We live in an age of gaps. There is the generation gap (best known, probably, because of the alliteration of the title, and for the fact that we have all felt ourselves a part of it at one time or another), and the marriage gap, the racial gap, the economic gap, and a host of others. In a world desperately needing unity lest it blow itself to smithereens, we live separated by chasms and gulfs. It would seem that God - if He is really a part of our world in the present age - speaks to our separations. Hence the pre-Lenten sermon series: God and the Gaps.

We begin with the generation gap because this is one in which God himself, at a particular time in history in the person of Jesus Christ, was a part! Unfortunately, the New Testament is silent about the "under thirty" years of Jesus’ life with one exception - that of the incident in the temple at age twelve. In that particular incident we see all the elements of the generation gap, even though in a somewhat milder form than is evidenced today at Berkeley or San Francisco State! (Bear in mind that He was only twelve).

So, forget, if you can, all the atrocious religious art you’ve seen of Jesus standing in the temple like Superboy, lecturing to his elders, and try to picture the incident as it really was.

I’m sure the story is well known: Jesus, taken by his parents to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, turned up missing in the caravan on the return trip to Nazareth. A frantic trip back to the city by the parents, and a retracing of footsteps brought them after three days to the temple where they found the young lad sitting in the midst of teachers and scholars, questioning them and listening to them, utterly oblivious of time. To Mary’s "Didn’t you know your father and I would be worried?" he could only reply, "But why did you worry? Didn’t you know I’d be in my Father’s house?" (or "about my Father’s business" as the KJV puts it.)

If you can get this picture in a contemporary setting, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble guessing the tension this kind of answer probably produced. Here was a real generation gap; Jesus was caught up in the EXPERIENCE OF THE MOMENT, completely oblivious of his parents’ anxiety. Furthermore - and we can only guess at this from the actions of his later life - he was QUESTIONING THE AUTHORITIES AND THE POWER STRUCTURES OF HIS DAY. Amid the elders and leaders and preservers of the status quo, he was asking questions. While the record indicates that Jesus did, in fact, go home with his parents - growing in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man - the key phrase in the story may be one that is rarely quoted: "Mary and Joseph did not understand!" There was a gap - and it was perhaps not so much a divine-human gap but a youth-age gap, a generation gap, and in it there may be a word for us.

I

Now, there’s no easy way except by the passage of time to bridge the gaps between generations, but there’s at least the germ of a way in two of the magic words that are bandied about these days: COMMUNICATION AND DIALOGUE. For any real dialogue to take place, for communication to become a reality, there has to be a real exchange of ideas. What I’m suggesting is that we who are over thirty have got to listen to the things that are being said to us by those on the other side of the line. Our problem is, we’ve all been youth at one time in our lives and it’s difficult to believe that today’s youth can have any convincing word to us that we aren’t already aware of.

The fact is, we have not been youth in this particular age! We still have the feeling that, despite an occasional outburst, the majority of today’s youth are still more like the YMCA types on our bulletin insert today than the bearded radicals of Berkeley and Chicago. Probably we’re right, but today’s rebels aren’t just the lunatic fringe, nor are the campus revolts simply a refinement of the traditional college high jinx of an earlier generation. This is a new breed - this NOW GENERATION - and we bridge the gap only by taking seriously what they have to say. (This doesn’t mean accepting all their ideas, or giving them free reign, but it does mean an honest listening, and an honest response.)

And what are they saying? The same things that Jesus said in the temple but with a different intensity. First, that THE PRESENT EXPERIENCE IS VITAL. I’m not suggesting that anything like a majority of today’s young people are involved, but I think it is safe to say that a larger percentage of youth than ever before experiment with drugs and stimulants, from cough syrups and glue to L.S.D! This does not represent a majority but it indicates, I think, a concern of the majority, namely a belief in the validity of the present experience. One takes a trip on L.S.D., I gather from what I read, to feel the heightened sensations of color, perception, form, and feeling. That the experience is hallucinatory is beside the point. There is a real concern for living for the moment, even though the wrong way is chosen to demonstrate it.

