, the only one in town, was led by a woman known for her principles, and she did not take this ‘lying down.’ She mobilized her colleagues, her friends and her associates, splitting the community in half. Eventually, she ran out of money defending herself and finally left the town bereft of her talents or a day-care center. The parents eventually spent thousands more on their daughter’s therapy, never going themselves…Then it came out that the wife had been having an affair all along. Both now began accusing one another of being the cause of their daughter’s problems, and they soon became involved in a very messy divorce – focused on child custody, of course” (Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in an Age of the Quick Fix, p. 77).

Growing up means no longer shifting blame to someone else. Growing up means taking responsibility for ourselves. Growing up into the full stature of Christ means looking at our less-than-mature lives, then looking at the life of Jesus to see how we might measure up to his maturity. We get a glimpse of that maturity in the way Jesus talks with the crowd in today’s gospel story. Jesus essentially says:

My sisters and brothers, grow up. You want me to keep feeding you. But I’m already doing that, all the time. Do you realize that you are working too hard for things that don’t last and will never fill that hole in your soul? It’s not just about work. It’s about gift. All you need, all you ever need for growing up is to receive the gift I have already given you. The gift of awareness. The gift of responsibility. The gift of God’s love. Through me, God has already given you everything you need to grow up. In me, there’s no more hunger, no more thirst.

Trust me on this , Jesus tells them and us. And believe in me. I am the true bread, the very bread you need, the wine of your life. And I’ve been right here, all along. So, grow up! And lighten up! Open your mouths, so you can be fed. Open your eyes, so you can see, like children and teenagers know how to do. They are open to life, open to growth, open to me. Young people know how to laugh and to play, to dance and to sing, to pray and to be open to what or who might be coming next.

So, Jesus teaches us, here’s the secret to eternal life, hidden in plain sight: learn how to grow up from each other, especially children. Grow up by being more like a child. Children allow others to feed them. So, grow up by letting me feed you, today and forever. Speaking of being fed, there’s a church camp at Claggett, starting tomorrow!

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints’ Episcopal Church Frederick , Maryland
August 2, 2009
(preached in the Great Hall only)