Letter to Liam

Psalm 40: 1-11
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
January 19, 2020

Liam ____ ____,



Today your family—your moms, your Gramma, your Mimi, your Oma, your Gigi, your aunts and uncles and cousins, your friends, and your church are making promises and commitments to you and to each other. This letter is for you to let you know how much you are loved. This letter is for you so you can hold us to those promises should we ever fall short of our love for you. This letter is also for you should you want to make some promises and commitments of your own—about how you want to live, the person you want to become, and the people with whom you want to be in community to help you live that way.

Today we welcome you as a joy and a blessing. We are a church, a group of people who are learning and living what it means to embody love and compassion, justice and forgiveness the way Jesus did. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. I hope you won’t hold that against us. Most of us are here for healing of one sort or another. Each of us has experience with pain and loss. In one way or another we have all waited and are waiting for God, for love to lift us out of our despair or suffering, our anger or fear, our hurt or loneliness. Sometimes it’s not easy for us to trust God or other people or even ourselves. That’s not an excuse but sometimes getting it wrong is what it means to be human. But we hope that we can be honest with you and that you will feel safe to be honest with us.



As you grow into who you will become we will be here to cheer you on, to share with you what we know and to learn from you. We hope that through this relationship we all will change and grow in some way.



Here are some things you can depend on from us. Though we won’t always get it right, we hope we will learn from our mistakes, and through those experiences we will know what it means to forgive and be forgiven and to try to be better.

We want you to know the whole of God’s love; therefore we will not keep it from you.

We will love and accept you no matter your gender identity or gender expression.

We will love and accept you no matter who you love.

We will love and accept you whether or not you choose to be baptized.

We will love and accept you no matter where your spiritual journey leads you, even if it’s away from us and church.

We will love and accept you no matter what your gifts are.

We will love and accept you no matter what the future holds for you.

We will sit with you when there are no words.

We will wait with you.

We will be patient with you.

We will persist with you.

We will accompany you.

We will sing and hope and pray with you and for you.

We will listen to you.

We will be authentic with you.

We will be brave with you.

We will be truthful with you.

We will tell you our stories of how we have witnessed God working in our lives, how love has made a difference in our life together.

We will show you what it means to praise, to express joy, to be wholehearted.

We will be forgiving with you and with ourselves so that one day you will be able to do this for yourself and for others.

We will show you what it means to struggle, to engage with God in the world and in human relationships.

We will show you what it means for God to come to you dressed up as your life.

We will invite you to work and serve with us.

We hope you will invite us to work and serve with you, in whatever you are passionate about.

We trust that you will come to know the truth about yourself, about who you are.

We pray that we will be worthy of your trust in us.

We give thanks for you.

We delight in you.

In you and in every child, we appreciate the gift of each other.  

In you and in every child, we glimpse ourselves.



As much as this is a letter to you, it is also a letter to each other and to ourselves and to God. In every child we see our best hopes of who we can be. In every child we see how God loves us; we recognize how powerful our love is—how love can shape and save a human life.

Liam, I hope one day you will follow Jesus, in that you will learn to love well, show mercy, do justice, and move through this life with humility—which means to not rely solely on your own understanding but seek the wisdom of others. I hope you will come to know this church as your extended family. I hope each of us will be for you a living, breathing piece of scripture—something that tells you how love is being made visible in the world. I hope one day you see yourself this way—as a child of God, loved and accepted no matter what.

Amen.