Youth see adults as "uptight," whatever that means. (I understand it to mean "unable to be themselves - caught up in the masks of society - going through the motions of living instead of really living each moment.") He sees adults as so concerned with the status quo, the rules and regulations of their structured society, that they never live in the present. Boris Pasternak, in Dr. Zhivago, said, "Man is born to live, not to prepare to live." Today’s youth see adults as merely preparing to live - and never really living, and for youth, this is the time to live. So the black youth wants "Freedom NOW," and the college rebel wants the rules changed NOW - after all, he’s only going to be around for four years and can’t wait! (The fact that his proposed rules changes may infringe on the NOW of a future student generation he never considers!)

A theme song of youth may be that one Sammy Davis sings on the radio these days, "I’ve Got to be Me." Be yourself, do your own thing, live for the happenings NOW. That’s their message to us and I think we have to listen. We don’t have to buy all the conclusions; we may have a different perspective - and should have - but their challenge makes sense, because we haven’t treated the moment as important as we should! For Jesus in that temple the experience of the moment was all important. He was discovering his own identity - he was doing his thing - and nothing else, not even parental authority was that important at the moment. For us the reverse is true. We fit ourselves into society’s mold, put on the masks the world expects us to wear, and simply exist - missing the present moment and all its experiences. (Now I happen to think that you can only be yourself in relationship with God ... that experience takes meaning only when it is a response to God’s creation.) Within the framework, are we not called to live in the NOW? To be ourselves and recognize that we’re letting life pass through our fingers? We need to be more sensitive to beauty, more open to friendship, more concerned with the reality of the present moment. We need to live now! As Sister Corita says on one of her paintings, "You’ve only got one life. Live it up!"

II

The other thing that Jesus was doing was QUESTIONING AUTHORITY, I realize that the expression "hearing and asking questions" is the normal Jewish phrase for a student learning from his teachers and yet everything about Jesus’ later ministry indicates a real challenge to the authority and the power structure. He called the leaders "whitewashed tombs," he drove the money changers from the temple, and he deliberately violated the Sabbath laws. I have no difficulty picturing the boy Jesus in the temple as beginning the questioning that would be a hallmark of his ministry.

Of course, this is a prime mark of today’s youth - just as it has been of every generation - but with a much deeper intensity in our age. They are revolting (Robert McAfee Brown says that you take that word as a verb or an adjetive; he opts for the verb and so do I) on campuses, in politics, in civil rights, and against all sorts of things that we’ve simply accepted as "the way it is," like war and poverty.

Now, it’s easy to get "turned off" by revolting youth. Easy for a number of reasons. We, who are adults, are a part of the establishment and any attack against authority is an attack against us. Furthermore, the attackers often look and sound different than the kind of people with whom we usually deal. The Vice President of Wooster College described a student-trustee confrontation before school opened last year. A number of students had been invited to share their views and problems with the Board of Trustees. They met together for three days and by the second day about the only reaction of the Board was, "What’s wrong with these kids? They wear dirty shirts and put their feet all over the furniture!" They never heard them; they couldn’t get beyond appearances!

This is not to suggest that the loss of good manners is to be applauded but it is to say that we should take people seriously, even though their wearing apparel and hair style is not quite what we’re used to. Beards do not really negate brains - although I confess that I can’t really present an unbiased viewpoint on that one!

We must take seriously what is being said, and what is being said is simply the fact that people are important. Some of the collegiate demonstrations seem to be about ridiculous issues and certainly the students are not always in the right. There’s also a great deal of merit in the suggestion by the authorities that no student is forced to come to a particular college and if he does choose to do so he is aware of the rules in advance and ought to be prepared to abide by them. But ... logical or no ... the revolting student is saying, "You’re not seeing me as a person but only as an IBM card. You don’t understand my own needs, desires, and hangups."

This, of course, is the only answer to the generation gap. We must take each other seriously, even though the philosophy on each side of the line is amazingly revolutionary to the other. But we must listen, and we must love.

