Don Friesen
A father and his young son were out walking one day when the boy asked his father how electricity could go through the wires stretched between two hydro poles. "I don't know," said his father. "I don't know much about electricity." A few blocks farther on, the boy asked his father what caused lightning and thunder. "That too has puzzled me," replied the father.
The youngster continued to enquire about many things, none of which the father could explain. Finally, as they arrived home, the boy said, "Dad, I hope you didn't mind my asking you all those questions." "Not at all," replied his father. "How else are you going to learn!"
I hope that we, as Christians--and collectively, as the Church--have more to offer enquiring spirits that did that father! Some voices have wondered aloud whether we're adequate to the task. Thomas Reeves, a contemporary historian, says that in North America "Christianity ...is, in large part, innocuous. It tends to be easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not require self-sacrifice, discipline, humility, an otherworldly outlook, a zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God. There is little guilt and no punishment, and the payoff in heaven is virtually certain." (The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity, 1996)
The Scriptures consider it important to "tell the next generation" about God. (Psalms 48:13-14) We are told that God "established a decree in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our (us) to teach to (our) children; that the next generation might know them...." (Psalm 78:5-6) It is something people of faith owe their children.
Now, most of us don't like debt. We know it can be our undoing, and we tend to look askance at those who rack up a whopping debt load. Many of us, unless we're very wealthy, accept mortgage debts as inevitable. Some of us even carry car payment debts. Our church now carries a whopping debt load, though given past experience I have every confidence that we can dispense with it in less than due time. It's important, however, not to compound a financial debt with a spiritual debt, the debt owed our children. It's important we make payments on that debt as well, lest it become a crushing load.
I'm not talking only of parental responsibility with respect to our children. Though not all of us are raising children, we are all in relationships with children. Even though we may never talk to a child all week, we have children in our church to whom we have made promises, and for whom we all have special obligations and certain responsibilities.
We owe the kids of the kingdom more than shelter and comfort. We owe them more than convenience and innocuous compatibility; those don't even begin to make a minimal down payment on the spiritual debt we've accrued. What do we owe the children of the Church? Let me suggest four things: We owe the kids acceptance and love; we owe them an opportunity to nurture a relationship with God; we owe them a solid Christian education; and fourthly, we owe them each a compass!
We Owe the Kids Acceptance and Love
Firstly, and this one's rather obvious in a community that looks to Jesus as our example, we owe the kids acceptance and love. "Love one another," says the New Testament. "I give you a new commandment," says Jesus, "that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." (John 13:34) This commandment is not intended for adults only; it's applicable to everyone in the family of God, perhaps especially applicable to those at a vulnerable age and for whom negative experiences during their formative years can severely inhibit the development of their faith.
Loving and accepting our children is not the same as idealizing children or childhood. There have been times when children were considered invisible; and times when children could be seen, but were not to be heard; and also times when everything was expected to be organized in a child-centred way. To love and accept children is not to think that only gold comes out of Johnny's mouth. When I was a youth minister I had to deal with one mother who had several sons that could do absolutely no wrong. I often found them at the centre of some shenanigans, but Mother always arrived a day or two later to correct my perception and to assure me that her boys were beyond suspicion.
No child is perfect, and no childhood is perfect; in fact, therapists will tell you that a childhood remembered exclusively as happy and "ideal" is often a suspect childhood, an immediate target for further probing! And however happy our childhood, it is a broadening experience to realize that the experience of many children is very unhappy, even tragic. As Tom and his friends sang, just moments ago, the prayers of some children are uttered out of fear and grief and heartache. ("Prayer of the Children," by Kurt Bestor)
The Church is neither an "adults-only" community nor a "child-centred" community. It is a place where both young and old struggle together, in the words of the New Testament, to maintain "genuine mutual love, (to) love one another deeply from the heart." (1 Peter 1:22) Children, like everyone else, long for acceptance and warmth; like anyone else, they appreciate someone who cares.
We Owe the Kids an Opportunity to Nurture a Relationship with God
Secondly, we owe the kids an opportunity to nurture a relationship with God. We need to pay attention to our children's souls. We want to pass on the best of our own faith tradition, but we want to do better than pass on a second-hand faith. We want to do better than bequeathing our children a few spiritual hand-me-downs!
