Just over three weeks from now, the last of the four Baca children will celebrate her twentieth birthday, and that will mark the end of nearly twelve years of the presence of teenagers in our household. This is the kind of thought that hits me when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. You would think that after twelve years of being involved with something that you would have a little bit of a clue as to what it’s all about, but I’m not sure that I do. And so, this sermon begins with a disclaimer: When it comes to the topic of teenagers, adolescence, what we broadly mean when we use the term, “youth,” I probably don’t really know what I’m talking about. If you’ve ever been the parent of a teenager, you know what I mean. Now, I don’t mean that to be in any way disrespectful of teenagers. What I mean is that the period of human life that occurs more or less in the second decade of life is very complex and emotional and filled with rapid and radical change. Along with the first decade, it is the most formative and, therefore, potentially the most powerful time in a person’s life.

We are in the process of spending our Sunday sermon time together looking at the very real things of our lives from the perspective of our faith. Some of the most real things, and arguably the most important things, have to do with our relationships, especially in the family. We’ve already looked at families as a whole, and at children, and at grandparents. Today we’re going to think awhile about adolescents, and eventually we’ll work our way around to all the major subcategories of roles and relationships that comprise the modern family. I know that some of you may have left your teen years behind more than half a century ago, and some of you may not wish to remember those years of your life, and still others of you are in the midst of being a teenager right now or trying to be the parent of a teenager right now. There is a very important truth that I hope all of us realize from the very start, however, and it’s not just about teenagers. What we need to realize is this: that God in his wisdom has made it so that you and I need to spend our lives learning deeply about all aspects of the lives he has given us so that we can more fully appreciate and, therefore, more successfully navigate the many relationships and events and realities of life. To learn more about teenagers or mothers or uncles is to learn how better to live in those roles ourselves, if that is where we find ourselves, and it is also to learn how better to love and support and understand those people in our lives who are living those roles. To be a “good Christian,” in other words, you and I need to know as much as we can about the realities of life in this world so that everything we do in relationship to them is wise and healthy and productive. Nowhere is this kind of knowledge more important than in the realm of our family relationships.

Most of us have already survived the adolescent years and so we know from first-hand experience what that is like, and many of us have survived or are surviving the role of being parents of adolescents, and that gives us another perspective as well. To more or less summarize what adolescence is all about, let me very briefly review some of the major issues of that stage of life from a general psychological perspective. Early adolescence is marked by the onset of puberty, when the human body begins a dramatic transformation from childhood into adulthood. Puberty involves all sorts of physical changes, and most problematic of those relates to sexual development. This stage sees major advancement in our cognitive development as well, as we learn what science calls “formal operational thought” and “social cognition.” Typical issues that adolescents face, largely due to these physical and mental changes, are things like substance abuse, antisocial behavior or even criminal behavior, eating disorders, sexual experimentation and its related dangers such as unwanted pregnancy, depression, and suicide. The adolescent years see major change and, therefore, major stress in family relationships, peer relationships, self-identity, cultural and ethnic awareness, and spirituality. Essentially, every major aspect of life undergoes serious rethinking and restructuring during adolescence.

Someone once said that adolescence is, “the awkward age when a child is too old to say something cute and too young to say something sensible.” That may be true sometimes, but what sensible things can we say about this stage of life from the perspective of our faith? We’ve noted before that the Bible is not structured like an encyclopedia where you can just turn to any topic and find wise counsel, but with a bit of digging we can learn a biblical perspective on most things. One place where the Bible speaks extensively about this young stage of life is in Proverbs. Nowhere do the scriptures differentiate much at all between childhood and adolescence, but you have the feeling that in Proverbs there is an underlying acknowledgement of the stage of adolescence wherein a person is growing rapidly and needs more than anything else to have sound direction and training in the ways of life. In fact, that is one of the primary reasons for the entire book of Proverbs, to recognize that young souls are something like blank slates upon which will be written the complex code of human character, for better or for worse. And so the book is filled with statements like this one we read a few moments ago: “Listen, children, to a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight.”