We have to be honest - honest enough to differ rather than just throw up our hands and say, "Forget it. Do what you want!" There are some areas of experimentation that are too dangerous to be treated cavalierly and lightly; drugs and promiscuous sex can do immense psychic harm and there’s no sense pretending they don’t. We ought to say this, but in it all, we must love.

We can do it because God is in it with us. He’s been through the gap. Amazingly he continues to love a revolting mankind (and maybe the adjective is the correct usage here.) But love us he does - and if we take that love and forgiveness seriously we too can love - and the gap can be bridged.

I’ve often wondered why "30" is the dividing line these days. Why not 21 or 25? Maybe the answer is in that old journalistic device. "Thirty" is printers’ jargon for the end of a column or the end of an article. Maybe, for too long, thirty has marked the cop-out - the end of our concerns and compassions and idealism and love. If so, we’ve got a lot to learn. But, God helping us, we can. There are some pretty good teachers on the other side of the line! Thirty need not be the end of anything - in fact, any age is still the age for a new beginning. Life can be new, because God - who’s been a part of the gap - is in it with us.

Even more, the student is often revolting because he doesn’t think that society sees other people as important. He doesn’t see why the society of which he is a part gets so upset when four letter words are used, when it doesn’t seem as concerned about the real obscenity of prejudice. (As one of them put it, no so-called dirty word is even in the same league with a Southern sheriff saying, "Move along, nigger") Real obscenity is not a four letter word but a slum lord profiting from human misery.

Again, this is not to say that youth are always right, but instead of dismissing them as "kooks, commies, and perverts" (Max Rafferty’s phrase) we need to take them seriously. Parading with a Viet Cong flag may seem perilously close to treason to the generation of us who grew up with World War II and "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," but it means something else to the youth who says, "There are people out there in Southeast Asia ... and we don’t act like we care about them." Maybe all is fair in love and war and maybe women and children are always innocent victims in time of war - but there’s something in the spectacle of napalm burns that destroys not only the victim but does something to the user.

I’m suggesting that what the youth are saying as they question authority is the same thing that Jesus said a number of years ago when he challenged the power structure of his day - namely that people are more important than society acts as if they are, and the role of society is to reach out in love. The youth of our time are called immoral but the fact is they have a different conception of morals - one that we need to understand. They are very concerned with morals in the public sector - they see the need for the state, the establishment, to care enough for people to overcome poverty, sickness, warfare, and the like. Sure, they’re idealisitic. Of course, they aren’t aware of all the ramifications of international politics that make simplistic proposals such as unilateral disarmament not only risky but impossible. Nevertheless, we need to listen to them. For they care about people. And so must we, not just as individuals, but as a society.

We’ve made "Christianity" too much a defender of the status quo - and too little an innovator in new ways of loving our fellow men. In the sports page a few weeks ago, after a Cleveland-Brown victory, the assistant coach was describing his team:

"You have to take your hat off to these guys," he said, "They’re great. They’re ..." he hesitated, groping for the right word. "Well, I wouldn’t say they’re religious, but they’re Christians," he continued. Almost (the article ended) as if there was something sacred about winning.

Most of us, of course, wouldn’t be that crude - but Christianity does have a connotation of success, winning, the "good guys." In point of fact, our faith should be deeply concerned with losers - with those who dwell behind curtains of color and economics, with the disenchanted and the disinherited. I think our youth are challenging us to look in those directions! "So you win the rat race," one student said once, "You’re still a rat." Our challenge is to see Christianity as a force that pulls us away from the old rat race and sends us out into the world with concern, compassion, and love.

III

Ultimately, Jesus went home with Mary and Joseph. He was obedient and, for a time at least, he submitted to the power structure. What moved Jesus to willingly be obedient to his "over thirty parents" (Joseph, at least by tradition, was across the magic line, even if Mary was not)?

I think that the answer was implied. Mary and Joseph didn’t understand him ... and they would understand even less. They would try to restrain him from preaching, and they would miss the import of his first sermon (interestingly enough, one concerned with setting release the captives and preaching good news to the poor), they would be at a loss to perceive his mission. BUT THEY LOVED HIM. They must have loved him. And it closed the gap.