“Raising
Radishes, Raising Children”
Psalm 78:1-7, Matthew 5:1-11
(Child Dedication Service)
March 8, 2009
Dave Russell,
----
This
morning we have dedicated Lucas Bennett Anderson, and not only that, we have
dedicated ourselves, to God. We have
prayed for God’s blessing on Lucas’ life and we have promised as a community to
care for him and nurture him in the faith and to support his parents.
Mutual
support and encouragement and accountability is one of
our reasons for existence as a church.
And in those watershed moments, during those rites of passage, it is
important to make the support and encouragement of the church tangible, as we
have done this morning with the child dedication service.
While
the arrival of a child is an occasion for great joy, for much excitement, while
it comes with high hopes, it is also a bit daunting. It can be daunting because raising a child is
an awesome responsibility. Caring for
another life, nurturing a child through years of growth and change is no small
thing. It is a great joy and a great
responsibility and parents know that at times it will also be a great heartache
and at times it will be a great headache.
It all comes together – it’s a package deal. I once heard Tony Campolo
say that grandchildren are God’s reward for not killing your children. Parenting is not an easy job.
In
the musical “The Fantasticks,” two exasperated
fathers are talking about the difficulties of raising their children and they
compare raising children to raising vegetables.
They note that when you plant a vegetable seed, you know what you are
going to get, but it’s not that way with children. The break into the song
“Plant a Radish.”
Plant
a radish.
Get a radish.
Never any doubt.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know what you're about!
Plant a turnip.
Get a turnip.
Maybe you'll get two.
That's why I love vegetables;
You know that they'll come through!
They're dependable!
They're befriendable!
They're the best pal a parent's ever known!
While with children,
It's bewilderin'.
You don't know until the seed is nearly grown
Just what you've sown.
Every
turnip green!
Every kidney bean!
Every plant grows according to the plot!
While with progeny,
It's hodge-podgenee.
For as soon as you think you know what kind you've got,
It's what they're not!
Kahlil Gibran makes the same point with a
different metaphor when he says that children are like arrows that are shot
from a bow. We can very carefully tend
to the bow and the arrow, we can use our strength and will and our good and
well-intended efforts as we pull back the bowstring and carefully aim the
arrow; but once you let it go, you no longer have control. The arrow goes where it will.
There
is no more important task than parenting, but the thing is, we don’t have
control over the final product. We can
teach our children and love them and guide them and point them the right way,
but in the end it is out of our hands.
We all know that we can raise two different children in essentially the
same way, and those two children will be very different from each other.
At
times the Biblical writers speak as though raising children is more like
vegetable gardening. Proverbs 22:6 says
“Train children in the right way, and when they are old they will not stray.” This sounds like a cut-and-dried failproof formula, but we all know of children who have
been trained in the right way who have strayed.
It really isn’t like raising vegetables.
Does this mean parenting doesn’t matter?
Of course not.
Training children in the right way, bringing them up to love and follow
Jesus, to love God and love their neighbor is the best way of helping children
to become loving and caring, responsible, Christlike
adults. There is great truth in that
proverb, but it is just that: a proverb, not an immutable law. It is wise advice, not a guarantee.
Because
there are no guarantees, what we have done here today in making promises to God
and to one another is even more important. Why would we go through all this if it didn’t
matter? If there was a guarantee about
things, this would feel like going through the motions. But because life is unpredictable, our need
for God and our need for one another is even
greater. Because our actions really do
matter, the way in which we as parents and the way in which we as a community
teach our children is vitally important.
With
Lucas, we are blessed to now have six children in our church two years of age
and under. And there is no telling where
their lives will take them, no telling the impact these children may have on
their friends and their families and on this church. There is no telling the difference they will
make in this world. The possibilities
are wide open. They are filled with
promise and potential, and while we don’t have any guarantees, we know that the
care and teaching we provide to our children matters a great deal.
