Youth Sermon on Faith

MATURITY

A sermon by Molly Tavella

Trinity Cathedral, San Jose, CA

As I’ve progressed on my road toward maturity…all I can say is well, what a ride it has been, although I don’t think it ever ends, does it? I mean I am definitely more mature than I used to be, but I get the feeling it is never over.

I am the youngest of three and I remember having to go to bed early and wishing I was older. Watching my sister get to go to college and my brother get to stay out late, I thought: if I could only be older so that I could do that. Now that I am older and facing SAT’s and college applications, I wish I could go back to when I just had to go to bed early! I have a feeling those wishes of being further ahead in life never end either, because now I see my older siblings, getting married, getting started on careers and I wish I could be doing that. I think most people have trouble facing the present, chronologically, or spiritually, I know I do. But we act a certain way depending on how mature we are. I obviously was not ready to go to college when my sister, who is eight years older than me, was ready. In the same way as chronological maturity, everyone travels the road of spiritual maturity, but everyone is at a different place on it, from having no knowledge of their spiritual obligations--to understanding their faith.

When I was younger, church was a nice, big place where I kept my crayons and markers in a box in the cabinet that I got to play with when I got too fussy, or squirmy or when I just wouldn’t be quiet. Parents, you know the drill. I had no knowledge of sin or evil or righteousness, I just wanted to play with my fun box.

As I started getting older, I actually started listening to the words I was praying, or singing or reciting, even if I didn’t know what Hallelujah meant, or have any idea who this Hosanna was. And when I got even older, I actually started to understand and think about these words and apply them to myself. I started to realize my own faith, that that is what it was: my own. I had to make it happen. I had to believe. It wasn’t my parents doing it for me anymore. --They couldn’t.

It was a time of self-realization, a time of taking responsibility for myself.

A Christian camp I went to helped me to make it my own, and consciously take that responsibility upon myself and accept Jesus into my heart. My Confirmation when I was 16 also reinforced that. Each time, I again remembered that it was my own faith. --Hebrews 6:1 says, “We must try to become more mature and start thinking about more that just the basic things we were taught about Christ.” --My parents had given me a strong base, and now I needed to build on that base. I now knew the difference between right and wrong, I could never be the innocent, unknowing, little girl I used to be, but isn’t that the point of growing up? Once you know the truth and you know what is expected of you, you have reached maturity, you can’t go back. --That is where sin comes in. We want to do something, but now we know we shouldn’t and it becomes a struggle. Now, obviously nobody is free from sin; sin is like death, or taxes. Nobody can escape them (as I found out the hard way with the taxes earlier this year, which is also a big part of maturing).

What makes someone truly mature in their faith is that they try not to sin, knowing that they inevitably will sin, and then they are able to stand up and admit they are wrong, ask for forgiveness, and ask for God’s help for when they go back out into their lives and try not to sin again.

It is a personal fight to not sin; we need to focus all of our power on what we are doing right now in order not to sin. It does us no good to dream of the future or long for the past because we need all of our concentration to uphold our Christian life so we don’t fall into sin. We need this concentration at every moment, in every decision. If you lose your focus on God for one second, that is when you are weak and it is harder to maintain spiritual maturity and to trust that God will see you through.

Sin can happen so quickly; you aren’t expecting to have to face it, you might be thinking about something else, so you are weak. When you reach spiritual maturity you know that sin is a choice. You realize that everyone struggles with his or her own personal weaknesses and everyone struggles with hardships in life.

You must put your faith in God. Putting faith in God is another sign of spiritual maturity, and it is probably one of the hardest things to do, having complete trust in what He has planned, especially when you are having a hard time. It is really easy to try to blame God when things get bad, and of course bad things often seem to come in threes. My boyfriend had to have surgery on his foot, he got better, but then the doctor told him he has to have surgery again because it didn’t heal well, and now I have an injured foot. Well, “When it rains it pours,” right?

In my struggle to have spiritual maturity, I know that I can’t blame God, that He is not trying to harm me and I try to see the good in any situation, to put myself in God’s hands, like the blind Bartameus had to have faith, as we heard in the Gospel earlier.

I’ll throw out another saying that I have to remember, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” We have to be aware that God is at work in all things, and try to be positive in our responses to what is happening by remembering that life can be like a roller coaster with peaks and valleys, it can get really good and really bad, but is mostly somewhere in between. We must have faith that God knows what needs to happen, and He is not trying to hurt us, but He is trying to make us better. God knows what He is doing, even if we can’t see it at that moment.

I recently went to a great Christian conference with this really dynamic speaker, Jeffrey Johnson. He gave these great analogies about trusting God. My favorite one was where he was talking about getting ready to go to the conference and how he had planned out everything he was going to wear. He had brought a specific pair of pants for every day to go with a specific shirt. For the first day he picked out a shirt and set it on the ironing board because it was wrinkled. He took the iron and set it to a heat number that he knew would not damage the shirt. But when he was about to place the iron on the shirt, it screamed out at him: “No, please stop, you are going to hurt me. That iron is way too hot.” And Jeffrey said, “Oh, I’m not going to hurt you, I pre-set the iron to how much heat I know you can handle.” But the shirt persisted, “No, no, that iron is bad, it will hurt me!” And Jeffrey continued, “Well, why would I want to hurt you, I’m the one that bought you.” The shirt was still skeptical, saying: “I don’t think that this is good for me. I know what I can handle.” And Jeffrey said, “I am only trying to make you your best, why would I want to ruin something I am about to get into.”

Well, that was such a good analogy to me. So many times, we don’t trust God, we think we know what is best, but God knows the past, present and future, from a point of view that we will never know. From our very insular point of view, how can we question Him? Why would He make us look bad if He is a part of us, if the Holy Spirit is in everyone? Well, that is all a part of the spiritual maturity we need to strive for. We need to take responsibility for our actions that struggle against God’s plan, in other words, our sins. We need to give our lives to Him. Every day is a new struggle towards that spiritual maturity, and it is hard, but that is what maturing is all about. It is a path of faith we all must go down. We see others ahead of us, and we want to be where they are, that is only natural, but like I found out, you must travel the path to maturity for yourself, and focus on what you, yourself, are doing, both spiritually and physically, just like everyone else, for who knows what unseen pressures or troubles others face. We never truly reach the destination of maturity, but we need to enjoy the path we are on; if we move too fast, we might miss our early bed times and innocence or end up making a decision that we wouldn’t have if we had really been focusing on God. Maturing is hard, spiritually and physically, but we need to face it, take responsibility, and embrace the here and now, college applications, hot irons and all!