Come And See

Tomorrow morning at Bedford Presbyterian Church we will celebrate Confirmation and the lives and witness of five young adults who have been in a conversation with me this past year about how we imagine and think and talk about God and what we know about the life and witness of Jesus and what it means to carry something of all that into the world in which we live.
I will do my best…
We will do our best…
To make it a meaningful moment for them.
One that will somehow find its way into the fabric of who they are and how they live.

Early in John’s Gospel there is this wonderful story.
Philip has already met Jesus and is so captivated by who he is and what he is teaching that he goes home to tell his friends. As his friends question him about this new teacher, instead of trying to argue with them or to convince them, Philip simply says, “Come and see.”
That is the best he could do.
And, it is the best I can do.

So, here is what I hope.
I hope that somewhere along the way…
Somewhere in all the conversations and questions of this past year, instead of trying to convince them or to make sure they understand all the “correct” doctrine and dogma around this thing we call Christianity, they have heard me say, “Come and see.”
Try it out.
Enter into the conversation with me.
Join me in trying out something of this in your own life.
Ask the hard questions that make room for new ideas and new insights.
Come and see if any of what we say about God makes sense.
Come and see what it might mean today to “treat others as you would like to be treated.”
I have no expectations that 10 years from now (or maybe even a year or a couple of months from now) they will remember the types of things we talked about for an hour or so on Sunday evenings this past year.  And, that is okay.  But what I hope they do remember is somewhere along the way I extended an invitation to them.