"Daddy, I have a question." I still hear the little voice from the back seat as I quickly turn down public radio and listen carefully, glancing in the rearview mirror. My eyes tell me that she is this growing seventh-grade young woman, trying independence, and friendship, and activism, and team sports, and makeup on for size. But my memory hears her voice in bouncy, three-year-old syllables that persistently spoke the same phrase just yesterday.

The questions have grown and changed and adapted over the years, starting with "why" at two or three. "Why do people have wrinkles on their face?" "Why is the sunrise so many different colors?" "Why do you snore so loud?" As she has grown, so do the questions, in depth and color and wonder: "How long does it take for Artemis to get to the moon?" "How much school would I need to become a pediatric hematologist?" "Why is Pastor Kristen so much better at preaching than you?" "One of my classmates is fasting this month, what's that about, and why does he do it?" "Who are the masked people driving and walking in our neighborhood, and why are people so afraid?"

Children seem more willing to get to the heart of the matter with their questions. They don't need to prove what they know, what tribe they belong to. There is no virtue signal or imposter syndrome or posture to their ponderings. They simply ask the people they trust what they wonder. The world sparkles with mystery and magic, every new experience an unknown waiting to be unfolded.

A young Robin Williams, may his memory be a blessing, shared his infectious teaching charisma with young scholars at an all-boys school in the Dead Poets Society. After encouraging them to tear out the poetry analysis pages in their textbook, he brought them close for a lesson in life: "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

For indeed, the teacher was right. These are the life abundant that God is inviting us into, that Jesus pointed to in parable and in miracle, that the spirit sustains in our breathing and singing and dancing and delighting. These are the things of God that the children remind us of, that their imagination and their questions point us toward, each and every moment.

Tradition has it that Psalm 78 is at the center, the very beating heart and pulse of Scripture itself. It's a message, a memory, and a mystery, nudging God's people to trust in God's faithfulness.

Scripture is a message. It has something to teach us. And as we remember Jesus, who is a rabbi, a teacher in our faith and in our stories. We so too remember the teachers in our own lives, in Sunday school classrooms and in pulpits, in public school education, and on football fields.

We are a people who need to be taught and formed as we wrestle with what it means to be people in the world. We are a people who need the teachers among us. And as Mr. Rogers reminded us, "look to the helpers when we are in doubt." Look to the teachers as well, who are forming the imaginations of the youth in our midst.

We are a people who are taught, and Scripture always has something to teach us. It may be hard won, it may be hard wrestled with, but indeed Scripture will reveal itself a truth for us today and tomorrow and in the days to come.

Scripture is a memory, and in fact, Psalm 78 conjures memory after memory after memory of God's people. Scripture contains a memory and passes it down to us as ours, shared by our ancestors, pored over and memorized, guarded and translated, argued and debated. But indeed, this Scripture is our witness. We share it in progressives and conservatives, evangelicals and mainline, Catholic and Orthodox. We share this Scripture as a text for us to wrestle with, to make sense of, to pore over and push back against, not as distilled truths, but as something that is yet unfolding in front of us. It's a memory, a memory that we share and pass on to the coming generations. So, as the psalmist conjures these wonderful images, it is inviting us to wonder how we might share this memory best with our children, and their children's children's children's children.

Scripture is a mystery that points us to things that cannot be contained in human language, in our experiences or our insights, and our hunger for knowledge or our pursuit of excellence. It points to the mysteries of God, the same God that lit the stars in the sky, hung on a cross, and persists in mercy and love, and in bread and in wine. These mysteries, at the depth of our human experience, stretch our imagination beyond what is possible to what God still does among us.

Jesus leaned in when kids asked questions or tugged at the hems of the grown-ups around them, admonishing the disciples who chased their wonder away. With the words of Psalm 78 humming from his bones, Jesus opened His mouth in parables, stories that upended expectations, set broader tables, and dreamed of a different way.

In times like these, in which moral injury abounds, corporate trauma seems to have the regular chorus. In times like these, we need more wonder, more curiosity, more childlike imagination, and faith, and hope. A child isn't curious because someone told them to be. They are curious because the spark of love and life calls them.

A young child in our congregation walked up to the communion table with his family, bright eyes and a little mischief in his face. He tucked his hands in his pockets and glared up at me, just about to stick his tongue out, with no place to give the bread of life. I knelt down and offered a blessing instead.

Then I watched with curiosity as he walked away with his family. "But mom, I don't want a blessing," as he stomped his way back to their seats. The rest of the line dwindled. I walked back and simply held up this holy mystery. "Did you want this?" His eyes brightened with the same mischievous twinkle as he nodded. "Yes."

Paul writes that we are all stewards of the mysteries of God. These holy mysteries are the treasures of our tradition, the stories of our ancestors, our sacraments and sacred songs, our memories and moments that shape our identities. As stewards of these mysteries, we are entrusted with their power and their potential, so that the coming generation might know and understand the wonders that God has done, that God is doing, and that God forever more will be doing.

As the Ethiopian eunuch preached to Philip, "What will prevent me from being baptized?" as the young boy in our sanctuary opened his hands for the bread of life. As we live and move in fractious and violent times, as our youth see visions and our elders dream dreams, God is working wonders among us.

And so, perhaps, as Robin Williams taught his students in the Dead Poets Society, as Walt Whitman once opined in the great poems of our past, perhaps we have a song to sing, a verse to provide, a story to write. And the question remains, what will your verse be?