Raising God's Children

"...."What is required, of you and of me and of this congregation, to raise
God's children in this day and age, to raise children who will know the One
to whom they belong, all their life long?"

"My family," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "lapsed Catholics, ...did not approve of my attending Methodist Sunday School and services in a country town two miles from our home, though apparently they did not forbid it. A girlfriend in my seventh-grade class who rode the school bus with me had one day invited me to come with her to her church," Oates goes on, "and I'd accepted the invitation, eager to be included, hopeful of an adventure...In Sunday School, as in school generally, I'd been the brightest, most cooperative and, how to say it?--most hopeful of young people, astonishing our teacher, with having memorized no less than one hundred Bible verses in a regional competition among Methodist churches....

"My religious yearnings, like the emotions of early adolescence generally, were powerful, disturbing, and inchoate; I did not know what I believed, or if I was capable of any sustained belief. Certainly I wanted to believe--something. I wanted to be what I perceived as normal, happy, adjusted, chosen. [And] I was enchanted by the...language of the Bible, so new to me, mysterious and incantatory and vaguely terrifying, its cadences quite apart from its meaning. (Its meaning, I was told, was exactly what it was: just what the Bible says.)"

From such hopeful beginnings, this now prolific author has grown up, so to speak, to characterize herself as "a nonreligious observer of religion....I have retained my original fascination with the Bible," she observes, "but it has long become a purely poetic/metaphorical/psychological fascination....My Christian faith could not be sustained against a ceaselessly active curiosity and skepticism that began in adolescence."

All of which underlines my question on this Sunday when we begin another season of Christian education: have we any hope...may we be hopeful about raising God's children? I think of those here who have raised a family in the church, and now are left to wonder what was missed in those years, such that Christian faith could not be sustained in their adult offspring. I think of those here with children now eager to be included, hopeful of an adventure on the second floor of Strouse. I think of those barely in these doors, with infants baptized and promises made to raise a child or two or four in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I include those of us without children, but whose participation in the community of faith implicates us by way of the promise made to Demi Marie Simms at her baptism, the promise to raise this child of God. Though I also think of each and every adult in this sanctuary, some so steeped in the faith that doubt never had a chance, but others of us raised in an age of such skepticism that, still, we hold to the faith with scant assurance that faith's hold will be sufficient to sustain us.

That is why these few verses read from the Book of Hebrews are oddly reassuring to me. On this Sunday when we sit to the task of educating ourselves and our children into the tradition of the Christian faith, the assurance is that the early church struggled too! Those who were so much closer to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, were also those given to dullness in understanding, an infantile grasp of faith's substance, a falling away from faith once given, sluggishness in matters pertaining to salvation. We are not the first to wonder why, out of 168 hours in a week, two are too much to spend in worship and church school. We are not the first to compete with the more attractive promises of a secular society. We are not the first to watch as the truth of the gospel is critiqued from the somewhat arrogant perspective of sophisticated academics or the simply shallow pronouncements of fly-by-night gurus.

But that is small comfort. For still we are left, as the early church was, with the responsibility of raising God's children against significant odds. How are we to hand over to our children a tradition whose story and affirmations and creeds we barely know ourselves? What are we to say when they come to us, at age four, asking questions more sophisticated in scope than we have ever anticipated having to answer?

Biblically, the enterprise of initiating a child into faith's tradition has had its start with a child's question. So the Book of Exodus records, "When your children say to you, 'What do you mean by this service?' you shall say..." and later, "When in time to come your son asks you, 'What does this mean?' you shall say to him...." and in Deuteronomy, "When your [child] asks you in time to come, 'What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the ordinances which the Lord our God has commanded you?' Then you shall say to your [child]"...and in Joshua, "...that this may be a sign among you, when your children ask in time to come, 'What do those stones mean to you?' Then you shall tell them..."

The raising of God's children still begins, more often than not, with a child's eager question, hopeful of an adventure. And this is not our own doing: it is a gift of the God who always takes the initiative, sight unseen, with the hardest of hearts and even the youngest of hearts and minds. How many of you returned to this institution-abandoned-in-adolescence because a three year old, one day, out of the blue, said, "Mommy, does God have a big toe?" or "Daddy, how did God get his name?" (By the way, Jean, I haven't forgotten Carolyn's request!) I do believe a child's questions about God are, in the first place, God's undeserved grace to a lapsed parent, propelling a household toward the community called out by a Word not its own.