John Westerhof, a Christian educator, says that in our faith development we may go through various styles of faith before we call a faith our own. He names four styles of faith; one is "experienced faith," in which faith is not so much a theological affirmation as it is an affective experience. It may not be so much the words children hear spoken as the experiences connected with those words--experiences of trust, love, and acceptance--that encourage them to respond to and explore the Christian faith. A second style of faith is "affiliative faith," a faith expressed through affiliation with a faith community. A third style of faith is "searching faith," in which one feels a need to test one's faith tradition. We're kicking the tires of the faith, and unfortunately, many Christians don't like their tires kicked. Some are threatened by a critical attitude, and so some individuals leave the church at this point, feeling unwelcome.
The last style of faith is that of "owned faith," the culmination of Christian nurture, when we are willing and able to stand up for what we believe. The faith of our mothers and fathers begins to make a real difference in our lives when it becomes our faith.
We Owe the Kids a Solid Christian Education
Thirdly, we owe the children of the Church a solid Christian education. We wouldn't dream of saying, "I'm not going to force Johnny and Jenny to do their homework or even to go to school. I want them to be free to make their own decisions. It wouldn't be right for me to influence them." Yet the same reasoning is sometimes caught escaping the lips of Christians with respect to the Christian education of their children. As if not going to church or not taking them to Sunday School isn't influencing them! We teach our kids something about what's important both by that which we neglect as well as that to which we pay attention. And we certainly try to influence our children in most other things. We teach them what's permissible and what isn't permissible; we monitor their homework; their television viewing; their diet; their sleep patterns; their pastimes and even their friends.
We owe it to our kids to pass on the wisdom of our heritage, what James calls the "wisdom from above". (James 3: 15 & 17), the wisdom that is "pure, ...peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy." (3:17)
We owe the kids a solid Christian education, not only with respect to wisdom and knowledge, but with respect to spirit. We owe the kids some idea of what it means to be like Jesus. Squabbling with each other, as the disciples did, scrambling for power and greatness, does not fit the bill! True greatness is to be like Jesus, who was a truly powerful person, but who valued himself, not because of his power but because he humbly wanted to do the will of God. It freed him to be lowly with the lowly, unthreatened by the mighty, and sure of his destiny.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if we owe our children a Christian education, we're behind in payments! To make a commitment to their nurture and education means little unless we volunteer to teach them. The fact that we are still looking for teachers and youth sponsors does not speak well of our commitment to Christian education.
We Owe the Kids the Gift of a Faith Compass
Fourthly, we owe the kids of the kingdom some idea of our own faith orientation. Unlike the father in my opening story, we need to give our kids, if not some answers, then an approach to questions that will wear well, whatever their questions. The approach of some Christians is to give their children--and adults--a map, and that may be adequate if the moral and spiritual terrain doesn't shift much from one generation to another. However, the geography of life is constantly and rapidly changing, so it might be better to put the map away and give our kids a compass!
One of the things I learned at camp as a kid was how to find my way through the woods with a compass. I took some orientation training, after which I was turned loose in the woods and told to find my way back to camp! A map would have been more immediately helpful, but a map of the area around a lake in northern Saskatchewan wouldn't be of much help if I got lost in Algonquin Park! However, what I learned about using a compass is quite transferable from one set of woods to another.
Similarly, we owe it to our kids to pass on to them the points of our own faith compass, and to show them, by our example, that when we're in crisis, this is how we approach it--with prayer; by sharing it with our sisters and brothers; by looking to the Scriptures; by looking to God for direction. That's how we get our bearings. That's how we keep from getting lost.
We cannot shelter our children from crises or from the darker side of life. In one way or another, they will learn of its existence. But Madeleine L'Engle writes that "we owe it to them to show them that there is also this brilliance, this light of the sun...." We owe it to them to point them toward the Light. (Glimpses of Grace, page 314)
May all we do, as parents, and as brothers and sisters of those parents, help to point our children toward the light of God's eternal revelation. AMEN
(Several of the ideas in this sermon are borrowed from Fred Kane, "Can the Children Be Saved?")
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.