Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. Michelle Webber

United Church of Christ 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 August 12^th, 2007

“Thanks A Lot”

John 3:8

Matthew 14:25-30

Twice I found myself getting teary on the last day of art camp. The first time was when I was looking over some thank you posters that the kids made for each other. One of the big kids wrote on my daughter’s poster “I heart you.” It made me teary because I knew how much it would mean to her to know that she is loved by an older girl whom she deeply admires. What a gift to her, to feel valued by someone whom she values.

The second time was when I took three of the girls who had been learning tone chimes from Thelma Ackley to sneak in and watch Thelma practice for playing solo bells next week. They were in awe. After 5 days of practice they were not only rightly proud of what they had learned, well steeped in the knowledge of the skill needed to play the tone chimes, but mesmerized by watching someone who is as practiced as Thelma. They stood there completely silent, mouths open, smiling, eyes wide, just soaking it in. When we walked away they said, “How does she do that? ... It’s like magic.” It was as if they had seen Thelma walking on water.

Months ago, when we began planning art camp, the first thing we did was look for a theme song. Alexandra Morgan, Lisa Teske, Anna Rehwinkel and I looked at several songs and talked about different ones. We asked Kristin Burns for some suggestions. She suggested, among other things, a song that had come with our Sunday morning Children’s Program curriculum last year. The song we chose was Raffi’s Thanks A Lot, the one we sang this morning. It’s simple and catchy and gave us a wonderful theme for Art Camp: Gratitude, “Thank you.”

It’s such a simple phrase. I’m sure people have been saying it as long as we’ve had language, and perhaps expressing it even before that. Sometimes it’s thoughtless polite expression. Someone hands you something, or opens the door for you, and you just say thank you without thinking. Sometimes it’s a deep felt appreciation for the way someone has empowered or assisted you.

I am impressed by how often my daughter, Jerri Lane, says “Thank You.” She is only 4.

There is still much she can not do for herself. Her day is a constant cycle of please and thank you. Please help me put on my shoes. Please get me some cereal. Please help me fasten my pants. Please watch me while I take a bath. Please play with me. And more often than not she says thank you. I don’t think I remember to say thank you as often as she does. I would do well to learn from her example.

We had a sub-theme each day, based on a different verse of the song. We were thankful for the sun, the moon, the stars, things of the air, ourselves and our feelings. When I asked Thursday morning if anyone remembered the theme for the day before, one boy, Brandon, said, “Please and Thank you.” “Yes,” I affirmed, “That’s the theme for the whole week.” And indeed, as the week went on, more and more kids came up to me and spontaneously thanked me for doing things that I was surprised they noticed I did. Nancy Burton, who was a shepherd at camp, said that two of the girls in her group made thank you cards for her and gave them to her. Their gratitude was very special to us.

And I became grateful for them, too. I am grateful to Madeline who played with Jerri Lane in the nursery, to Brandon who made me a snack and shared a storybook from home that reminded him of Art Camp, to Ashley, Anna, Matthew,

Branko and James who posed for amazing photos, for Ian who helped me set up a project, the red and orange groups who made snack each day, the yellow, green and blue groups who prepared lunch for us… I could go on and on and perhaps I should. It would give you a good picture of how much I appreciate each and every camper, as well as each and every adult at Art Camp. It definitely takes a village to run art camp. We had 26 kids and 19 adults, along with three teenagers.

We intentionally kept the adult to child ration small. While our theme was gratitude, our number one goal is to make sure that each and every kid feels welcome, accepted and affirmed as an individual. We want to approximate God’s unconditional love, as much as humanly possible, and to inspire kids to seek and follow the small spark of God that is in each of us. This requires a decent amount of one-on-one attention.

We want them to learn the lessons taught in our scripture stories today. While I did tell those stories at Camp, the number one way they will learn them is by being in an environment where people act as if they are true. In the story from John that we heard during the invocation, John says that the wind blows where it chooses. He describes the wind as God’s creative force, the “wind hovering over the water” that sparked creation. Then the author of John tells us that if we open our eyes to the spiritual world, if we look for the effects of God’s creativity and become born of the spirit, in other words, conscious of God’s existence, then we are like the wind. We blow where we choose. We have God’s creative force inside of us. Each of us has the power to create, the power to follow our imaginations wherever they can take us. This is John’s message to us. The beginning of John’s gospel presents Jesus as a light that shines in the darkness and the darkness can not overcome it. Now John is telling us that we have that power.

We can shine in the darkness, and the darkness can not defeat us.

I think of one girl at Art Camp who was having a hard time figuring out how to play two tone chimes at the same time. She was getting pretty frustrated. But the adults in the room knew that she could shine through the challenge so they worked with her until she got it. The darkness and self doubt could not overcome her because she was around people who believed that it could not overcome her.

In the same way, the gospel of Matthew also calls us to believe in ourselves. Peter is amazed by Jesus walking on water. Then Jesus tells him that he has that power in himself, too. What a concept! I know that I can float in water, but would I believe in the moment that I could walk on water? Or would I sink like Peter?

Peter does well when he is focused solely on Jesus. He looks straight at him and walks right on top of the water, but then he looks away, he looks at the storm raging around him and he begins to doubt and he sinks. Whenever we are learning new things, being stretched, we need just that type of focus, lest we doubt our ability to achieve the new skill and sink.

All the adults worked hard this week at helping kids walk on water. And we stretched them. We had 6 year old boys who “don’t dance” participating in dance class and kids who had never before played chimes learn an entire song

and someone who hates to get dirty playing with clay. We had kids who’d never used acrylic paint doing a 4 day painting project. We had a lot of fun, but we learned a lot, too. Many of us learned that we have power in ourselves that we didn’t know about before this week. The power to dance, the power to get dirty,

the power to make music, the power to be grateful for who we are and what God has given us in creation, the power to lead children, the power to let children lead us, the power to let children blow where they choose.

I just received a book called “Don’t sit on the children.” I haven’t read it yet, but I think it is an amusing way of saying “let children blow where they choose.” I am not advocating a limitless childhood. I have seen too many young adults who grew up without limits crash into the institutionalized limits of adulthood. But I have also seen young adults who have had too many limits placed on them crash because they did not know how to set their own.

Our challenge at Art Camp this week, like the challenge of parenting,

was to seek the individual gifts of each child, to encourage them to see and develop those gifts in themselves, to affirm the gifts they see in others, to allow them the room to fail and succeed with those gifts, but to also provide enough structure that they understand the natural limits of the world and of the culture we live in.

Ann Jones, who taught visual art to 3 of our 5 groups of kids, said that one a-ha she saw the kids have this week was about the ability to recover from mistakes. They did a 4-day acrylic painting project. On day 3 some of the kids finally understood that each daily step was only just one layer in the process

and that they could paint over and begin again at any time. They also had to practice intense editing. Most of them began with pictures that were too detailed for the size and medium they had to work with. Ann encouraged them all week

to filter out all but the most important elements of their painting. Both of these are great limit lessons for kids that will help them blow where they choose without crashing into things. They practiced focusing only on the most important things and received the grace of being able to re-work their mistakes. Most of us would do well to incorporate those two lessons into our daily lives.

I invite you all into the challenges of parenthood, the challenges of art camp: learning how to blow where our creative energy, the little spark of God that is in each of us, chooses to blow us, but being mindful of the very real limits of our incarnation and our culture, for it is by knowing how not to drown and

how to focus only on the most important things, that we can walk on water.

And this is what we, as a Christian community, can offer the children in our midst, an opportunity to be among people who honestly believe that they can achieve whatever magic it is that has them in awe. Amen.