Sometimes the languages we speak need translation if we're to understand each other. Color and gender and class can create conflict as easily as they can enrich community.  Not all voices are easy to understand.  There are the voices of children and the muffled voices of infants in the nursery. There are the voices from the streets around us, yearning to be recognized.  In the midst of all these voices come the voices of vestry and committee chairs, the voices of parishioners on discernment committees that will be discerning-along with guidance from the Holy Spirit, the shape of our parish's future.  Each voice has a distinctive lens on the world and the church.   Each voice often needs to be translated so that we can understand the other.  The desire to be heard, the access to be included, the dignity to matter, all shape our ability to hear. These are the things that God's Holy Spirit promises to translate, so that we can travel on the journey of faith together to that new place where God reigns.

This past Thursday afternoon, I was in the library at Virginia Seminary, preparing for a class that I'll be teaching for the seminary this summer, Adolescent Development & Spirituality.  From the pages of one book came another voice seldom heard at St. Thomas'.

"What is teenage life to me?  That's a good question.  If I said what teenage life is to me in one word, it would have to be "hard."  No one really gets you, and you don't even really get yourself.  You're just starting to figure yourself out, who you are and why you're here.  When it comes to high school life, most adults say, I understand" or "I know, I was in high school once," but that was once and this is now.  It's much harder to live life now than ever.  You have one true friend, the one who is always there for you and the one who is there for you when you cry.  All your other friends are just there.  They listen and are fun to be around, but you can't always trust all your friends because some will betray you.  Most of my friends are 16, 17 or 18 years old and have had to go to their friend's funeral because they overdosed on drugs or alcohol.  Three students died last year at my school because of drugs and alcohol.  Two years ago there was a count of 17 girls pregnant."

This is one of the Pentecost voices from the world around us begging to be understood, voices that claim a new place, that see a new place, a place where they don't yet belong and a place they long to be.  These are teenage voices that are a part of the household of the church, that tell us something essential about God's reign and vision for the world for only they can describe what the adolescent world looks like through the eyes of those who live it.

To baptize a child this morning is to welcome them not just as an infant, all passive and cute, or as a toddler, more active and challenging.  To welcome a new member of the household of faith today means to welcome a future adolescent, and young adult who will grow to middle age and then older adulthood.  To baptize any child today is to hold open our doors in prophetic hospitality to more teens, younger and elder adults, and families of all shapes and sizes with children.  To baptize even just one child is to commit ourselves to a lifetime, and that includes finding a way to create space not just for this child to grow up here and find their own voice, but to create space for those who've yet to come.  We're not whole and fully the image of the household of God until our prophetic hospitality makes room for every child we welcome into our midst to grow up with us, and welcome their friends here as well.