R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Exodus 20:1-2 (NRSV)
Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Luke 1:5-20 (NRSV)
In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.

Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside.

Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."

Zechariah said to the angel, "How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years."

The angel replied, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur."

The first step in dealing with a problem is admitting that you have a problem. We have a problem. It shows up in a number of places. You can see it on T.V. You can see it in our music. You can see it in our courts and prisons. But perhaps the place the problem is most visible is in our schools.

I know a number of you--adults, children, and youth--are in our schools on a daily basis. I am so grateful to be able to go to our schools and see people from this congregation who are contributing so much to making our schools better. We have a lot of students, teachers, staff people and support people that we can be proud of. But they know we have a problem, too. Our schools are in crisis and they are in crisis for the same reason that our youth are in crisis: The connection, the concern, the respect that should exist between adults and youth has been broken and we have not been successful in rebuilding it. So we have youth who live most of their adolescence without significant relationships with adults and adults who are mystified at what to do about their youth who seem to be living in a different culture and sometimes on a different planet.

So you see the fruits of this as you walk through our schools. Does it seem strange to you that we are having major meetings in this county over dress codes and the possibility of uniforms in our schools? I have to watch where I step with that issue because I have a very divided family on that. But the reason for the discussion is that dress standards are the tip of a very large iceberg. Bare midriffs and droopy drawers are only a sign of something much larger. When they are matched with consistently disorderly conduct and disruptive behavior and disrespect of teachers, we see that something much larger is going on. It’s clear that some students see no need to relate to adults and they see no value in respect.

So they act up and act out. Northampton High School reported 939 disciplinary incidents between September and December which works out to something like 14 a day. Teachers soldier on through the difficulties. They do the best can and they do amazing things in helping our students learn, in minimizing the disruptions, and in dealing with the attitudes and dress code violations and hallway fights. But they wonder where the backup is. And good young teachers leave. And the ones who stay feel sometimes that they are the only ones who stand between these children and youth and a world with no education, no discipline, and no order at all.

Now I know we’ve got good kids. Don’t hear me wrong. I love our youth and I love hanging out with them. They are bright and talented and God loves every one of them. They do amazing things. But our youth are hurting and they wonder where the backup is, too. Who’s going to give them a sense of hope and guidance in this wilderness they’re passing through? Where are the adults who will care about them enough to enter their world and to show them what it means to find meaning and purpose in life? Who will love them enough to confront them when they have gone astray? Who will teach them what it means to seek God and to become a whole person?

Now I’m going to date myself and talk about an old movie. Way back in the year of 1991 - back in the last millennium - there was a movie called Grand Canyon. It was not about the Grand Canyon, it was about Los Angeles and the ways that people’s lives were coming apart in that city.

In the opening scene of the movie a character played by Kevin Kline is leaving a Lakers basketball game and takes a wrong turn that leads him into a very dark and threatening area of the inner city where his car breaks down. This may be hard for you younger folks to believe, but this was in the days before On-star and cell phones and things. But there were things like car phones and that’s what this man uses to call for a tow truck.

But he’s scared. He knows that there are gangs of young men roaming the streets - gangs filled with fatherless young men who have a reputation for violence. Sure enough a group of thugs surround his car and begin to harass him. He begins to believe that he will die because one of the group pulls out a gun and threatens to do just that.

Just then the tow truck driver shows up. It’s an African-American man named Simon and he sees the situation but he goes about his business as if the boys weren’t there. He asks Kevin Kline’s character what has happened, determines he needs a tow and he hooks up the car to his truck while he invites the man to sit in the cab with him. All the while the gang of boys is threatening him and saying, “Are you dissin’ me?” Which is short for “Are you disrespecting me?”

Finally Simon stops and says to the leader of the gang, “I need to ask you a favor. Let me go my way here…I need to get out of here, and you got the gun.”

The gang leader grudgingly agrees to let him go but he says, “Tell me this: are you asking me as a sign of respect, or are you asking because I’ve got the gun?”

