Whispers of the Spirit

by Anne Apple

In some churches, it is the time of year when confirmation classes kick off. Confirmation is a ministry of educational formation, a time when the church comes together to be nurtured in the gospel in powerful and imaginative ways. We invite young people to remember their baptisms, others to prepare for baptism, and we invite congregations to remember promises made in baptism.

Out of the cold of winter, springtime signals a time when teens will publicly acknowledge and confess, "I believe in Jesus." To make sense of what that radical confession looks like practically, I turn to the scriptures, particularly the Great Commission in the gospel of Matthew.

A crucified and risen Jesus says to the eleven disciples who came to worship, "Go. Make disciples. Baptize them and teach them to obey. Remember, I'll be with you." Sounds pretty simple and precise, but I know that it is not.

The text tells the truth and it hurts. There are no longer twelve disciples. Judas was dead to discipleship through betrayal and the community was broken and hurting. The text also says that the eleven were in worship but that some doubted. Teaching obedience to Christ in a world where doubt and despair is real is anything but simple, and requires an attitude of octogenarian humility partnered with adolescent invincibility.

As one of seven on a teaching team, I busied myself spouting prayers and pushing biblical texts. I pushed the youth to open their bibles to Genesis and to imagine the smells in the empty ark, well used, but finished with its salvific work. I pushed them to flip through to Luke with a cursory glance at the Psalms. In Luke, I pushed them to see with the eyes of the first evangelist women. I longed for them to see the empty cave where second guessing Peter saw the neatly folded laundry of grave cloths. Especially there, in that dark and empty space, Peter knew Jesus had the power to change life.

At the end of a year of confirmation, I took three youth who had missed a closing retreat down to the river, to remind them of the purpose of our confirmation faith journey. I wanted this confirmation journey to plant seeds of wisdom so that they might know one day the power of Christ to transform their lives. We talked about the significance of baptism and the renunciation of evil which are both made realistic on the banks of the Mississippi where water is visible and danger is a stone's throw away in invisible yet strong river currents.

I was especially frustrated with these three youth. They'd missed a retreat and they acted like they did not care. Destructively they teased one another. Intuitively, I knew something was up; something was wrong and that they were living with suffering born out despair. I heard the Spirit cry with them. But, over the course of the year, I had ignored my intuition. I opted out for producing a busy drama of spouted prayers and pushed biblical texts.

Sitting on a park bench beside the river, the Spirit compelled me to name and to speak out loud the despair I intuitively knew and had ignored. After I named the despair, two of them got angry while another looked at me intently from the back of a park bench. As I tried to explain the love of Jesus, and the power of that love to set them free from their real pain of trying to live as a teenager in this broken and doubting world, I could see that nothing I was stuttering about was being heard. I was a bobble head at the river's edge.

Then, the youth sitting on the back of the bench said, "Let me translate for you." This was the one youth of our thirty who was to be baptized the next morning.

He said something to the others like, "God loves us. Anne loves us. God knows what's up with us and God doesn't want that for us."

I said something like, "I'm frustrated with you and I'm frustrated with myself. For two of you, this church made some promises when you were baptized and we're not living into them. For the other one of you, tomorrow the church is going to make promises specifically for you: that we will help pick you up when you are down. It seems like an empty promise because I know you are down, and I know we, as a church, are not helping to pick you up."

He continued his translation, "The power of baptism and this Jesus stuff is real. She wants us to believe that."

So, there we were at the water's edge, living and dying, learning with one another, remembering that God will be with us, howsoever, God will be with us. I learned from one who had yet to be pulled through the waters of baptism about what it means to go and make disciples. That particular day such learning required acting on intuition and translating the power of Christ to work in the dark, empty spaces of brokenness and doubt.

Anne Apple is Parish Associate at Idlewald Presbyterian Church in Memphis, TN.