The LPC e-pistle is designed for the friends and families of Langhorne Presbyterian Church and any others who happen by.  Pastor Bill Teague shares weekly comments on the world, the life of faith and Langhorne Church.  A weekly e-mail, sent by request, keeps members up to date on news and prayer concerns within the congregation.  Langhorne Presbyterian Church is a warm, Christ-honoring congregation, and we'd love to have you stop by for a visit if you're ever in our neighborhood.  You can get directions to LPC here.

This year’s class has included ten amazing ninth graders and one wonderful eleventh grader, seven girls and four boys. You’ll have a chance to see and hear who I am talking about on Sunday June 3 when they lead and participate in all three services.

It will be at the 9:45 service that ten of them confirm the faith of their baptism and one of them affirms her faith she feels the cool waters splash on her head and run down her face.  They will be well-prepared for the service and when the question is asked, “Who is you Lord and Savior,” they will know to say as one, “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.”

But confirmation is about so much more than rehearsing lines for a Sunday morning show.  It is, in a word, about faith.

In his class book, Will Our Children Have Faith, John Westerhoff theorizes four stages of faith development through which most children of the church and Christian homes will go:

• Experienced – this is the early stage of learning to say grace at mealtime, sitting on a parent’s lap and being read a children’s Bible storybook, or being shown that “all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.”
• Affiliative – this is the school-age stage of knowing who we are by where we belong. Children learn what it means to be a member of their particular family through traditions and customs, reassuring routines and lived values. They learn about being a third grader from teachers and peers and about being a Christian from the Christians they meet in church and home and see the things those Christians do and say.
• Searching – in adolescence children begin to question why we do what we do and say what we say. They wonder if there might be other ways of being and doing and they think about those other ways and sometimes try on those other ways. They compare how it feels and see how it works. Searching requires lots of good guidance and just enough free space.
• Owned – “to make it my own because he has made me his own,” Paul says of the gospel of the risen Christ. Sometimes it is in a moment of conversion – a compelling experience or a convicting word. Other times it comes imperceptibly – “I don’t know when, but I know now without doubt that I belong to Him and with those who are His.” However it comes, it is a faith that is owned.

Without doubt, the Confirmation program at LPC is designed to include experience and encourage affiliation; it insists on searching. But owning faith, declaring it “mine,” is not for a program to accomplish. It is for a student to decide and discover.

For six full and wonderful hours this past week, I sat and talked with the young disciples who have been on this journey of faith we call, quaintly, Confirmation.  One by one and each in his or her own words, I heard of decisions made and faith discovered: “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.”

Confirmation Sunday is June 3.

The Washington Post sent some reporters to rummage through the dumpster of Mitt Romney’s past and they have come up with an ugly incident from the candidate’s senior year in high school. The people who remember the incident recall it so well that they can quote exact words spoken. Romney says he doesn’t remember it all. Maybe, on both counts.

It is a story of a new kid at school, a non-conformist, being harassed and bullied. Some of those involved in the incident remember the 18-year old Mitt Romney as the lead bully. He must have been, whether the words he is credited with speaking are correctly remembered or not. The boy who was bullied died a few years ago and never told the story publicly.

After the story broke, Romney told an interviewer, “Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.”

It’s up to the voters to decide what we are to make of this 1965 incident, if anything. How closely connected are any of us to the person we were, more accurately, were becoming, and the dumb things we did when we were in high school?

It is also up to us to decide how much attention we are going to pay to the muck-slinging, half-truth telling mess that American politics and journalism has become – or maybe always has been.

But bullying is more than a dumb thing and there is no “if” about its hurt and offense.

My brush with bullying came two years before Mitt Romney’s. It was the summer of 1963 and I was going into the seventh grade.  I was taking a summer school class at the junior high school.  Back then summer school was for enrichment.  It was a biology class. My guess is that I have a lot of the details wrong, but the incident, accurately remembered or not, is as clear in my mind as if happened yesterday.

Each morning I would walk from my house in our suburban development to the bottom of the hill where I would meet my friend Richard and then we would walk together to the school. One morning, there at the corner of Henderson Drive and Gregory Street, I arrived to find a group of boys, I am guessing they were eighth graders, circled around Richard. I know they were calling him names, though I don’t remember the words they were using. There may have been some pushing or shoving; some books fell to the street. My guess is that I was there for no more than 90 seconds before it was all over.

What I remember is that Richard was standing there, his books and homework scattered on the sidewalk.  And I left.  I didn’t stay and help him gather his scattered things. I didn’t walk with him in the kind of silence that friends would understand. I left. I walked to school alone; certainly not with the bullies because I was afraid of them.

In my memory, Richard and I never walked to school together again.

I was eleven years old. Since that day in the summer of 1963, I have stood up to bullies more than once and sometimes at some cost. But that day, and there is no if about it, I hurt my friend Richard. By saying nothing, by walking away, I hurt him deeply.

I have no idea what happened to Richard, where his life has gone since the few times we talked in high school. I tried Googling his name once, but came up with nothing. Maybe he’ll Google my name some day. Who knows, if he does he might come upon this post.  And Richard, if you do, I apologize, not if, but because I hurt you.

I don’t lose sleep over that incident at the corner of Henderson Dr. and Gregory St. I rarely think of it, but when I do, I feel sorrow and regret. Eleven years old, but still guilty of cowardice.

