A Sermon for World Day of Prayer
The Rev. Patricia Gillespie
2 Timothy 1:5-14
Mark 5:21-23,35-42
"Talitha kumi. Young woman, stand up!"
I wish Jesus would come along and say that in our churches. Look around today. Look around Sunday morning. Sometimes it feels as if the young women are dying. Or as if they're already dead. They are not here.
Oh, sure, some of them do come. Some come to have their children in Sunday school. A few come looking for God or Jesus or on a spiritual search of some sort. But look around you. The statistics are clear, even in small-town Minnesota, The young people are somewhere else.
For the most part, it's not violence and oppression or horrendous human rights violations like we see in East Timor that's keeping the young people away from our churches. Although for some women and some minorities the church does feel painful and oppressive. You would think it would be easier to say to our young women here in Little Falls, "Talitha Kumi. Stand up. Be alive again." than it would be to say it to young women in Indonesia.
But the no matter how hard we the ‘faithful remnant' try, the young people don't seem to hear the church's message of new life. They have jobs. They have other interests. When they're not at work, they have families and friends as important priorities.
We just can't get the young women to come to church. Just look around – how many of us here are even under 50? (And I've only got four weeks to go.) We run short of women for World Day of Prayer; we have trouble funding mission projects from bake sales and such; potlucks and social events become few and far between; and even worship services sometimes look like they're sponsored by the AARP.
Are our young people dead to the Good News that Jesus brings us? We watch in frustration as depression and violence increases, and we wonder why they don't come to church and hear that God loves them.
If you listen to the stories of the young people – women and men, girls and boys, in Java or Jakarta or Little Falls – those of us who listen with Christian ears often hear the searching and longing that we understand to be a desire and need for God.
If you go one step farther and have the courage to invite them to church, hoping to share the blessing and new life that we have found here, what happens? A few may come back, but most do not.
If you take the next step, and this is the most difficult of all, and set the ‘church recruitment evangelism' aside and listen, really listen, to them again, what do you hear?
I heard it clearly one Sunday last month. Waiting in the back of the church for the procession to begin, praying and talking with a teenage acolyte, we looked out at the small February congregation. The snowbirds and the ‘visit the kids in the south' folks are all gone. The church feels almost empty. Most folks in the pews are retirement age. Our youth group that morning had been poorly attended, even the youth leader didn't make it. With the clear and profound vision of a fifteen year old, she said sadly, "Our church is dying."
And she's right. Not just about our tiny Episcopal church but about the church in America. Your churches and my churches, struggling churches and growing churches, mainline Protestant, traditional Roman Catholic, and spirit- filled fundamentalist churches. In the eyes of our young people – teenagers, twenty-somethings, generation X – the church looks pretty dead. They want say to us, who come here to find life, "Get a life!"
The church seems sadly unable to meet the spiritual needs of most of today's young people. They may care about social justice in Indonesia, but they don't come to World Day of Prayer at church to find a way to make a difference there. They're more likely to go to an internet chat room on human rights violations. (I'm glad to see that Church Women United has a wonderful website.)
While we wonder about the young people being dead to the church. They wonder why we bother with a church that seems dead.
So to whom does Jesus need to say "Talitha kumi"? Which of us is, like Jairus' daughter, at the point of death. Who is it that needs to be resurrected here?
We all do. We all are dying and in need of resurrection. Our selves, our world, our churches....
It's almost Lent, a time to prepare for the spring of new life in our own lives. As Christians, part of preparing for Easter is recognizing the dead parts of our own lives.
Traditional Lenten preparation includes recognizing those places in our personal lives that are wounded, dying, or deadly.
Traditional World Day of Prayer asks us to take time to recognize those places in our world that are wounded, dying, and deadly. To see the human rights violations in Indonesia, to recognize our own country's sin in enabling horrendous violence in East Timor, and to do what we can to make a difference -- it may mean writing letters of protest to multinational corporations, like Nike. Just do it.
Lent can also mean recognizing those places in our church's lives that are wounded, dying, or deadly. It would be a good time to listen to what our young people see when they look at us. They may be the prophets that predict our salvation. They could be the ones sent to us to speak God's word.
It's time reach out like Jairus did -- to invite Jesus into our lives, into our world, and into our churches.
We began today looking at our churches and noticing how few young people we have, saying
"Look around today. Look around Sunday morning. Sometimes in our churches it feels as if the young women are dying. Or as if they're already dead. They are not here." ...
"They are not here."
Do those words sound familiar? Remember another story about someone who was dead. And when the friends come to see -- when the friends come to look at death -- they hear those same words. An angel says to them, "He is not here."
It's Easter morning. The message is not death but life.
The angel says, not to the twelve regular disciples, but to the women, "Do not be afraid. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here..... Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you."
It's a scary time to live in Indonesia. It's a scary time to be a young woman. It's a scary time to be the church.
"Don't be afraid," the angel says. "Stop looking for death." We in the church sometimes look with despair at our young people who "are not there" and we want to help them.
In America we sometimes look with despair at developing countries that seem to be dying, and we try to help them, often in ways that make things worse, as it did in Indonesia.
But God's messenger might well be speaking to us about our young people and about developing countries, the angel saying, "They are not here. They have new life. They have gone AHEAD of you."
The resurrection is real. The message of the cross is that new life happens in deadly places where we least expect it. Jesus is to be found alive in backward Galilee, rather than powerful Jerusalem. Perhaps America might need to turn to "backward" developing countries to find Christ again. It may be time for the church to look for new life not in ourselves and in our traditions -- however holy and wonderful they may be – but in the struggling and lives of our young people.
Perhaps while we're worrying about our dying churches, grieving in the backyard like Jairus' friends, Jesus is reaching out to take the hands of our young people as they struggle to find the new life they can't find in the church.
It's time for the church learn to listen to our daughters and sons, to really listen to the young people who are everywhere but in our churches. They may indeed be going ahead of us, to another place of new life, just as Jesus did.
They, who are ‘unchurched' may be standing in the place of Christ for the church. They may see more clearly than we do where the church is wounded and dying. If we listen to them we may recognize our own need for new life, so that we, too, hear Jesus' life-giving words,