Simon says to him, “Man, the world ain’t supposed to work like this. I mean, maybe you don’t know that yet. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without having to ask you if I can. That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything is supposed to be different than it is.”

But he still hasn’t given the young man the answer he’s looking for so he says to Simon, “So what’s your answer?”

Simon says, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.”

“That’s what I thought,” the boy says. “No gun, no respect. That’s why I always got the gun.”

To me that was a very insightful scene. It was even more profound a few months later when Los Angeles exploded in riots in the spring of ‘92. It showed that there was something tragically wrong in the way our children were being raised. They had no way of expressing themselves in ways that could be valued by the adults around them and they had no adults around them to show them a different way. So they sought a cheap version of respect with a gun. And Simon recognized the consequence. “Everything is supposed to be different than it is.” It seems just as true in 2006.

We may live in a society that has forgotten the value and role of its elders, but God knows, too, that everything is supposed to be different than it is. Right there in our Ten Commandments you see it. The first four deal with how we are to honor and serve God. The last five are strict prohibitions. But right in the center, the fifth commandment, is the hinge that connects the way we live with the way we honor God. “Honor your father and your mother,” the commandment says, “and you will live long in the land that God is giving you.” That word honor is a heavy word. Literally. It could also be translated as “Give weight to what your father and mother say. Don’t disregard what they say for it should weigh on you.”

What weight do we give to our parents today? And here I’m not just talking about our biological or adoptive parents, though I am talking about them, too. We may have really negative experiences with neglectful parents, or abusive parents, or absent parents. But that was no less true in Moses’ day when the Commandments were given. Parents can be wrong sometimes. They can be out of touch. They don’t know how to use remotes or to do instant messaging or set the clocks on DVD players. But God knew that the parents and beyond them the elders among the people had a special responsibility for passing along the teachings of the community, for raising their children in the ways of God. That’s why the Bible so often says about the law - teach these things to your children. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. [Deut. 6:7]. Elders need to talk to their children and children need to give them weight and honor and yes, respect. Respect is not a zero sum game. If I give it to someone else it doesn’t mean that I have less myself. Children need to hear the words of the elders because the only way they can become people of weight themselves is if they have an elder to guide them in the way.

Now already I can hear in my ears the music of Fiddler on the Roof, and not just because Judi is getting ready to start rehearsals this week. That show opens with all of the elders in the village shouting and singing about how their lives are grounded by tradition, tradition! Things have always been like they are and why is that, “Because of tradition!” That’s just the sort of thing that leads to youthful rebellion which is what happens throughout the rest of the show. It was a perfect Broadway show for the 60s when the whole culture was asking questions about the old ways and questioning whether the tradition really knew what it was talking about.

I hear that and I know we asked some important questions of the old authority structure. We all want to “stick it to the man.” But now we have no man to stick it to. It’s like that commercial that shows the corporate executive in his fancy office talking about how a consumer choice he made was his little way of sticking it to the man until his aide reminds him that he is the man. No one wants to be an authority figure in this new age, but God needs elders. I know that’s an archaic word and it’s something that no one wants to claim to be in our youth-obsessed culture. But God needs people who will speak the truth in love to our youth and God needs youth who will listen for the truth from their parents and elders even when they can see how many ways their elders have gone wrong.

So then there’s the story from Luke where the angel comes to the old priest Zechariah who has been a faithful servant of God for many years along with his wife, Elizabeth. What they have desired more than anything else is a child, though by now they are far past child-bearing age. But they are among God’s people and we know from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hagar, and Naomi, just to name a few, that God has a way of bringing about unexpected pregnancies. That’s just what this angel announces to Zechariah, though he doesn’t believe it and as a result he’s struck mute until the child is born.

