Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today is confirmation day in our congregation. Eight youth are invited to affirm their baptism before the assembly of members and guests of Christ the King Church. I would like to speak directly to our young people who will be confirmed in the faith later in the service. I hope everyone here today will overhear what is said and take to heart the word that is proclaimed.

The most helpful advice I received regarding faith was given by a Baptist pastor who had great influence on young people. He recounted one day when he was talking to a young person. The young man was struggling with his faith. He would hear one account of God at home, another at church, another at school and yet another in the media. All of the opinions were difficult to harmonize.

Finally the young man confessed to the pastor that he did not believe in God. The wise pastor gently asked the young man to describe the god he did not believe in. The young man began parroting everything that he had heard from the many sources. When the young man had finished the portrait of god, the pastor expelled a sigh of relief and said, “Thank God, Richard, that you don’t believe in this god. I don’t either!”

We pastors are very aware that we cannot force a particular view of God on you. We are also aware that it is a formidable task to equip a young person to go into the world and to hold on to the best of our religious tradition concerning God. Our job is to teach that tradition by word and deed.

But tradition is not the same as the relationship that we have to God. The wise pastor was able to relax with the young person because he could make the distinction between our understanding of God and the reality of God in the world. There are many both within and outside the church who believe that our relationship with God depends upon our intellectual grasp of God. In other words we mistakenly believe that if we can achieve an intellectual understanding of God, God can then be useful to us.

Of course, nothing can be further from the truth. Any concept we can formulate about God will of necessity be inadequate to the infinite and mysterious One who created heaven and earth, sets free what is God’s, and makes it holy. God defies any and every attempt by us to objectify God. God cannot and will not be packaged in such a way that we can use or exploit God for our own purposes.

We are a Lutheran community of faith. The one thing that we offer to the universal church is an understanding of God that insists on God’s freedom. God’s name among us is varied. God is “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.” God’s name is “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” I know that this is an odd name. This name was proclaimed to you at baptism. It was there that God chose to bind you into a relationship with a mission.

Our relationship to God comes through the gift of Jesus Christ. It is not a doctrine that Jesus teaches. It is Jesus’ very life and death that reveals the God whom he calls heavenly Father. Jesus knows himself as the one whom God has sent. He is the revealer because he never claims to control or manage God. Jesus makes himself totally available to God. This absolute availability is fulfilled in his submission to the cross.

The cross becomes a picture of God at work under the conditions of life in which you and I live. We are subject to every limitation and much evil while at the same time we are conscious of the infinite possibilities that exist. We find it hard to reconcile the photographic data that the Hubble telescope is sending us about creation with the fact that millions of people are suffering from lack of food and water. The same God created it all. How can we believe in a God that allows this? But, dear brothers and sisters, what about us? How can we believe in ourselves when we allow these conditions to continue and we create new circumstances that allow the suffering to expand?

God does not need our efforts to justify God. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the God of Moses and the prophets; the God of Jesus Christ is free. God will justify God’s own self and does not need our help. We, therefore, do not need to use God’s name to dominate or control others. Their freedom and our freedom are secured by God’s own refusal to be exploited or co-opted by humans for their own purposes.

This very freedom zealously is manifest by God in creation and especially in a world that wants to know God by controlling God. Our ability to laugh at ourselves is based on our freedom to realize that God is in charge of the world and that God expects us to love one another.

Dear confirmands, dear congregation, it does not get more sophisticated than this. The God who is revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who refuses to give up on this world. In Jesus Christ we are set free from our fear of death, from naive faith in human knowledge that is constantly being revised and refined, from our self-centeredness that seeks to make ourselves the center of the universe, and from our lack of compassion toward those who suffer.

I hope that together as we go out from this place, that we not only know the God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, but that we will know the gods that we do not believe in. In this way there is hope for every new generation that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.