“Our Second Childhood”

I John 3: 1-7, 8

April 26, 2009 + Third Sunday of Easter

Baptism of Ainsley Erin Seaton

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Rev. Dr. David Brown

Several times I have had this experience: I attend a meeting or conference and there is a book table in the next room. I am intrigued by a title, buy the book and bring it home, intending to read it soon. Then I put it on a bookshelf and there it sits for months, even years . . . unread. Then one day, my eye falls on that unread book. Once again I am intrigued as on the day I bought it. I pick it up and read it.

That experience was the genesis of my message today. I read Robert Coles’ “The Spiritual Life of Children” (Houghton Mifflin, 1990). It’s an incredible book. Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who taught for many years at Harvard. He’s published more than 40 books. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his five-volume study of the effects of the Civil Rights revolution on children. That book is called, aptly enough, “The Children of Crisis.”

In the course of studying desegregation, Coles met Ruby Bridges, an African American girl who, when she was six years old, marched through an angry mob on her way to attend first grade in New Orleans in a formerly all-White school. Coles said that meeting Ruby changed his life. He said that he stopped being an analytical detached observer and became what he called a “field worker.” He realized he had something to learn from a six-year-old girl who could face a racist mob with courage and dignity. What he really became was a listener. He asked children questions and listened carefully to their answers.

Out of that approach, he wrote another landmark study of children entitled “The Spiritual Life of Children.” Incidentally, he had trouble finding funds to research this project because foundations didn’t consider the spiritual life of children – or adults, either, for that matter – to be a serious study project for scholars. But Coles finally got the funding and this marvelous book is the result. Let me share a few stories from it.

Coles interviewed fifth graders in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a racially mixed, blue collar community. He had the children write down answers to these questions: “What is most important about you? What makes you the person you are?” They all wrote down their answers, then read them in a group and discussed them.

The discussion moved to other topics, became heated, and then, suddenly, stopped. Coles made some awkward comments trying to get the discussion going again but nobody responded. Finally, one girl spoke up. She said the discussion they had just had reminded her of discussions at her home, especially when her family was in a lot of trouble. This girl had a stammer in her speech and at times the other children would snicker when she spoke. But this time they didn’t. There was silence as she spoke. She said:

“We try to figure out what we should do. We get upset, then we calm down. You have these bad times, and you learn what to do. You think about God and how he had his bad times, too. My grandpa reminds me of that. “You march through life,” he says. “It’s a long time you march, if you’re lucky.” My sister, she died. She was only four.”

The girl sitting next to her wiped a tear from her eye. The class became quiet. Then the girl with the tear said, “If you die when you’re only a kid, then you go to heaven. So your sister is there. She’s up there. It’s when you get older that you can lose out.”

In these discussions, Coles discovered an impressive wisdom rooted in the genuine spirituality of children. These children had a vision of what life is all about. They saw life as a journey. “A long march” is the way one girl described it. And we don’t know where we are going on that journey. We don’t know what we will become through this journey but we know that God has something to do with it.

1Coles related another incident. Another girl in this fifth grade class wrote about was important to her. She said: “I am the one at home who can make Gramps laugh. I don’t tickle him. I just tell him jokes. My mom said that without me Gramps would be sad.” Coles noticed that she crumpled up the paper she had written on and asked if he could read what she had written. She confessed to Coles: “When I wrote that I was boasting. The nuns tell us that we shouldn’t do that.” Then she asked Coles if she could read another statement and he said that she could. She had written these words: “I am like I am now, but I could change when I grow up. You never know who you’ll be until you get to that age when you’re all grown, but God must know all the time.”

Now listen again to the words of our text for this morning:

“See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he (Christ) is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

- I John 3:1-2

Such wonderful words and not all that different than the words we have just heard from those fifth graders in Lawrence, Massachusetts. They saw life as a journey, tool. They called it “growing up.” During that journey they knew they would change. Life is a journey and we don’t know what we will become but we know that God has something to do with that change and growth.

The unknown writer of the First Letter of John suggests that we Christians have entered a phase of our life’s journey he calls “childhood.” The writer says that we are children of God. This is a baffling statement and disturbing, too, for there are those who have been raised to believe that only some people are God’s children. No, we are all God’s children. We’d better be because if we’re not our world doesn’t have a chance. We need a vision of our common humanity that will transcend the differences among religions, cultures, nations, genders, orientations, races, values we need something that will unite us as one human family.

If the writer of First John was here this morning I would want to say this to him. “Please don’t give ammunition to those who seek to divide humanity according to those who are “saved” and those who are not; those who are good and those who are evil; those who are in and those who are out. We don’t need that. Nor is it truly biblical to do that. Didn’t the Apostle Paul tell the Greeks when he was in Athens, “We are all God’s children?” (See Acts 17:22-28) Every human being on the face of the earth is our brother or our sister.”

But, thank God, I don’t believe this is what the writer of the Letter of John is trying to say to us. He says the world doesn’t understand what we know because the world has not yet recognized what is there for all of us to experience. I believe what he means is that we are all called to experience a “second childhood.”

Now I hesitated to use that term as the title of my message because it might suggest old codgers doing silly things that embarrass their families. But I believe that “second childhood: is an apt way to express this insight of our Christian faith. Isn’t this what Jesus meant when he told us we should become like children? Childlike not childish. Wasn’t this what Jesus meant when he had that night time encounter with old Nicodemus, telling him he needed to be born again? Nicodemus demonstrated how much he needed the renewal of a second childhood when he asked Jesus: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born (again)?” (See John 3:1-5) To which I believe Jesus must have said something like “My God, you really are dense, Nicodemus. It’s a metaphor! Don’t take it literally; take it spiritually!”

In other words, when we “get it,” when we realize that we and every other person on the face of the earth are part of God’s family, when we realize that we are given this precious gift of a new birth, a second childhood, it is the best news we have ever heard.

The journey of life, the journey of growth, is never over no matter how long we may live. No matter what happens to us – a broken marriage, a lost job, financial disaster, whatever has knocked us down and nearly out – our lives, can always have a new beginning. We don’t have to be trapped in a past of regrets, of anger, of resentment, of disappointed hopes and dreams. The slate has been wiped clean. We can become new persons starting right now. And God is with us all the way!

By now I expect everyone in the world has heard of Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old Scottish singer, who appeared out of nowhere and astonished everyone with her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Her story is inspiring millions to take a second look at their lives. Granted that few of us in middle age can do what she did but hidden inside all of us are abilities waiting to be developed, a second childhood waiting to be born. Don’t write yourself off.

Looking at this beautiful little girl that we baptized this morning, we see in her all the possibilities of a wonderful life. We share in her family’s hopes and dreams and prayers that her life will be full of God’s blessings and that she will be a blessing to others. But I tell you that all of us here today have just as much chance for a radiant future as she does no matter how young or old we may be. For we are all God’s beloved children and it does not yet appear what we will become. This is our hope, this is our dream, this is our prayer, and this is our destiny.