By Reverend Laurie DeMott

I remember when my son John was going off to college and I felt the need to say something profound to him, some carefully chosen words I could leave with him that would reverberate in his memory as he confronted new situations, protecting him from making damaging choices, and steering him toward the good side of the force. Finally after much deliberating, I came up with the following words of wisdom:

“John, if what I’ve been telling you for the last 18 years hasn’t had any affect on you by now, then its probably too late! So, I’ll trust that those 18 years did make a difference and all I’ll say now is I wish you the best …. and don’t do drugs!”

In thinking about my sermon today, I feel a bit of the same thing. If you guys haven’t been listening to me for the past few years, it’s a little late for me to be trying to get you to listen now so we could make this short and sweet. I could just say, “I wish you all the best …. and don’t do drugs!”

But of course, today I’m a preacher and not a mother and if you think sometimes it’s hard for mothers to hold their tongues, it turns out it’s impossible for preachers to hold ours so like it or not you’ll have to endure some final words from me.

Two weeks ago, I asked you all to tell me your favorite memories of youth group and you poured forth with stories about overnights at my house, Wii golf and Capture the Flag games, service projects, throwing pumpkins off a balcony, and lots of memories from Christmas plays. Now let me tell you about my favorite memory. It’s a strange memory because it isn’t even really mine -- I wasn’t there when it happened because it happened outside of church, outside of Alfred in fact, but it was reported to me during Coffee Hour the next week. It happened one of those nights when a bunch of you went up to Geneseo to square dance. There had been some church event before hand, a fundraiser maybe, and so you all got a late start and you arrived at the dance after most of the squares had already formed. Consequently, you ended up in a square with a man who was developmentally disabled or somehow challenged and was a bit of an awkward outsider, but you welcomed him into your square and danced as if he was just one of the group.

I was told about this incident by an adult who attended that dance with you, told because they wanted to share with me how impressed they were with all of you that night and how proud they were to have you as members of our church. I’m not exactly sure which of you participated in the square dance that night but it doesn’t really matter because this borrowed memory is just one of a dozen similar borrowed memories in which the adults of this church have told me about things they have seen that have made them realize what a phenomenal group of kids you are. And when they share with me how proud they are of you, they are not talking about your academic achievements, or how many awards you gained on the swim team, or any of the other standards by which you are measured every day in your life outside of these walls because frankly, we don’t really know those things about you. I can’t tell you a single one of your grade point averages and I’ve never bothered to try to find out. All we know is what we see Sunday after Sunday, in the way you treat one another, in the way you interact with the younger kids, in the way you willingly volunteer your time to help other people -- to stack wood, to paint walls, to climb trees with chainsaws, to play soccer with refugees. The only part of you with which we are really well acquainted is your character, and if you have not heard this loudly and clearly from us by now, listen carefully – each and every one of you without exception has a heart of gold.

So it would seem like our job is done. We can send you off into the world proud that we have had a little hand in your shaping and confident that your strong characters and compassionate hearts will continue to serve you and others well. Unfortunately, what I have learned over my years of ministry is that a strong character and a compassionate heart are only 2/3 of the equation for living a life grounded in wholeness and peace. There is a third component that is absolutely necessary, and it is one that we cannot give you. The third component rests entirely in your hands. Deuteronomy 30 says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life…” The third component for a life of peace is choice. And I’m not talking about that parental kind of admonition that you hear all the time when you’re about to go to a party or something – “Make good choices, please.” I’m not talking about those kind of choices. I’m talking about a fundamental core choice that each of us makes as to how we decide we will view the world, as blessing or curse, as life or death.

Some kids get to your age still convinced that they can live in a protected bubble where nothing terrible will ever happen to them, but you already know that’s not possible. You have already confronted the tragic death of friends and the unfairness of events beyond our control. If you ever thought you were immortal, you know now that’s not true. If you ever thought believing in God would keep you and everyone you love safe, you know now that that’s wishful thinking. You know that simple platitudes can be not only empty but hurtful in their shallowness when you are desperately trying to make sense of things that will never make any sense, ever. And it is in those most tragic times that we come to recognize the inadequacy of strong character and compassionate hearts because, if anything, the stronger your sense of right and wrong, the more you will be angered by unfair tragedies and the more compassionate your heart, the deeper your hurt is going to be. If anything, everything we take pride in seeing in you right now could end up not being your greatest blessing but your worst curse because it leaves you open to unfathomable hurt and frustration.

And so that is where the third element comes in – your choice. Look around you at the people in this sanctuary. Let me tell you, we are NOT here because life has been so good to us. If we ever believed that God would make our lives rosy and wonderful, we stopped believing that long ago. No, you are looking at the battered and the wounded. We have known injustice, we have seen suffering, we have been thrown to the ground with our own grief. We have had our sense of right and wrong challenged and our compassionate hearts wrung with pain. So why are we here, then?

We are here because of a choice we made, and continue to make sometimes every day. We have decided to choose life and not death. We have decided to choose blessing and not curse, and if events aren’t very blessed then we will be blessing so that others will know life again.

When you have a compassionate heart and it is broken, you face a fundamental choice. You can either choose to protect your heart by closing it down and not trusting in love again -- you can decide that God is useless, and all of the talk about compassion, goodness, justice, and hope are empty words without any real power. I have known people who have chosen this path and the ironic thing is that usually in trying to save themselves, they end up losing themselves. When there is nothing left to believe in, the center of their lives will echo with a terrible emptiness.

Or you in the face of senseless tragedy, you can choose to insist on the power of love to heal even the greatest hurt, the power of joy to overcome the hardest of sorrows, the power of our patient presence with one another to see us through the pain and find a way to live and laugh again.

A few weeks ago, when you shared all of your memories of the great fun you had in your years of youth group, I said to you, “I’m glad that you really enjoyed church, but as your minister I have to ask, do you think you learned anything?” And Cheryl said, “Oh, absolutely. In five years, we’ll come back and prove to you that we are the good moral people that you were teaching us to be.” My words of wisdom for all of you is that I pray in five years, and ten, and twenty, you are not just good moral people, but that you are people of joy and peace, because that is who you chose to become.

And don’t do drugs.