Wendy: Today I have put into your bulletins a little brochure giving all the Sunday lessons for the first six months of 2006. What I hope you will do with the brochure is take it home and put it in your Bible. More importantly, I hope you will get out your Bibles every week, and read the lessons for the coming Sunday. I want you to do this because it will prepare your mind and your soul for worship; and also because it will help you get more familiar with your own Bible. Perhaps some week you will read what comes before or after a lesson that intrigues you, and you may benefit from the footnotes, or from a different translation than we read in church.

The cycle of lessons is called a lectionary, and we have been using the Revised Common Lectionary for several years now. It is similar to the lectionary at the back of the prayerbook in the Gospel readings, but often has different Old Testament and Epistle readings. What is important to know, is that most Sundays have a theme, and that there is a particular theological sequence for half of each year. The sequence begins in Advent, with the prophecies of the Messiah, and goes in order to the birth of Jesus, the revelation to the Gentiles, the baptism of Jesus, the call of the disciples, the ministry of Jesus, the journey to Holy Week and the crucifixion, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The theme for today and for next Sunday, is the call of God, and the call of Jesus in particular, to follow him and to spread the good news.

Well over a month ago, the Adult Education committee had plans for the three part series on Ministry to Children in a Grandparent Congregation, which began last Wednesday evening. I suggested the idea that our Family Ministry Director and I should do a dialogue sermon. We chose this Sunday to fit with the series, and only weeks later did we look at these appointed lessons, and discover how appropriate they are. Not only do we have the psalmist telling us that God has knit us together in our mother's wombs, but we also have the call of Samuel when he was only a boy. Rosemary, why is this story of Samuel's call so important?

Rosemary: The story of Samuel's call gives an example of God calling a child to prophecy. By prophecy I mean the act of relaying a message on God's behalf. While this is the only recorded conversation in the Bible in which God asks a child to deliver a message, there are several other examples in which God calls or designates a child from the time he is in the womb. These include Samson, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, St. Paul, and of course, the child Jesus.

In Awake My Soul, a wonderful book on intergenerational worship, Ernesto R. Medina writes "The elders of a community have the gift of wisdom and the children of a community have the gift of prophecy." By this he means that elders have the benefit of many years' experience and reflection from which to draw a deep understanding of God; while children have the advantage of young minds that are yet wide open to new revelations.

All of us, including children, are subject to movement by the Holy Spirit, that is, moments when the Spirit speaks directly to us through new ideas or sudden inspirations; and when we bear witness to these movements, then we are serving as prophets. The trouble for adults is that we have been so carefully trained to ignore or repress movements of spontaneous inspiration. When a gospel reading in church moves me with joy, I do not shout aloud or dance down the aisle, as badly as I sometimes want to. I stay still and silently thank God for a lovely inspiration. The opportunity for prophecy is lost.

And this is why Medina and many others claim that children have the special gift of prophecy: Unlike myself and many adults I know, a three-year-old has not yet learned to suppress any of his impulses, whether divine or simply mood-related. So when a toddler impulsively shouts or jumps up and down, we don't know whether he is being just a nuisance or whether he has been divinely inspired to shout his spontaneous joy. Generally, we assume the former: "That child," we think, "is badly disciplined, disrupting prayer for attention, bored, rude, etc."

Do we ever assume that perhaps a toddler or even a baby is responding to a movement of joy by the Holy Spirit? How often do we listen for inspiration in the voice of a cooing infant or in a toddler's shouts?

Wendy: Without being aware of it, we may assume that the Holy Spirit combines the roles of teacher and lieutenant: sometimes educating us, and sometimes giving us orders. While the Holy Spirit certainly does these things, it is too narrow a description. Most often, the Holy Spirit is addressing the heart, rather than the mind, by giving us strength and courage, by motivating us to pray and to worship, by stirring up our compassion for the suffering of others, by giving us patience in a difficult situation, and by enabling us to feel the joy and the love of God. Rosemary's thought is surely right, that sometimes when children speak out in worship, it is a response to the Spirit's presence. The story of Eli and Samuel seems to be an example of this. Is that what we need to learn from the story, Rosemary?

Rosemary: Interestingly, the first 2 times that Samuel woke Eli, the older man told him to go back to sleep. He was probably annoyed, as anyone would be who has been wakened from sleep by a child claiming to hear or see impossible things. But Eli realized upon the child's third appearance that Samuel was being called by God.

When Jeremiah made his very unorthodox prophecies, his contemporaries at first begged and then ordered him to stop. He was a being a nuisance. But he was also being a prophet. Jeremiah spoke in ways that were unexpected, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, just as God had directed: and so does the Holy Spirit; and so does a child.

How long does it take us to recognize God's calling when the time, or the place, or the person, is unexpected? The Book of Common Prayer states that the ministry of all laity is to bear witness to Christ; it does not say, "all laity except children," or "except anyone who is being a nuisance." Like Jeremiah and like Samuel at first, many children find themselves shushed and scolded for their spontaneous expressions of the Spirit, because we fail to recognize prophecy when it comes in unexpected ways.

Children hold a special link to the Holy Spirit in that both exist outside the boundaries and rules that adults have so carefully built around themselves. The Holy Spirit and the child do not wait for a time that is convenient or polite to shout their praises.

Wendy, what was Jesus' attitude toward children?

Wendy: Jesus seems to have been quite interested in children: he talked with them, observed their play, healed them, and insisted that his disciples allow the little ones to come to him. His teaching that those who want to enter the Kingdom of heaven must become like children (Matt 18:3) must have been unusual at the time, as it is today.

Recently, more research has been done about attitudes toward children in the early church. The early theologians affirmed that Jesus died for babies as well as for adults, and expected children to be reading Scripture at the age of 7. St. John Chrysostom advised parents to censor the stories and ideas their children heard, so that they would not be exposed to "all sorts of folly and bad examples from popular entertainments"!

All the evidence we have points toward the full inclusion of children in the life and worship of the church. When a whole household was baptized, that included infants and children. The early documents make it clear that ONLY those who were baptized received Communion, and also that everyone who was baptized received Communion. It was much later, in the 13th century that the requirement of Confirmation before receiving Communion was established. In the Episcopal Church, when we were going through the process of prayerbook revision in the 1960's and 70's, the fact that all baptized persons received Communion for the first 1200 years was rediscovered. On that basis, we decided that baptism confers full membership in the church, including the receiving of Communion. According to the early church, the theological basis for this was given in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (6:53).

There is also some evidence that children had a liturgical role in worship: that of saying, or singing, the Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy upon us). Early Christians believed children were innocent, and therefore closer to God, which made them the most appropriate members of a congregation, to pray for God's mercy on behalf of all those present. And so today at St. Thomas, we are trying in many different ways to integrate our children and youth more fully into our worship, and into the life of the parish. Amen