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It was sobering.

The Sunni Muslim journalist was speaking to us in his marble floored office in Beirut. He was surrounded by pictures of himself with Popes – of both eastern and western variety – and with political leaders, also from both east and west. He looked to be of an age, “approaching retirement”.

He was shaking his head about the generation of adults now running things in Lebanon.

He said they were a generation who had come of age during their civil war, young people who spent their youth literally barricaded against each other. Christian against Muslim. Shi’a against Sunni against Druze.

“When we were young,” he said. “We knew people of other faiths. I’d been inside a church for the baptisms of family friends. And my Christian friends had been in a Mosque. These young adults today only know their own confessional grouping. They are Maronite Lebanese or Druze Lebanese. Not – Lebanese.

“How do you build one nation when a whole generation has no experience of being one?”

His words reminded me of Dr. Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core, based in Chicago. Interfaith Youth Core helps young people of different faiths engage in community service – together. Eboo says people learn to be guided either by hate or by love and respect.

Eboo has personal experience. He is a thirtysomething Muslim Indian American. Raised in a mostly white suburb of Chicago, he remembers when he could have turned down the wrong road. He was a bright, well-educated college student – still, the hurtful residue of a lifetime of racial jokes and bullying was beginning to build up in him, into a pile of resentment that needed only a match. Fortunately for him, Eboo met, not a firebrand, but a series of wise mentors who took the time to walk with him a ways and to spark in him more hopeful possibilities.

In his book, Acts of Faith, Eboo Patel tells about people who took a different turn. He chronicles case after violent case – infamous acts of violence – by Christian, Muslim and Jew. In every case he shows where the bomber, as an impressionable young person, was taken under the wing of a mentoring adult, a mentoring, hate-filled adult, who twisted that young person’s outlook.

Eboo is convinced that there are moments when a young person can turn in one of several directions. Which one, depends on which adult steps in as mentor and friend.

These last years, serving as General Minister and President for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), I have been in many dramatic places.

I’ve visited the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla – more like permanent settlements than “camps”. Whole families have now lived at Sabra and Chatilla for sixty years. No homeland to return to. No nation willing to resettle them.

(In a sliver of hope, we were there visiting a school Disciples and UCC support through Global Ministries. There I saw laughing young people surrounded by caring adults.) But aside from such slivers of hope, multiple generations in Sabra and Chatilla know only separation and hatred of the enemy.

I’ve visited Haiti – dramatic even before the earthquake – There I saw another school we support, the House of Hope, ministering to child domestic workers. A place for children whose parents are so poor they offer their children into indentured domestic servitude in hopes that in the city opportunity and education will be possible for them. More often, without an intervention like House of Hope, such servitude brings only slavery and despair for yet another generation.

My calling has taken me to downtown Indianapolis! – not so dramatic, you say? But in Indianapolis, too, as with so many American cities – and rural areas – our children are lagging. The Indianapolis Star reports that 1 out of 4 Indianapolis high school students cannot read well enough to graduate. Indianapolis, the Crossroads of America, the quintessential American city, is not the only one.

Where will this generation of underachieving Americans find meaning and hope?

Where will they lead us when it’s their turn?

(It’s the young people who often lead, you know. Martin Luther King, Jr. was 26 when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Mahatma Ghandi was younger than that when he started his work for justice in South Africa. Jesus was thirty when his ministry began.)

Last month my minister preached on the child Jesus in the temple. (I’m sure many of you did.) In the Rev. Linda McCrae’s sermon, she imagined that when Joseph and Mary finally came to the temple, after several frantic days of searching, and saw 12 year old Jesus there, in deep conversation with the priests, they must have asked themselves, “Who is this child?”

Pastor Linda went on to challenge us to ask that question in our own context. To look around us in our church and ask, who are these children? She challenged us, do we know who they are?

When the children come forward for the children’s moment – who knows them? When the youth lead worship on Youth Sunday, who knows their names? Who knows what they care about?

Who are the children in our neighborhoods? How many of them are at that intersection where the direction they take right now depends on the adult who befriends them? At that same intersection where so many violent extremists were when a hate-monger got hold of them. At that same intersection that young Jesus was when he turned to the priests of the temple.

