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Today we are celebrating the ministry of the Covenant Teen Mother and Infant Center. The Center began when the City of Rochester schools threatened to close the childcare centers that allowed teen mothers to remain in school. Covenant United Methodist Church (UMC) rose to the occasion to establish an alternative, and although the school district did not ultimately close the doors of its child care centers, Covenant followed through with its plan for its ministry. The occasion of celebrating this ministry gives us the opportunity to talk more generally about the situation of children and teens in our society and the church’s response. In what I will say, I want to be clear that I am not referring directly to any of the teens and their children that are served by our Center-rather, I am talking in statistical generalities about what we know about children and teens.

What can we document about the life of children and teens in the United States?

In a few words:

• roughly 20 percent of the children under age 18 in the United States live in families in material poverty; and 23 percent of young children under age 6 live in poor families.
• becoming a teen mother significantly increases the likelihood that a young woman will live her life struggling with poverty, especially if she drops out of school.
• despite the increase in child poverty in the United States, the instances of teenage pregnancy have been declining.
• despite the increase in child poverty in the United States, the cases of severe violence perpetrated by children and teens has steadily declined since 1974. But crime is increasing among their parents’ generation, significantly surpassing the crime perpetrated by children and teens.
• despite reliable data that documents the decline of crime among children and teens, we have increased our building of juvenile prisons.
• popular images suggest that teen pregnancy occurs because teens have sex with other teens. Health officials know that much teen pregnancy occurs as a result of sex between young teens and adult males, usually within the family.
• health officials know that sex education will not present pregnancies that result from abuse and violence.
• when girls are not coerced into sex, they most frequently delay sexual activity when they have a vision of the future, and educational and vocational goals they want to attain.
• on the basis of emergency room statistics, the most likely place that an injury requiring emergency room treatment will occur is in the family, second the workplace. Contrary to sensational publicity, schools and recreational areas frequented by children and teens are among the safest places in the United States.
• despite evidence to the contrary, we are regularly barraged with images of teens as violent, sexual, and irresponsible.

(See Mike Males, Framing Youth, and the Scapegoat Generation.)

As Christians who believe that every child is a child of God, we have a fine and sensitive tightrope to walk. We must be very careful that our own language does not portray teens as inevitably troubled, promiscuous, and criminal. At the same time, as long as one child is victimized, or suffering, our job in caring for all God’s children is not finished.

What’s behind the negative publicity about teens that seems so rampant in our newspapers, political speeches, and academic articles? Some say, every generation as it grows older proclaims the doom of the teenagers in its midst. One scholar I heard at an academic meeting studied the treatises of ancient Greece in which the ancient Greek elders were decrying the moral decline of the ancient Greek teenagers, in much the same language as we use today. Some say, the Baby Boom generation that is presently in control of politics, the media, and the universities needs to divert attention from its own rise in violent crime, drug abuse and sexual violence. Focusing the negative press on teens keeps the publicity about our own generation from coming to the fore. Some say, the problem is racism: the present generation is the last dominantly Caucasian generation, one that fears the multicultural, multiracial, white minority society that this generation of teenagers and their children represent-one that will be increasingly powerful from about 2025 on. Some say, negative images are the only way to get attention and funding for worthy projects for teens!

What do we in the church say?

This morning, in Psalm 78, we heard, "Give ear to my teaching. . . .We will tell to the coming generation the glorious and mighty deeds of the Lord, and the wonders God has done. God has planted a word in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, that our forbears should teach it to their children. . .so they should set their hope in God. . .and keep these commandments."

We say, every child, every child, is of equal worth in God’s eyes, regardless of situation of birth or circumstances. We say, every child is fundamentally religious, and deserves the opportunity to make religious meaning out of his or her life, to find his or her way to God, whether the path is to God through Christianity-a journey we can offer to guide-or whether that path is through Judaism, Islam, or another religious path.

Yesterday I spent the day with the men of the Christian Reformed Church, leading workshops on the theme: "When Children Please and Disappoint." It was a rare privilege to sit in a group of all men and listen in as they talked about their fathering as a religious experience. In the 1970s, as increasing numbers of women became ordained, we began to talk about the experience of childbirth and raising children as ordinary religious experience, in sermons, prayers, and eventually even in academic papers. But I’ve rarely heard men talk in a similar way about fathering as a religious experience - an experience where they seek and find God. These men yesterday did what I have heard many women do in the last twenty years. They talked about witnessing the birth of their children as a profound, wondrous, mysterious experience of God. They talked of their struggles and joys with raising children as a repeated reminder of the grace of God. In the words of one man, "I experience grace through my children, even as my daughter tried to slide her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, like a video, into the VCR."