That Word, of course, is heard first and most fully in the biblical witness, as the stories of scripture point us toward the God we know in Jesus Christ. To a child's questions, then and now, "The adult answers characteristically, 'Let me tell you a story.' It is our story," says Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggmann, "but still only a story. That is all that has been given to us. In that way," he says, "the child learns both about the deep conviction of the adult and about the precarious foundation of faith."

In others words, this is the story on which you and I have staked our lives, supposedly. Have we? This is the story through which we know who we are and to whom we belong. Do we? This is the story most of us were told as children and, though we may have run far afield in the days of our youth, the prodigal's story within the story is true. There is this reliable Parent who has set us free to roam and has welcomed us, each one, home. How might we tell this story to our children such that they may live in trust all their days, that they may be given the adventure of faith until they lie to die, that they may tell the self-same story to their children when, in time to come, their child asks?

First of all, [says Brueggemann] we must know the story for ourselves and tell the story in all its concreteness. For the most part, we have been given in scripture not a set of propositions, but a scandalously specific collection of tales about characters who are flawed and confused and forgiven...about a God relentless in pursuit and merciful beyond all telling. As adults who are but babes in the woods when it comes to the Bible, why not, each night before you go to bed, let the Bible tell you a story as though you were the child you still are. Notice the incredible, recognizable detail. Commit it--not word for word, but image for image--to memory. Wrap your mind around its peculiar asides. Store these tales in the marrow of your bones, that you may have a storehouse ready for the next question tumbling from a toddler's lips. The Bible must first be written on your own heart, before it can be handed on to your children and children's children in all of its astonishing concreteness.

Then, in the second place, knowing that 'its meaning is not exactly what is: just what the Bible says,' knowing that the community which first told the story was not interested in static meanings or flat memories, spin for the one who has asked of you an impossible question, spin an open-ended tale filled with invitation...a story, when added to all the other stories, with the power to "create a context, evoke a perception, form a frame of reference" as vivid and real and true as when it first was told. I think of Bill Cosby's telling of Noah...I think of Kazanzakis' telling of Christ's passion. Within the boundaries of form and plot and characters, there is a world of faithful proclamation awaiting the wide eyes of the littlest of these.

Third, our literal minds have long ago forgotten that the stories of scripture are stories which were first intended for the practice of imagination. Parables are the best example: open-ended stories which spoke the known world of the listening crowd and then, in one unexpected turn, turned everything upside-down and inside-out. They still do! "The listener is expected to work as resiliently as the teller," says Brueggemann. "The communication between the two parties is a bonding around images, metaphors, and symbols that are never flattened to coercive instruction. Israel has enormous confidence in its narrative speech, sure that the images and metaphors will work their own way, will reach the listener at the point of his or her experience, and will function with claiming authority." Within the story, in other words, there is a world beyond our control, and meanings held in the still creative hand of a God whose Spirit is too free for sedimented minds.

Fourth, know when you dare to give your child the stories of scripture, you are giving them a counterstory to the story they are told by the culture every day...you are giving them a subversive story to the powers and principalities of the day. You are letting them in on a secret: that power is made perfect in weakness...that the last are first and the first last...that service is true freedom...that things seen are less important than things unseen. This they are given to know not as disembodied principles, but only through the stories of a pilgrim band fleeing Pharaoh's army through a parted sea, stories of a dozen guys given the keys to the kingdom while Rome crumbled, stories of shipwrecked prisoners bound toward home by way of a cross. The stories of God, if told thus, may find you raising revolutionary children for Christ's sake.

Then finally, if we are to tell our children these stories as they have been told for generations, we must dare to tell them with confidence...as our bottom line of truth. "The question was always alive in Israel," says Brueggemann, "Shall we risk these stories? Shall we take our stand on them? If we do, we must do so with the awareness that not only the substance, but our claims for truth are suspect and troublesome in the world." Foolishness to those who are wise; folly to those who are perishing.

Though in the end and inspite of Joyce Carol Oates' interest in the poetic/metaphorical/psychological value of the Bible, this story we have been given is more than an idle tale. For it points to One who not only told the story, but was its incarnation, the flesh on the words, the point of the plot, the savior of our lives. These are stories which finally invite us, no matter our age or sophistication, to know Him and trust Him and follow Him all our days. There are no guarantees: if we tell the story, as we ought, to our children, will faith be the result? That, says the Book of Hebrews with highest assurance, is in God's hand. Therefore "we may be confident of better things, for God is not unjust; he will not overlook our work and the love we have shown" for his sake, in raising God's children. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Return to the Chapel