That Kid Reminds Me of Someone

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 1

“Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.”

     —1 Tim. 4:12 niv

I had a mild culture-shock one Christmas night as a teenager, staying up into the wee hours of December 26^th.  WASH-FM, our local soft-rock station in D.C., had been playing an all-Christmas format for weeks and weeks.  That night, as the calendar turned over to the day after, they were right back playing their usual Phil Collins and Shania Twain as though the preceding four weeks of Advent had been merely a peppermint-coated dream.

That’s how the radio business works, I suppose: and I do like Phil Collins as much as the next guy, so I’m not lamenting the choice of music.  But it seems to me that we’ve gotten Christmas backward.  Our culture tends to equate Advent, designed to be a season of looking-ahead, with Christmas itself, such that December 25 is a single, climactic day to cap off and terminate a season, rather than the kickstart it actually is—the jumping-off point for a twelve-day festival that we’ve almost completely forgotten.

It might not be such a big deal, except that there are implications here for the way the church interacts with teenagers.  Advent, recall, is a time of looking forward to God being born as a human baby, somehow both fully God and fully diapered at the same time (technically, “wrapped in bands of cloth”, Luke 2:12): and then for the next twelve days from December 25^th to January 5^th, the season of Christmastide invites us to stop in awe and praise God that it has actually happened—that God was among us as an actual kid.

But if we move on too quickly, if we fail to do like Mary who “treasured all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51)—taking it all in, pondering, enjoying it—we might fail to make a crucial connection: that if God became a human teenager, the teens around us are exactly like God just as they are.  Leave Christmas too fast, and we might miss it—and we may not realize how holy, how God-reflecting, how amazing these under-18ers are just by virtue of being themselves.

Instead, let’s make some deliberate effort this Christmastide to celebrate for the entire 12 days, even if in small ways, praising the Lord for affirming our kids by becoming one of them.  Once Epiphany comes, from January 6^th onward, we may then be able to ride the wave of celebrating “the child” that the magi visited (note that it’s not “the baby” anymore in Matt. 2:11), and then the young-person Jesus who “increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52)—just like the junior- and senior-highs around us are already doing.

These youth bear Jesus’ image through simply being themselves, without even trying.  This January, let’s stop and be in awe of how awesome that is—and how powerfully our young people reflect the image of the Living God just by being alive.

This article appears in the January, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.