Growing Up
When I was about six years old, my parents took me to see a stage production of Peter Pan. I was probably too young for live theater, so I only remember a bit of it. Near the beginning of the play, the actress playing Peter actually flew onto the stage. That was pretty cool. After that, I got bored. But something about the story of a child who lived in a magical place called Neverland and refused to grow up stuck with me. I knew I had it pretty good as a kid and I wasn’t in a rush to change that. Of course, not every child is as lucky as I was. Some kids have to grow up much too fast. But there’s something about the innocence and imagination of childhood that’s worth holding on to if you can.
Jesus said so too. Do you remember this conversation from the Gospel of Matthew? “The disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’”
But it seems that the author of the letter to the Ephesians didn’t get that memo. “We must no longer be children…but must grow up in every way.”
And of course, that sounds right too. We do have to grow up, don’t we?
But how can they both be right? How can we at once “become like children” and “no longer be children?”
Maybe it would help to consider what Christian maturity looks like.
Let me start by saying that maturity doesn’t have much to do with age. Some kids are mature. And some full-grown adults never quite get there.
Whether we like it or not, maturity isn’t a milestone we can reach by following a perfectly-defined self-improvement plan. It’s more often something that happens to us. Most people mature through pain. Everything falls apart. And then you rebuild.
Maturity is a task that’s never fully complete. We grow in maturity. We grow in Christ. We backtrack a bit. Sometimes we backtrack a lot. And then we grow again. At least in this life, there’s always more growth ahead of us. Growth isn’t often comfortable, but it’s important.
Even though much of it is out of our control, there are some guideposts. Today’s lesson talks about a few of them.
A mature Christian, a mature person, is grounded. Not tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine. Not easily manipulated, flattered, or frightened. If you define yourself by what others think of you, you’ll find it hard to mature.
A mature Christian knows himself or herself pretty well, warts and all, and has come to terms with being unique. “The gifts [God] gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.” We’re all created in the image of God, but we each have different calls, different gifts. To live a mature Christian life, we need to learn to be comfortable with uniqueness in ourselves—and we need to respect the uniqueness of others.
Maturity looks like “humility and gentleness.” It looks like “patience, bearing with one another in love.”
A community of mature Christians is united in Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”
United in Christ—but not uniform.
Our differences make the whole stronger. The whole body is “joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly.”
Most important of all, as Deacon Yvonne reminded us last week, maturity looks a lot like love.
There’s a phrase in today’s Epistle reading that I want to talk a bit more about: “speaking the truth in love.” All too often, I’ve seen that phrase used as a weapon. “Ephesians says to ‘speak the truth in love’ and so I’m going to tell you at great length about all the things you’re doing wrong.” If you ever find yourself tempted to say something like that, go back to the rest of the passage. Are you speaking from a place of humility and gentleness? Are you embodying patience? “Speaking the truth in love” might mean sharing your own experiences of God’s grace. It can’t mean judging the people around you.
If we center ourselves in God’s love, we’ll have the confidence to share that love with others. Growing in maturity looks like being ever more fully yourself. It looks like living ever more completely into God’s will. Maturity includes strength, but it’s a strength that has no need to prove itself.
I think that’s at least part of what it means to “no longer be children.”
And I suspect that it’s that kind of maturity that allows us become again like a child. To love simply and purely. To know without doubt that we are who and what God made us to be.
It’s the work of a lifetime. But it’s work worth doing.