Just as we have been slow to think of fathering as a place for religious experience, we rarely allow ourselves to think of teen pregnancy and child raising as a genuine religious experience. Part of what we can offer - not impose - as a church-based Teen Mother and Infant Center is the opportunity for our teens to think of their own birthing and child raising experience in religious terms, in a way that heightens the value of the birthing and child raising for both mother and child. Does it matter that young people have the opportunity to make religious meaning out of their experiences, especially experiences that may be connected with trauma, stigma, or violence? According to James Garbarino, the author of Children in Danger, and one of the foremost thinkers about child resilience, the answer is "yes." Garbarino compared the resilience of children in war torn countries to the resilience of children in highly violent sections of inner cities of the United States. He concluded that children weather crises of violence and trauma significantly better when their parents find meaning, especially religious or moral meaning, in the struggles around them. Such meaning-making is a significant part of other cultures, but absent in many violence-torn inner city communities in the United States, except where religious groups have maintained their presence with inner city children.

But the Psalm we heard earlier speaks more specifically than teaching general religious meaning-making- it speaks of teaching the children "a law in Israel, that they may see their hope in God, and keep God’s commandments." In the Hebrew Scriptures the law is understood as a gift of God, a gift that maintains the community’s hope, keeps the community in good relations with one another, and with God. What is this law by which we are to live our lives and teach our children?

The law is formulated around the Ten Commandments. When I was a child in Sunday School and learned the Ten Commandments, it seemed that the last nine were pretty clear cut, and probably doable, "do not make graven images, do not take the Lord’s name in vain, keep the Sabbath, honor your father and mother, do not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness against your neighbor or covet your neighbor’s belongings." Of course, even as a child applying a little concentrated attention to whether I was actually living the commandments, I quickly learned that though they seemed clear-cut, they weren’t actually all that easy to follow. Still, the goal seemed clear.

But, even as a child, I found the first commandment befuddling: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, you shall have no other gods before me." Why did God have to tell Moses that? To my childlike religiosity, "You shall have no other gods before me" seemed too obvious to deserve to be a commandment, and too vague to know whether I was living by it. The line in the sand was not drawn clearly by this commandment in the way that it was drawn by the other commandments.

If we take the Ten Commandments - the fundamentals of the gift of the law - seriously, we must admit that all of them require a lifetime of living to understand and live toward. But it’s especially true of that first, abstract, commandment - it takes the mind and experience of adulthood to even begin to wrap our minds around that one.

"You shall have no other gods before me." That part of the commandment gets lots of commentary in our society today - we speak of the way that we make gods of our most vital desires - for example, our personal desires for consumer goods, for so-called intact families, for guaranteed safety in our communities, for the longest life that modern medicine can provide - we are very aware that we as a society raise these minor gods to the status of God in the daily practice of our time and money.

The other part of the commandment gets less air time - the part that begins "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." What do we learn from that part of the first commandment?

The phrase "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery," has repeated significance in the Hebrew Scriptures. We read in Deuteronomy 24:17: "You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there, therefore I command you to do this," or again, in Deuteronomy 24:21: "When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore, I am commanding you to do this." There are many, many other examples where the interpretation of the law reminds the community of what they are to do for the most vulnerable people, and why they are to do it. The community is reminded to care for its widows, orphans, and resident aliens - the ones most likely to be marginalized in the society of ancient Israel - because God had once cared for the Israelites in the Exodus. The first commandment is a teaching about fundamental and deep generosity, God’s fundamental generosity in the Exodus, and the community’s responsibility to enact that generosity toward those in its midst. Such generosity keeps our priorities in order and is a prior condition that allows us to act on the second half of the commandment - to put no lesser god before the one true God.

"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." As a society, we have a great stake in forgetting that many of our ancestors -- unless we descended from indigenous people or captured slaves - emigrated to this country in peril and need. We have a great stake in forgetting the good deeds done by teenagers, and we have a great stake in forgetting the Good Deed done by God in the Exodus. As long as we can forget our ancestors’ personal exodus from political or economic hardship, the good that has been done or is being done for us by others, including teenagers, or the good that God has done for us, we need not be generous. As long as we can ignore the ways in which we at time slid by, got extra encouragement when it wasn’t deserved, got a break we didn’t earn, or got help we didn’t deserve, we can continue to live by the myth that everything that befalls our teens results from their own choices, and only their own good choices can make them who they will become. But if we remember that which our society would rather forget - then we are called to practice generosity, compassion, and grace - to become vehicles through which the love and justice of God can be made manifest in the world.

We become generous people by living generously. Generosity is primarily a state of the spirit or the soul - an attitude of grace toward others from which actions such as material giving arise. We learn the first commandment not by drawing lines in the sand, but by opening our heart to it. We live into it, when we sponsor and become involved in such ministries as the Teen Mother and Infant Center, locally, or contribute to the Hope for the Children of Africa campaign, globally. We live into it when we become "A Church for All God’s Children."

In recent years I have been particularly humbled and proud at the efforts our somewhat clumsy denomination has made at trying to recall us to this truth. We have tried to call attention to children in need, AND, a review of the websites of our General Boards and Agencies shows that we walk the tightrope - we call attention at the same time as showing positive images of children and youth. Our denomination's efforts were recently rewarded when the recording artist, Kurt Bestor, donated to the UMC a song he had composed and recorded for use in any non-commercial efforts promoting the well-being of children. The song was sung recently at the rededication of the United Methodist Building in Washington, D.C. It’s called "A Prayer of the Children." As we listen to it now, let us allow it to help us to grow our generous hearts and souls and minds.