But what is interesting is what the angel tells Zechariah about this child to be born. He will grow up to be John the Baptist, of course, who is the forerunner of Jesus. But he will fulfill a prophecy of Malachi, which said “He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” [Mal. 4:6]

One of the things that had gone wrong in the land, one of the reasons that the people were crying out to God for a redeemer and a Messiah, was that parents and children were estranged from each other. The old systems that had provided for the passing on of God’s word from one generation to another were breaking down. But even worse, the hearts of parents and the hearts of children were turned elsewhere. The sign of the coming kingdom was that their hearts would be turned to one another once again so that there would be no curse on the land.

Those Christians who followed on the message of John and Jesus lived out this prophecy in a radical new way. They knew that the raising of children into new Christians was too important to be left to individual family units. They knew that it took, if not a village, a body to raise a child - the body of Christ. So when they welcomed a person into the church, they made it clear that they were now adopted into a new family. When Jesus looked around at those he was teaching and said, “Who is my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and brothers - whoever does the will of God”…when Jesus said this he was not saying that his family didn’t matter but that he had a larger family and so do all of us when we enter this community.

That’s why this message is so important for us. Our youth are hurting. Our schools are facing a crisis. And what group is more able to speak a word to this situation than a body that has declared that because of Jesus Christ we no longer look like the rest of the world? Who but the Church, which connects people who would not be connected otherwise, which brings into relation people who would not otherwise be related, which says that to enter the kingdom of God you must become like a child, and which challenges adults to be more than friends to their children but elders who share the word of God despite their failings…who but the Church can speak a word about why honor and respect are essential things?

I am so excited about what is going on in Franktown Church. Every day I experience something that just knocks my socks off. People are finding healing. People are finding grace. And what excites me more than anything are the possibilities for drawing people together around the love of God. But we need to live out this vision of Zechariah’s angel. We need to see the hearts of parents turned to children and the hearts of children to their parents.

How does that happen? It happens when we get together with Angie Williams after the service today to talk about how adults can become more involved in the lives of our youth. It happens in our confirmation process when adult mentors get together with young people, one on one, and share their lives and their questions and their faith with one another. It happens when we pray for our youth and for our elders. It happens in informal ways when adults stop to talk with youth about what is going on in their lives and when youth do the same with adults. Yes, it’s awkward and unnatural - but only because we have lived so long in a world where “everything is supposed to be different than it is.”

Most of all it happens in baptism as we remind ourselves of the implications of God’s love. When we baptize an infant or a child or even an adult in this font, we recognize that something has shifted radically. It’s so radical that Paul uses the language of death and resurrection to talk about the experience of passing through that water. We die to our old lives and are raised to life with Christ in a new relationship with God and with others. We are adopted through this water. We are reborn. And we have a new family when we do it.

Whenever we baptize someone we repeat an affirmation together as a congregation which says that we have claimed someone as our own and that we promise to help that person live out the claim God has on their lives. We say, “Wesley, you are God’s child and you are our child.” “Maxine, we love you because God loves you and we want to help you be the best disciple you can be.” “Tad, you are gifted and loved beyond measure and we’re going to hold one another accountable to that love and those gifts.” That’s what happens at baptism.

So I want to ask you to do something. I want to ask all the adults in the congregation to stand if you are able. Children and youth of Franktown Church - these are your parents. You don’t just have those at home. You’ve got all of these people who claim you and love you and if you were baptized, they said that they would help to raise you. Yes, they make mistakes but they also have the capacity to learn from their mistakes. Talk to them. Listen to them. Honor them. You need them.

Now it’s time for the rest of you to stand. If you are 18 or under, stand up. Adults, these are your kids. They are all your kids. Like every child ever born, we had no idea what they would become or what they would do, but we knew from the first moment that they were a gift. If they were baptized here, you claimed them. They need you and your guidance. They need as many caring adults in their lives as they can get because it‘s a rough world out there. And you need them.

It’s an amazing thing that God has done. God has taken all of us and made us a family. What was God thinking? I really don’t know. I think God was thinking that Christ’s love is sufficient to transform the world. And us too. Thanks be to God.