One of the consistent messages of scripture about family relationships is that the older generations have something to teach the younger generations. Nowhere in the Bible will you find support for the idea that the young should be left to fend for themselves and to decide for themselves what is true or right or useful. Wisdom about life is something that can be and must be handed down from one generation to the next. Presumably, successive generations might become wiser than previous ones. Knowledge does not just happen to us, and it does not just occur to us, and it is not something we can simply manufacture from our own imaginations. Knowledge is received and therefore must be taught. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul speaks from out of this conviction when he writes, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—this is the first commandment with a promise: ‘so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth’” (6:1-3). Paul touches on the other side of a crucial, two-sided transaction. On the one side is the older generation and its vital responsibility to transmit knowledge, or as it is called in Proverbs, “wisdom.” For parents and other adults to refuse to teach is to abdicate a God-given role that is absolutely necessary for the health and well-being of young people. On the other side of the transaction is the younger generation and its role that Proverbs summarizes in just one word: “listen.” It is a hard lesson to learn, to be sure, but the most important thing a young person can do, and for them it is the absolutely necessary thing, is to listen, to absorb, to internalize, to learn, from the older generation. Wisdom is not something that you have to learn for yourself. It is something that an older person should joyfully and skillfully share and that a younger person should gratefully and joyfully receive.

One of the really fun things about the adolescent stage of life is that the transaction of teaching and learning, the relationship of teacher and student, is often anything but calm and clear and direct. Harold Leslie described an adolescent as, “one who has reached the age of dissent.” And Marcelene Cox said an adolescent is, “one who is well informed about anything he doesn’t have to study.” The wise and patient teacher role and the eager and receptive student role that scripture envisions for every parent and child is not always the reality, is it? And yet, that is what our faith teaches us is God’s design. To help the older generation become more courageous and responsible teachers, and to help the younger generation become more willing and responsible learners, it may help us know what God wants to happen in this transaction. We have a clue in words of the commandment, “so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.”

The wisdom of which Proverbs speaks is an all-encompassing knowledge about the way of God’s world that, when understood and applied, allows and enables a person to live a successful life. This wisdom is, first and foremost, wisdom about God himself, spiritual wisdom and knowledge, if you will. And it is more than just religious in character. True spiritual wisdom permeates every other area of human life and transforms human life into what it is meant to be. Our faith teaches us that when we really and truly trust and use the information we have from God about life, especially that which Jesus taught, then we can have successful lives, not so much in terms of material prosperity or freedom from problems and suffering, but in terms of having the inner resources of the spirit that make it possible for us to successfully navigate the perils and pitfalls and through it all to have an inner peace that transcends it all. One commentator said that wisdom, biblically speaking, “is skill in the management of one’s life, a knowledge of the true ends of human existence, the general rules which enable one to attain them, and the ability to put those rules into practice.”ⁱ If both the older and the younger among us can hold in our hearts the true purpose and intent of our teaching and learning, then we can find the patience and the techniques and the willingness seriously to undertake our respective roles, especially during the difficult years of adolescence.

From the Old Testament, then, we learn that God encourages adolescents to willingly learn from their parents and the other older persons, and we learn that the older folks have a great responsibility toward adolescents to share their wisdom, especially about God. But that is not the only biblical message about adolescence. In the New Testament, we have a wonderful glimpse into another side of the matter altogether, as Paul writes to a young man, likely still in the teenage years himself, about his role as a young pastor. Timothy is that young man, and though Paul is mostly concerned with Timothy’s task of looking after a church, along the way, Paul reveals another crucial insight regarding the reality of being young. “Let no one despise your youth,” Paul writes, and then he goes on to encourage Timothy to be a wise and faithful teacher and pastor. When I was younger I used to quote that phrase to myself and, on occasion, to other people whom I thought were despising my youth!