Our passage tonight from the Psalms takes up the topic of interaction among the generations. It urges us to action “that the next generation might know” what God has done.

 As our Lebanese friend pointed out, it only takes one quick generation not to know. Just one generation to have a completely different set of experiences and therefore a different set of assumptions about life and therefore to set different goals as they lead us.

If young people are to look at the world through the lens of “one” as I suggested we all do on Monday night, if new generations of adults who are already on the scene are to walk forward forgiving each other as I suggested last night, we will have to give a witness that this is possible.

We will have to decide – and do it! There is no leaving this to chance. Because – make no mistake about it – Someone is out there reaching out to our youth.

Just look around us. Watch a little television. Surf the web. What does our context and culture teach about wholeness and hope? About the possibilities of forgiveness? About love and respect?

(Did you see the Super Bowl commercials the other night? Where was the respect for women? Where was the expectation of mutually fulfilling relationships of any kind?)

What do we assume our children know?

But even more, look at our churches. What are we teaching young people? Intended – or unintended? As they watch us and interact with us – or, more often, don’t interact with us as we go on our busy way?

In our II Corinthians passage tonight, Paul was frustrated. (Nothing new for the Apostle Paul!) New leaders had come into the Corinthian church. Some of them were misrepresenting him to the congregation. It was causing dissention. Paul asked, in some exasperation, do you need a letter of recommendation to introduce me? You are my letter. You know me. You are the evidence of what I teach. You are the letter to be known and read and by all.

What are young people reading in the open letter of our churches today?

I remember in a church I served. We were doing listening conferences across the congregation. We did one specifically with the youth group. Those kids knew everything that was going on in the life of that congregation. There were no secrets. The adult carryings-on, for good or ill, were utterly transparent to those kids.

We are the letter. What are we putting out there for young people to read?

My sister is an American historian. In a conversation once, she said, “It used to be that we lived in communities where we had to interact with each other. People on different sides of the political fence could hate each other’s point of view, but they met each other in the coffee shop or at the PTA meeting or the grocery store and had to deal with each other. They expressed their points of view to each others’ faces. Therefore they had to carefully choose their words. It was harder to demonize the other.”

My layperson sister went on to say – “That’s why churches are so important. They are some of the few places left where different points of view come into respectful contact with each other. One of the few places left where we can teach that to our children.”

Church, we are the letter. What are our children reading in us?

Just last Sunday I had the privilege of being in a local congregation for a baby dedication. In a baby dedication there are promises – by parents and extended family – to love and cherish the child, to lead her or him toward a desire to follow Christ.

In a baby dedication, the congregation also makes promises.

 Last Sunday’s congregation promised to “uphold [the child] with our love, to teach the word of God, encourage him . . . that he might grow . . . to the fullness of God’s visions for his life.”

And then we prayed that God would help us be God’s hands and feet for this little one.

I pray that we will.

I pray that we, who are there at that child’s birth, will be there, too, a few years from now when that energetic little boy careens through the hallway, that we will kneel down and speak lovingly to him as we slow his progress down the hall.

I pray that we will be there in grade school and middle school as his big sister is learning to express her own opinions, that we will to listen to her and seek to understand.

I pray that we will still be there as they bring their friends to the high school youth group – as the future is beginning to stretch before them and they are making the decisions that will chart their path. I pray that we will know who these children are, that we will be the adults befriending them at those intersections of their lives.

I pray that we will be a letter of wholeness and forgiveness, of encouragement and life-giving possibility.

Actually, I pray that we will be more than just a letter. Because who knows letters today? I pray that we will be an interactive communication platform. That we will witness to the values we hold dear, but also listen to the hopes and dreams of these young people – that in that interaction, we will be the mentors helping them follow their own intuitions of wholeness and possibility, so that their generation can already begin to give the faithful leadership which is the hope for us all.

Here we stand at a great university, a model seminary, a leading congregation. Places people head when their lives are at a crossroad. Here at this university, this seminary, in our congregations, let’s renew our intention to know our children. Let’s covenant to be a faithful living letter, a positive email exchange, a tweet at just the right moment! Let’s be engaged mentors offering a witness of wholeness and hope.

It only takes a generation to turn the tide one way or the other.

Who is this child?

Church, let’s be sure we know.