Takoma Park Baptist Church, August 31, 1997: audience response involved
There are times when all of us need to participate, times when no single person can speak all the truths or do all the work. There are times when a community of people must come together, and think together, pray together, and speak together. This is such a time.
The state of family life in our nation is not good. Too many things show breakdown of the family. In fact, some have even spoken of the family as this decade's battleground, a battleground where, as in most wars, there are no clear winners, only losers. A battleground which is claiming the most vulnerable and yet the most valuable, our children.
The statistics alone should convince us of this. No doubt you read in the newspaper this week that a huge proportion of the young men of the District of Columbia are either in prison, have been in prison, or are being sought by the police. The battle is being lost if that statistic be anywhere near true.
Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund helps us picture the statistics very clearly by asking us to think about one day in America. Just one day out of 365 in the year. She says that every day in America, on the average, 38 children die violently. Of these three die from neglect; thirteen are victims of homicide, sixteen are shot accidentally by firearms, and six commit suicide. Thirty-eight children, violently killed, each day.
Then she says that every day in America, 5702 children are arrested. Get that astounding figure: each day, on the average, 5702 children are arrested, 316 of them for violent crimes and 403 for drug abuse. Children arrested!
If you are inclined to say, well, they did the crime and should pay the time, then consider this figure. Every day, every single day, in America, 8523 children are reported as abused or neglected. Now you understand how these numbers work. Today's 8523 adds to yesterday's 8523, which in turn is added on to Friday's 8523, and so on, and so on. And by the close of the day tomorrow, American police and child protective authorities will add 8523 more to their bulging case files. Almost makes you want to stop the clock, doesn't it? Wish we could do the Joshua thing, make the sun stand still! Stop the world, I want to get off!
But the statistics are not all that I have in mind this morning. It's not just numbers that occupy my attention. I am thinking of our own community. I am thinking of how so many of you have told me that you are just not going to go out at night anymore, because you are afraid of young people on the prowl. We can barely have prayer meeting and choir rehearsals because quite a few of you want to get behind that front door and lock it up tight each night. I understand. Nobody thinks you are paranoid because of that. It's just a fact of life.
I'm thinking of something I've been seeing a lot of lately. I am a subscriber to two mailing lists on the Internet, having to do with this community. These are message lists, where people can exchange comments about life in the neighborhood. One list is for Takoma Park, Maryland, and the other is for Takoma, DC. I watch to find out what others are concerned with. Mostly, it's crime. And especially juvenile crime. In fact, I would say that there is almost an obsession with juvenile crime among the folks who discuss things on these lists. I suspect it's a pretty good picture of what our community is thinking about these days.
So, what do we do? How can we solve this? Do we just lock our doors and keep ourselves safe? That won't work forever. Do we call for more police, do we vote for tougher politicians, do we lobby for stronger laws, do we call for longer jail terms?
In a moment I'm going to invite you to participate in this sermon. As I said at the beginning, there are times when all of us need to work on something, times when no one voice needs to dominate, no one person needs to do all the thinking, and no one pair of hands needs to do all the work. There are times, and this is one of them, when all of us need to work together and think together. So I am going to be calling on you to share in the making of this message. But first, a parable.
It seems that once there was a town in which a good many people had become ill. The town built and staffed a new hospital in order to take care of its sick people. They were very proud of their fine medical facility. But, before long, more and more people were getting sick, and so they added on to the hospital, they hired more doctors and nurses, and took care of more sick people. They were immensely proud. But it was expensive. Lots of tax dollars went into building these hospitals and paying these physicians.
One day someone new came to town and studied the situation. This outsider did some research and found out that all the people were sick from parasites. Unhealthy bacteria were infecting everyone. And a little more research told him why. Everyone was drinking raw water, right out of the river. And so this stranger went to the mayor and the council and said, “Folks, you need to build a water treatment plant.”
Ah, said, the mayor, and oh, said the Council. “But you must understand that our budget is too light to do that. We have all these hospitals and we need to take care of all the sick people. We have built all these clinics and hired all these doctors and nurses, and that's expensive. We just don't have the money to do something more.”
All right, here's the time for participation on your part. What's wrong with that? Where is the flaw in that logic? What is it that this mayor and this council are failing to see?
AUDIENCE RESPONSES
An ounce of prevention is certainly worth a pound of cure. The Bible gives us principles that will help keep disintegration from happening. Let’s go to the very source of the issue rather than put Band-Aids on later.
There are three key ideas in the passage of Scripture we’re working on today. The first is mutual submission. The second is parenting in the Lord. And the third is the idea of discipline and instruction. Mutual submission; parenting in the Lord; and disciplined instruction.
