Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the second Sunday after Pentecost, Confirmation Sunday, June 2, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Deuteronomy 11:18-21; Matthew 7:21-27; Romans 3:22-28

There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

                       --Romans 3:22-23

     I don't know how many of you were listening to those questions Wes put to the Confirmands. There's one traditional question he didn't ask them: Do you renounce the works of the Devil? Or in the updated version: Do you renounce the powers of evil?

     It's a curious thing: We ask this question of adults when they join the church, but we omit it at Confirmation. I don't know how this discrepancy came about. We must have convinced ourselves that teenagers have not yet become chummy enough with the Devil to be expected to repudiate him, a proposition which most teenagers and their parents will find amusing at best, and which most ministers will dismiss as theologically unsound.

     But the Devil and his works loom large in the UCC's Statement of Faith, which we will recite in a few moments: It names sin three times, plus one mention of evil, and it applies them without distinction to all people. This is good theology. So, Confirmands, if someone asks you to explain exactly what you were confirmed into today, you can answer confidently, proudly, that today you were welcomed into the fellowship of sinners. Because it's the truth.

     If you are not a sinner, then nothing we have taught you all these years in church school and in confirmation class makes any sense. You can handle life perfectly well on your own. You have no need of grace, love, forgiveness, and redemption.

     But the fact is that your parents brought you to church in the first place because, clueless though parents are, they know better than that. They know they themselves are sinners, and no matter how much they adore you and dote on you, they suspect that you are sinners too. There is a gap between the way things are and the way things are supposed to be, and that gap applies even to you, your minds and hearts and your souls.

     And that gap is most clearly to be observed in the difference between what we say and what we do: the way we talk the talk versus the way we walk the walk. I know that you know what I mean, because like all sons and daughters you already have a keen and ruthless eye to expose the hypocrisy of your fathers, your mothers, and their whole rotten generation.

     You must worry about the possibility that this perceptive ability of yours will grow dim as you age, and you will come to accept uncritically things that cry out to be condemned. You have probably already seen how this can happen. I hope you will not let it happen to you. On the contrary, now that you have allowed yourselves to be Confirmed in the church, you are under an increased obligation to detect and name all the Devil's works. And since you are now officially labeled as sinners like the rest of us, you must even turn that searchlight upon yourself.

     All your life you have heard that in Jesus we have a Savior who loves and accepts us just as we are, with no conditions, and that is true. The love of God is like the love of a mother or a father in that way. But in Jesus we also have a Savior who expects something of us: That by the help of the Holy Spirit we may come to reduce the gap between the walk we walk and the talk we talk. And the way that Jesus walked is held up before us to guide us in that.

     Even with the help of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, this will be hard for you, as it is for us all. The difficulty is that no matter how many times we discover what sinners we are and admit it and face it and renounce it, we forget the whole thing in no time and have to start all over again. So we gather ourselves into congregations like this one, which witness day after day and year after year to the different and better way that the whole world, including us, resists. God's way. The way that talks the talk and walks the walk. Welcome aboard the ship of sinners, and a good voyage to you.

     Amen