Some years ago a tourist was visiting in a small village in central Europe. He was staying at the central hotel in town and sat, on several mornings, on the terrace enjoying a cup of coffee while he watched the people of the village going up and down the bustling street on their way to work or engaged in commerce with trays of bread or cans of milk, bags of fruit or vegetables being taken to market or being purchased by families for their own meals.

He noticed something interesting after a few occasions of watching the passing scene; every single person who passed by, whether in a hurry or just sauntering down the street; pushing a push cart, or carrying a brief case; no matter who it was male or female, when they passed a certain wall along the way they would make a quick nod of the head and the sign of the cross.

Finally – being the curious sort, he asked why it was that people did this. No one really knew. No matter whom he asked, the answer was about the same – we have just always done it – it is the tradition of the town. “I learned it from my father and mother.” “It was my grandpa who taught me!” “It is just what we always do…”

Finally, he took to studying the wall and discovered that under layers of whitewash and grime from centuries – he chipped away enough to discover a small, but very beautiful stucco mural which had been painted on to the wall when it had been the boundary of a monastery. The church and the cloisters were long gone but the wall had been incorporated into successive buildings as is the way of centuries old places. Its original features had been obscured, but the tradition of veneration had not been forgotten – each generation carrying on the practice of nodding and crossing themselves because they always had – even though they did not know why.

If you think about it, we all acquire practice and habits which have come to us from observation of our parents or others who teach us the ropes as we mature into life on our own. Just as a wolf cub must learn to hunt in the pack, human beings learn about relationships and following the practices of the community by emulating the practices of our elders…not always knowing why we should look both ways before crossing or eat the broccoli or wash our hands before dinner, but never-the-less doing it.

Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Scholar, notes, "Israel was the sort of culture that loved its young enough to tell its young what it had heard from God." Israel (the Proverbs embody this) loved its young enough to say "you don't have to make up the way as you go. You don't have to reinvent the path to God on your own. We'll tell you. We'll show you the way."

Clearly, Christians are not born, they are made – in just this way, as well. It is a process of learning so slowly that most of the time it takes a lifetime. This is the primary role of the Christian Community – the job of the church to nurture Disciples of Christ throughout their entire lives. The old hymn, “Standing on the Promises” is one of many which remind us that each generation has a charge to pass on the promises of its own experience to the next generations coming after.

Just as Paul felt it important to remind the fledgling church at Ephesus, perhaps we also need a reminder. At the heart of our relationship with our God is a series of promises which articulate just a very few things.

•  God has chosen to love us,

•  In Christ, God has adopted us as children so that love is no longer conditional...it is forever and

•  We who believe have promised to live out the journey and the vision, as Paul calls it, "the plan for the fullness of time."

These are the promises. We give our church school children Bibles so that they can learn this story and come to understand who we are as Christians…and members of the larger church and members of this particular church, as well. If this Bible goes home and lands on a shelf to gather dust because that's where all the other Bibles in the home have landed, well then, that is the practice they will learn. If the contents of the book are discussed one day a week for a little over an hour…well, that is the practice that will be carried on. If we want the next generation to live their lives as Christians, we need to be their models.

When Vaclav Havel, the first President of the new Czech Republic, spoke at Independence Hall around the 4 th of July some years ago, he said, "The Declaration of Independence, adopted 218 years ago in this building, states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it." Underlying all that we are all that we hope to be is this truism – shared by one who came to adulthood under a Soviet style political system that saw religion as the enemy….but had another model to follow from family, and trusted relationships.

William Willimon, a preacher and author and now a Methodist Bishop was reflecting recently on his own experiences in the Civil Rights Movement in which he had participated as a student.

"We students had gathered to march for justice, bravely to stand up and be counted, to demand that the government do something for the rights of black people. But what was the first thing that the organizers of the march made us do?" They were gathered together in hot, crowded, tiny rural African- American churches for hours and hours of singing and praying and preaching. Most of all, for testimony, as many very humble individuals stood to tell of the empowerment and the strength that God had given them in their lives...

The activist students wanted to get out into the streets "...where we can do some good!" and their hosts patiently reminded them that not only had they been in the struggle much longer than these fresh young people, but also of something even more important. "If all we had in the streets [was our optimism and our energy and our feeling for justice] we would not be there for long.” Willimon went on to write, "We came to see that the most important, most revolutionary act we could make, was to sing hymns, to praise God and thereby believe and thereby act..." Praise and thanksgiving precede Christian action, praise and thanksgiving call it forth; praise and thanksgiving sustain it. This is the promise into which, according to Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we have been born.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...just as he chose us...he destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ." In Christ, we have an inheritance....a promise and a challenge...to pass it on.

Mark Twain, who in an autobiographical mood quipped, "once I could remember anything whether it happened or not. Now I can remember only those things that didn't happen."

Years ago, in my first congregation, a woman invited me to her home to complain. You may have heard me tell this story, it was a simple incident which has some profound undertones, I think. "Something is wrong with the church and the Sunday school," she said..."my grandchildren just don't seem to be learning about our faith. They don't know the stories...they don't know the Psalms."

Then she went on..."when I was a child my grandmother would pull me up in her lap and tell me the stories of the Bible and taught me to pray." She felt that her grandchildren should be getting that kind of instruction from the church and they were not. It was then that I quietly asked her about her own grandmotherly lap....as she had learned, was she also passing it along?

When was the last time you pulled those children up on your knee to repeat a psalm or tell a story?

We all have a role in the promise: to live with the confidence that God is already about in our midst and that it makes a difference to our lives (It makes all the difference!) and then, then to pass it on. In the midst of these confusing and sometimes frightening times ours is to stand on the promises of those who went before and then, pass them on! Amen.