This one little phrase from Paul, especially when taken with Jesus’ statement that we considered in an earlier sermon, that little children can teach us a lot about the Kingdom of the Heavens, teaches a crucial lesson to both younger and older generations alike. In God’s eyes, children and adolescents are not just pre-adults, or “pre-people” as a friend of mine used to jokingly say, but they are fully human, just as loved by God and just as valuable and precious and important in society as anyone else. While younger folks still have much to learn, they also can have much to teach, and no matter how green and growing they may be, they and their particular stage of life are part of God’s design for the human family, and what God has made we must never fail to appreciate as a good and proper thing. To be young is not to be without value, therefore it is not to be undeserving of honor and respect and love. It is, I think, that attitude of respect and honor and love that made Paul write his caution to fathers in Ephesians, “do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

The idealism and honesty and questioning that often accompany the stage of adolescence can be a helpful corrective to the cynicism and dishonesty and acquiescence of older age. A cartoon I saw recently pictured a young son presenting his father with his report card from school, and it was marked with all “D’s.” The boy is saying, “So what if my grades are lousy? You always said it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”ⁱⁱ

Mark Twain once said, “My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.”iii Being an adolescent and living with an adolescent can often be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but often it is anything but. The sharing and receiving of wisdom, the process of growing up or of helping someone grow up, is a time of great opportunity and of great peril. Dennis and Barbara Rainey, in their wonderful book, Parenting Today’s Adolescent,^iv give a list of what they call the “traps” of adolescence. For both adolescents and those who are responsible for them—which is pretty much all the rest of us, except children—the list is a sobering but also helpful reminder of the difficult and yet promising nature of this stage of life. Here’s the list: peer pressure, sex, dating, attitude, media, unresolved anger, appearance, deceit, substance abuse, busyness, the tongue, mediocrity, pornography, and false gods. It strikes me that if you can get all those areas of life figured out you’ve come a long way toward learning the wisdom that Proverbs and the rest of the Bible says is so helpful in living a successful life! Hyman Berston said that an adolescent is someone, “who goes from humpty-dumpty to hanky-panky.” There is potential hanky-panky of all kinds at the fingertips of every adolescent in today’s society. Let that be a loving and prayerful warning from this pastor from the older generation to a younger generation.

But I won’t stop there. For we who inhabit that older generation, as parents especially, but for all others, what can we do to help insure the success of our children and youth in learning the wisdom of God? The Raineys also list seven priorities for parents of adolescents. Here they are: Regular prayer about every aspect of your teenager’s life; setting standards and guidelines for your teenager’s life; being involved and knowing about your teenager’s life; learning effective training, which means setting goals, repetition, and accountability; the necessity of a community and that community’s shared responsibility for a larger sense of parenting; setting a biblical direction for your teenager’s life that involves identity, character, relationships, and mission; and, finally, perseverance. With these tools parents have the best chance of helping their children navigate the rough waters of adolescence and grow into personal and spiritual maturity.

When I first started thinking about what I wanted to say to you about this topic of adolescence, the phrase, “the young and the restless” popped into my head. I know that’s the name of a soap opera, but it’s a good phrase, nevertheless. When I was younger, I knew that it meant that when you are young you are restless, eager and yearning, trying new things, new ideas, new identities, never quite settled in who you are and even what you want to become. When I was older, and the parent, I learned that “young” referred to your children and “restless” referred to you! Both interpretations are true, I suppose. Whatever the case, it is part of God’s design that the young should be restless, in the sense that they are to be about the business of growing up, and that is hard work, indeed. And we older folks should be restless, too, never shrinking from our God-given role of guiding our children through the early and difficult stages of life, so that together we can enjoy the promise of God spoken of in Proverbs: “Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you…prize her highly, and she will exalt you…she will place on your head a fair garland; she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.”

Amen.

ⁱRobert C. Dentan, in The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the Bible, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1971, p. 305.
ⁱⁱHarley Schwadron, in Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Canfield, Hansen, and Kirberger, Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida, 1997, p. 197.
ⁱⁱⁱChicken Soup, p. 74.
^iv Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, 1998.