One of the great promises of Scripture is found in Isaiah 43:25:  “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”  This no more remembering of our sins in not divine amnesia. It is a no more remembering in the sense of no more holding them against us. In fact Psalm 103 reminds us that God does remember, “…he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” The good news of he gospel is that our sin, even long ago when we were young sin, is no longer held against us.

Should the news story, maliciously told or not, cause Mitt Romney to remember and be haunted by the long-forgotten incident, I hope that it causes him to seek for the One who knows his frame, who remembers that he is dust, but has chosen to remember his sin no more.

We watched ”The Hunger Games” and we will watch “The Avengers.”  I wonder what that says about us.

As I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago, “The Hunger Games” phenomena, among other things, made us dust off an old word we don’t use often, dystopia. Literally a dystopia is a bad place and, like its antonym “utopia,” a good place, often has a future tint to it. The future depicted in “The Hunger Games” is most definitely a bad place. In fact, the dystopia of “The Hunger Games” is decadent old Rome with a cynical new high-tech terror added.

The fact that “The Hunger Games” and the trilogy it was based on appeals especially to teens and young adults has fascinated me. And now having read all three books which I found even more cynical and more dystopic, I wonder all the more. This generation will not and cannot believe the “climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow” optimism of earlier generations of Americans. Maybe they don’t believe that it is possible to reach their dreams.

False hope is a setup. It’s not worth the price you pay when the whole thing collapses. And for those of you who have read “The Hunger Games” trilogy, I would only say that a field of dandelions is not a field of dreams worth dreaming. No plot spoiler there.

So, this week we will be watching “The Avengers.” I haven’t seen the film but have read some of the reviews (and Rotten Tomatoes says they are 93% positive).  It’s a superheroes movie, and, yes, these are postmodern superheroes with self-doubt and petty bickering among themselves.  But they are superheroes and they will do what superheroes do; they will beat the bad guys and save the planet.  They always do.

After the dystopic, though sometimes thought-provoking, vision of “The Hunger Games,” it will be nice to escape for 2 hours and 22 minutes (interestingly the same 142 minutes) into the good triumphs over evil world of “The Avengers.” Yes, I know that 21st Century good is a bit more problematic than the good of the original worlds of our comic book superheroes, but it is still good. Kind of.

If we are what we watch, then we are sort of schizophrenic. We are compelled to contemplate a very dark future with very little hope, and we long to escape to a fantasy world where superheroes, even flawed superheroes, save us from the brink of global destruction.

I know, some of us go to the movies just to be entertained.

But if you want to think about it, isn’t it true that the Gospel always speaks to our manic tendency to dark gloom and fanciful hope? The hope of the Gospel is solid and real, however; and the future it promises is sure and bright.

Pass the popcorn.

One of the speakers at last week’s West Coast Presbyterian Pastor’s Conference spoke of God’s generosity – a generous creation that sustains and nurtures life, a generous redemption that calls the prodigal home and seeks the lost lamb, a generous sanctification that pours out the Holy Spirit upon the redeemed.  Yes, a generous God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Is God generous? Of course. James 1:5 speaks of a God who gives generously to those who ask. Ephesians 3:20 tells us that God acts far more abundantly than we are able to imagine, beyond our thoughts and our petitions. Yes, God is generous.

God’s generosity was everywhere during my ten days in California. It was there in the beauty of the waves crashing on the rocky coast north of the Golden Gate and in the majesty of the towering redwoods.  His abundance beyond measure was surely present in the fellowship of pastoral colleagues young and old and in the good teaching of a wise scholar opening the pages of Scripture with fresh insight and faithful integrity. God’s generosity was poured out as I lingered over dinner and a long night’s conversation with friends I first knew nearly forty years ago. Yes, a generous God who grants my nearly 90-year old mother joy in good book, enthusiasm in nature’s beauty and an insistence on walking rather than riding to her book club or writer’s workshop.

Is God generous? Well, of course, God is generous. But not by evidential data alone.

Am I able to declare God generous to the couple, not many years now from a once-planned retirement, who have been forced into bankruptcy by a mortgage their reduced salaries can no longer afford? Where is God’s abundance in the life of the young father recently diagnosed with a serious form of cancer or the wife and mother whose marriage is slowly dying, suffocated by anger, neglect and bitterness? These lives, too, touch mine.

Is God generous? We marveled at the stories of the Sudanese pastors who vowed to stand firm when the tyrant dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir stripped them of their citizenship and the meager rights they once had. Less than two weeks after the cruel decree was issued, their churches have been ransacked and burned, their lives threatened. (Full story here) Has the generous God abandoned his church in Khartoum?

Like the some in the crowds who followed Jesus and demanded a sign, I want to dictate the proof of God’s generosity: bankruptcy avoided, cancer cured, marriage restored, tyrants deposed. But Jesus told those who demanded a sign that none would be given save the sign of Jonah; Jonah who spent three days in the belly of the great fish and then was spewed out upon the dry land.

It is still Eastertide, Sunday will be the fourth Sunday of Easter. The proof of God’s generosity is, finally, an empty tomb on the third day. Abundance beyond imagination is in the defeat of death and the victory of love.

I will continue to pray for our generous God’s grace in the lives of my friends who face financial distress, life-threatening disease and life-denying despair. We must pray for our brothers and sisters in the Sudan and elsewhere. But we have no guarantees of financial stability or sound bodies and healthy marriages. No guarantee that we will not face persecution for righteousness’ sake.

Easter’s empty tomb, however, is our guarantee that life has defeated death, love has vanquished evil.

Is God generous?  Yes, beyond our ability to measure.