Say Yes or No
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I wrote this for the confirmation students, so you guys can sit and listen in but it is really for them. I am sure you guys know what I am talking about already. That was a little tongue-in-cheek. But I have to start with a confession. Until I was probably about twenty years old I didn’t know what confirmation was. I grew up in a church that didn’t have confirmation. I was baptized as a teenager and that was about the equivalent, but the word confirmation wasn’t really in my vocabulary until I ended up working at a fairly large church in the southwestern suburbs. They had a confirmation program that would have about one hundred and fifty students a year. So I said, “Oh no, I better figure out what this is and fast.” The truth is as I studied it, as I looked into it, as I asked the people that you would ask about something—the pastors at that church and all the elders and deacons—and kind of went down the line asking, no one really had a straight answer for what it means to go through confirmation, what it means to confirm your faith. I mean I heard everything from it’s kind of a spiritual graduation; it’s a right of passage; it’s a coming of age; it’s the fulfillment of baptism; it’s the next step, and all sorts of things. My favorite was our senior pastor at that time told me a little joke and I hope I don’t offend anybody with it, but I found it very pertinent to a lot of what I think students face as they go through confirmation. The joke is that a Pentecostal preacher, a Catholic priest and a rabbi were all meeting for coffee and talking about this problem with bats that they had in their sanctuary. The Pentecostal preacher said “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I called an exterminator.” The Rabbi said, “Well, I got out the shotgun and just went to town on those flying rodents.” And the priest was kind of shaking his head, just confused. They said, “What?” “Why did you guys go to all that effort? You just have to baptize and confirm them and you will never see them again.”
I got in a lot of trouble the last time I told that one, but I hope it’s a new day and new age. But the point is that we as a church have done this ritual of confirmation for hundreds of years now, it started back even before the Reformation. For hundreds of years we have kind of let our kids float by afterwards. We said, “Great, you are confirmed. Now what?” Students, confirmands, I am sure many of you are going “Great I am confirmed. Now what?” That is kind of why we try to set up the questions that Buck mentioned earlier of having the students go: What do I believe? What is the foundation of my faith, not just what does faith believe or Christians believe, but what do I personally believe? Then ask the tough question: Why do I believe it? Why do I give validity to this? Why does it matter to me? And ultimately, ask the question: What am I going to do about it? Maybe that is a question a lot of you guys are still going through even now, is the, “What am I going to do about it?”
I think the best advice I can give is not my own. In the New Testament in the Sermon on the Mount I think Jesus just gives a great starting point. If we can go to that Scripture, this is pretty much in the earlier half of the Sermon on the Mount, comes out of Matthew 5, starting with verse 33: (Matthew 5:33-37)
33“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ 34But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. 37Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’.”
I think for a lot of people, a lot of scholars, the Sermon on the Mount is considered one of the most powerful and deep messages in the whole of the Bible. I studied communications in my Masters and we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount and how it was so greatly communicated, how it was easily one of the best written speeches of all time. And not once did I ever hear anyone talk about these verses. They talked about the Beatitudes, they talked about the lampstand, they talked about the builder and the foundation, all these great things; but what struck me was I think this was Jesus’ crux of the whole thing. Of the whole Sermon on the Mount, it boiled down to one short sentence that Jesus said: “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No’.” And the reasoning for that, the importance of that may be why it was on the top of Jesus’ list. He was speaking to people not as just preacher, not as another prophet, but as the coming King who is building his Kingdom and the whole of the Sermon on the Mount is about what it means to live out your faith. If you haven’t scrolled through it recently, I encourage you to because it is the most practical chunk of Scripture in my life. So often people say “the Bible doesn’t make sense.” Well if you read through the Sermon on the Mount I think you will find a good chunk of stuff that is real and valid and daily. Things like, he talks about money, he talks about relationships, he talks about worship, he talks about all these different things. But in the middle he says, “Don’t make outlandish remarks, don’t swear by heaven or earth, or this or that” He says, “Don’t even swear by the hair on your head, but let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.”
So Students as you are answering that third question of what do I do now, that could include a vast amount of things. You know we talked about those last week, staying involved in the worship, being a part of the worship here at Faith, being part of the discipleship and the service and we talked about different opportunities and you guys had some great ideas. Ideas these adults have never thought of, you are really smart, guys. But the most important step is let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’. And the real question is why is that important? Because it is the first one.
Jesus was speaking to people basically crafting a new world and a new kingdom and calling them out of a normal life, out of a normal Jewish life, out of a normal Gentile life, out of a Roman centurion life, out of a normal bricklayers life, out of a life that they had grown accustomed to. Their life, much like ours, was a life full of people who didn’t say ‘yes’ when they meant it and they didn’t say ‘no’ when they meant it. It was a world full of maybes. It was a world full of back stepping and backtracking. “Yeah, well, I know I told you I would do that, but I can’t.” Or “No, no, no. I never said that. You must have misheard.” So what is so radical about what Jesus is saying is if you are going to be his people, if you are going to be the bearers of the Kingdom news, if you are going to be the sons and daughters of God, you need to be different. You need to stand out and for him the most ordinary and radical way to do it was to mean what you say. To start with your ‘yeses’ mean ‘yes’ and your ‘nos’ mean ‘no’. One of you guys’ parents has to be nudging and going, “You told me you would clean your room today.”
But it is so simple, you guys. That is where our faith should start, with integrity and with honesty because if you can’t be believed in your daily life and in your ‘yeses’ and your ‘nos’ in your promises, how are they going to believe you if you say you know the one and only son of God? How are they going to believe you if you say your faith is life transforming? If you say your faith has the power to move mountains? If you can’t keep your yeses and nos straight?
That is the first step, where it starts, you know when you ask, what am I going to do about it? That is the most practical advice I can give. Start with your yeses and nos and build out from there, but the beauty of it is that it is so hard to do. It is so difficult in our world to simply be honest, to be straight forward, to have a yes mean yes and a no mean no. When we transform our way of thinking, when we focus on actually meaning what we say, it means that we have to stop and think and filter everything else through that. If your mind is constantly set to do this on a Kingdom mentality, a mentality that says I am going to live my life with honesty and integrity so that people believe me when I tell them about Jesus. The good news is that the rest kind of follows behind that first step. The second step and the third step and the life long faith that grows and develops happens with simply a first step of letting your first step be letting your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’.
Our students going through confirmation have already said a few yeses, I didn’t hear any nos that I know of, but they met last week with your Session members, with the people who have been voted and put into place to represent this church and they sat and had what I must say was a really delicious lunch, and I must say that because I made it myself. They sat and they conversed and then after getting to know each other a little bit we came up and asked them the exact same questions that we would ask anybody going through new membership in this church. Those questions are questions simply about do you want to do this? At their very core there do you want to be a part of Faith Church? Do you want to live out your faith here at Faith Church? And do you want to be involved in leading Faith Church? I am proud to say that every one of those students has gone through weeks asking these three tough questions and then hopefully that made it easier for them to say yes to those questions.