Holy God, whose proclamation of peace through the risen Christ startles us yet washes over us with refreshing joy, we are eager to see Jesus and to trust that the purity of life we know through him is worth emulating.  Put us in touch with truth that cleanses and makes whole so that we can relate to others in ways that reconcile and redeem.  Amen. 

            The phone rang Tuesday evening, just after I had gotten Tess to bed and I had changed into my own pajamas and was settling down on the couch for a few minutes of mindless TV before going to bed myself.  On the other end was an old friend.  We’ve been friends since we roomed together in college, and have been especially close this past decade since we’ve both lived in Asheville.  Her eight year old son is my godson, and being his godmother is one of the greatest joys of my life, but it is a responsibility that I find I must take very seriously, for this is one young man with lots of questions and a deep yearning to explore the depths of his own understanding.  When he doesn’t get something, I often know about it.  The fact that I’m a minister, coupled with my being his godmother, makes me a prime target for all his unanswerable questions.  I’ll never forget the story my friend told me years ago. They were driving in the car, and son asked Mom what they were having for dinner, and when she said that she didn’t know, he responded, “We’ll, I guess we’ll have to ask Auntie Beth.”  “Why would we ask Auntie Beth what we’re having for dinner?” asked his mom.  “Well, doesn’t Auntie Beth know all the answers to all the questions?” 
            This one Tuesday night was a toughie, though.  My godson’s great-grandmother had just died, and the funeral was that afternoon.  His great-gran had lived to be 92, and died peacefully in her sleep, fully trusting in her savior Jesus Christ and where she was going.  But this young man, at age eight, has already suffered a great deal of loss: both grandfathers, still young in their sixties, taken by cancers that ravaged their bodies and spirits.  And a dear friend and classmate of mine and his mom’s, who also lived in Asheville, died of ALS a year and a half ago.  So when the minister told a story in the service, about a man who was sick, who choose to die and be with Jesus, instead of living as long as possible with his earthly family, my godson was beside himself.  And boy did he have questions: Why would the minister say that?  What would someone want to die?  Why would the sick man not want to stay with his family as long as possible? 
I wish I could say that we ended the conversation with him feeling more assured by my wisdom and carefully thought out answers.  Even though I could tell it helped him just to talk and vent, I knew that only concrete answers would satisfy him, and I had none to give.
            I have to say that when I went back to this text on Wednesday morning, I read the first verse with clearer perception.  “See what the love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”  The writer of this letter means to assure these early Christians, because they are under siege by those who would hold to different standards, different understanding of who Jesus is and how salvation occurs.  He’s writing to them, encouraging them not to relinquish what they have been taught to believe, despite external pressures to change their ways and surrender their steadfast faith.  They have assurance that they are not alone, they have a heavenly Father, who has, literally, in the Greek text, lavished love upon them, and called them children.
            But my conversation with my godson surfaced for me another tension present in the text, the sense of incompletion that we must live with here and now.  The truth is, being a child is not easy.  We adults can, at times, idealize children and childhood.  What’s the phrase that is often used, “Youth is wasted on the young?”  I mean, we know that children can be wonderful, and that they can also be difficult at times, but I think sometimes we forget that being a child can be really hard, because there is so much going on around you and inside of you, that no one seems to understand and no one can explain in a way that is helpful.
            And yet the reverse is often true.  Young people often idealize adulthood, with all its freedoms and choices.  Once you are grown up, you’re good to go, because you’ve sorted through all the stages and struggle of becoming.  You’ll have a career, and maybe a family, finish school and start making money, have everything pretty much figured out.  But, from the perspective of the writer of this letter, we’re all lumped into that category of children.  This is both an act of grace, and perhaps a truer, more accurate picture of how it really is with us.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
            There’s a strong sense of already-not yet present within this text, and we, who are adults, who at least feel some obligation to the children in our midst to have our acts more or less together, to do the hard adult work of being responsible and faithful, trying to maintain some level of certainty, we hear this writer saying to us that we are more like the children in our midst in our unknowing, in our lack of completion, than who we will be when Christ is finally revealed to us. 
            I think being called children of God may be one of the most profound, grace-filled titles that Christians have been given to live with, because there is nothing implied, no blank left to fill in.  We are all children, and we all have a parent, a God who bestows love lavishly upon us, but who also has expectations of us, expectations that, if met, will set us apart from the rest of the world.  The author of this text would lay those expectations out before us using the themes of righteousness and purity.  Those who are called children of God will not be contaminated by worldly views and will lead lives and make choices that have a sense of Jesus’ purity and God’s righteousness, not the world’s lawlessness, at their core.
            So let’s imagine, for the sake of understanding what this purity and this righteousness might look like, a child, an infant, in our midst.    The parents of this baby, on a Sunday morning, bring their child to the font and we all say, “You are a child of God. This has been true about you, little baby, from the beginning, and now, your parents and your faith community undertake critical work of helping you begin to orient your life to God.  You will sin, we all know you will, and our hope is that you will experience true forgiveness, so that you might become one that will be able to share true forgiveness, and learn to share with the world the power of God’s reconciling love.  We, your parents, and your brothers and sisters in Christ, promise to show you the way, to tell you the stories of Jesus, so that you may grow in the light of his love.”  Then our challenge, our responsibility as that child’s community of faith, is to live into those vows that we make, so that any baptized child in our midst, begins to understand what it means to orient themselves, their lives, to Christ.  They, hopefully, among other things, learn to be kind, and to play fair, not to take what’s not theirs, to choose healthy and appropriate roll models, and begin to assimilate the language of faith as a part of their own vocabulary.
            When the time comes, hopefully, this baptized child decided to make a public declaration of faith.  We help them by enabling a confirmation process, where we review the basic tenants of the faith, and make sure they have begun to develop nurturing relationships within the church with adults who are not their parents, widening circles of adults with whom these young people can explore questions of faith and from whom they can learn about others’ life experiences.  We say to these confirmands, “You are a child of God, and now you get off the proverbial shoulders of your parents and begin to claim for yourself the faith that has nurtured you.”  And we hope that as teens, growing into adulthood, they begin to claim the language of faith as their own.  That they make good choices, and that they experience both consequences and grace when they don’t.  That they feel free to ask the tough questions of us, and that they learn to honor themselves and their bodies, and come to value friendships, especially with those who are different from them.
The secret we adults often keep from our young people is that the same lessons they are working on learning and the ones we still work on learning.  We are children because we have a heavenly parent who lavishes love on us, but we are all children because we are all still in the process of becoming, still learning how to orient ourselves, our lives, toward God, even as we love the world in which we live.  There is grace, yes, but there are also particular expectations places upon us.  We are all children.  But being a child of God isn’t easy.  It’s not easy because the world doesn’t get us and is often quick to judge us.  It’s not easy because we are not yet fully whom we will one day be.  Do you recall the words we say at a funeral? We thank God for that person’s life, and that his or her baptism is now complete in death.  We are all still in the process of becoming and always will be, until our own baptisms are complete.  Praise God we are on that journey together. Praise God we do have a savoir who promises to be light and life and the example we are called to follow.