In
our scripture from Psalm 78, we read:
God
established a decree in Jacob,
and appointed a law in
which God commanded our ancestors
to teach to their children;
that the next
generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and rise up and tell them to their children,
so
that they should set their hope in God.
God’s
laws and promises have to be repeated again and again. The stories of the Bible have to be retold
for each new generation. The teachings
of Jesus are not caught by osmosis – we have to teach them to our children and
our children’s children. We have come to
faith only because of generation after generation who passed on the faith, who
told the stories, who taught their children.
We are only here because our parents and grandparents, and their parents
before them, and their parents before them, were faithful in telling the story
of Jesus.
In
the Psalm, did you catch the reason for all of the teaching? It is “so that they should set their hope in
God.” The goal is that our children and
our children’s children – succeeding generations – might set their hope in God.
It
is important to teach our children, to nurture them in the faith. But what is it that we teach? What is the content we are to pass onto
succeeding generations?
To
paraphrase a well-known expression, “it takes a church to raise a child.” And one of the reasons it is so tough, one of
the reasons it takes all of us, is precisely because of the content, the values
that we seek to instill in young people – and hopefully older folks as well.
Our
New Testament reading comes from the heart of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on
the Mount, known as the Beatitudes. Blessings that Jesus pronounces for various people. We have heard the Beatitudes often enough
that we kind of lose sight of the radical nature of what Jesus is saying. Look at who he says are blessed: the poor in
spirit. Those who mourn. The meek. The meek, for goodness sake! Those 6who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The merciful. The pure in heart. The peacemakers. Those who are persecuted
for righteousness’ sake.
It
is difficult to teach things like this.
For one, we are not completely sure we believe it. Mercy and purity of heart and meekness are
not necessarily at the top of our list of qualities to strive for. Nobody seeks to mourn or be poor in
spirit. It’s not easy being a peacemaker
and we certainly don’t want to be persecuted.
Some
have argued that Jesus is simply telling it the way it is in God’s kingdom, not
prescribing what we are to try to go out and do. We are not supposed to aspire to persecution,
for example. Still, this is not easy
stuff. It goes against so much in our
culture. This is certainly not something
our children are going to learn out in the street. It is not something they will pick up from TV
or learn from their friends. The values
that we are trying to instill are countercultural. Think about Jesus’ teachings: Love your
enemies. It is better to give than
receive. The first shall be last and the
last shall be first. Do not worry about
tomorrow. Love your neighbor as
yourself. And then look at what Jesus
does. He associates with sinners and tax
collectors – with those who are outcasts of society, those who are looked down
upon, those who have a bad name. He gets
in trouble because he isn’t so concerned with outward shows of piety, but says
it’s what is on the inside that really matters.
He values women and carries on public conversation with women in a time
when that was a cultural taboo. Likewise
he speaks with Samaritans – despised half-breed heretics in the eyes of most
folks - and uses them as the good guy in stories he tells. He has time for children when most people
thought that children should be neither seen nor heard.
Together,
we are trying to follow the ways of One who challenged
the norms of his culture – and ours.
While people for the most part like Jesus, most do not take seriously
many of his teachings. We are trying to
instill values that are not widely held.
Raising a child is hard enough.
Raising a child in the way of Christ is even more difficult. It takes a church.
Raising
radishes or turnips or carrots is certainly easier than raising children. It is a lot cheaper and much less
time-consuming, and as the song tells us, you have a lot better idea of what
you are going to get. Radishes cause a
lot less frustration and they generally don’t cause much heartache. And you don’t have to teach vegetables in the
way they should go. With children, there
is not only a curriculum, it is a very difficult
curriculum. We are trying to teach
things that we find pretty tough ourselves.
But
for all of the difficulty, the joy that children bring, the potential and
promise they have, the love that we give and the love that we receive from our
children, make it all worth it. We have
a wonderful and awesome responsibility.
We give thanks to God for Lucas and for all of our children. And we know that they are not simply our
children, they are God’s children. We
are all God’s children. Thanks be to God. Amen.