I
First, mutual submission. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Be subject, or be submissive to one another, and the motivation is reverence for Christ. What does that mean? Let's popcorn out some synonyms for subjection and submission. Give me some other words that could be used to mean being subject to one another:
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
All right, now let's do the same thing for "reverence." What are some other words? What does this mean, reverence for Christ?
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
Now can we put together some other ways of saying this Scripture, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ?”
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
The most basic principle in creating solid homes is mutual respect. Recognition that the other person is a unique creation of God, purchased by the blood of Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit, worthy of respect. And if that other person is only two years old or ten years old or sixteen years old, they still must receive respect. Our task as adults is not to assert authority; it is to respect our children, and to earn respect by giving respect, seeing our children as gifts from Christ Himself.
Now sometimes we do not even respect ourselves, we do not see ourselves as part of God's good gifts, and so we do not respect our children either. Maybe some of us were abused or misused as children, maybe we've never gotten past that ourselves, and so we just keep passing it on until somewhere along the way it explodes. So if you are an adult, and you are in a position of authority, you really have to see what your self-image looks like before you put down a child. Mutual submission means putting aside our own wishes and our own pride, in order to give to a child. That's something we can do if we have let Jesus Christ claim us and if we have really heard Jesus Christ tell us of His love for us. If you know deep down that Christ loves you, you can respect and love a child.
I wonder if maybe some of you have stories you could tell about what respecting a child will accomplish. Maybe somebody treated you so well when you were a child that you were shaped by that. Or maybe you learned something from your own children about how they responded when they were given the respect due a child of Christ.
While you're thinking about that, I'll just relate something that opened my eyes one day a few years ago. My own son experienced me, I know, as demanding while he was growing up. The usual things: get your grades up, get a job, clean your room, repair your car. It got to be awfully one-sided. I would demand, he would grumble. And on it went for quite a while. I began to notice something; I began to notice that when I would call him at his college dorm, he was seldom glad to hear my voice. His responses were sort of short: yeah; no. Might as well not call if that's the best we can do.
But then the caIls started coming the other way. Dad, I need help with my car. Dad, I need some things I didn't take to school with me. And, as every parent of every college students has heard, Dad, I need some more … (you fill it in). Well, I started going over to Baltimore to find him and help him out. Nothing heroic, mind you. Just going and being with him and trying to help what needed helping, with a minimum of lecturing. After all, he had heard the lectures.
He graduated; he got a job, and launched out on his own. It felt like we were still at a distance from one another. He was over in Virginia, I was here, but so what? Until one day he called and asked me to do something; he asked me to come over and visit and pray with his friend, who was about to have major surgery. And when I did, and both his mother and I followed up in the hospital afterward, everything changed. Everything shifted. We became not just father and son, over and under, authority figure and dependent, billpayer and sponge. We became friends. We became two men, loving and respecting one another as special gifts to one another.
"Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" and a new self-esteem, a new wholeness is possible.
Do you have stories to share about how somebody helped you grow by respecting you? Or about your child thrived on respect?
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
II
Mutual submission; and then parenting in the Lord. We are called on to be parents "in the Lord" and thus to be worthy of our children's obedience. You know the passage; doubtless you quoted it many times when you felt you needed a little extra ammunition: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right."
What do you think the phrase "obey your parents in the Lord" means? Does this mean that children are to obey only Christian parents? Does it imply that parents who give out ungodly commands are not to be obeyed? What do you think?
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
Well, I don't want to focus on legal loopholes. Kids will find ways to wriggle out of obedience just fine without my helping them interpret the Bible! I just want to focus on parenting in the Lord. We parent in the Lord when we love our children as Christ loved us. Parenting in the Lord is bringing the spirit of the redemptive Christ to our relationships with our children. Being sacrificial. Loving and giving and doing whatever it takes to raise these children.
I think if there is anyone thing that troubles me about our generation, generally speaking, it is that there is a me-ism in it. There is among us a strong desire for my space, my free time, my privacy, my self-fulfillment. It's a curious thing. Our late Minister of Music, Bill Garrett, who, as most of you would remember, was Personnel Director for the Montgomery County government, used to say that his greatest problem was the lack of the work ethic among his employees. They just did not want to inconvenience themselves. They couched it in very sophisticated language about self-development and personal enhancement, but it amounted to just one thing: they did not want to work if it was not convenient! I remember some campus ministers I once tried to supervise; every time I would ask them to do something, their answer was, "Oh, I don't have energy for that!" Nice to get a paycheck, but don't ask me to go out of my way to earn it!
I wonder if we are parenting the same way. Nice to have children, cute and decorative and precious. But don't ask me to inconvenience myself for them. Oh, but parenting in the Lord, the kind of parenting that earns obedience, is sacrificial. Maybe some of you have stories about how parents sacrificed for you and earned your love and respect.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
III
The final principle is discipline and instruction. And this is where I really do want to include the whole church community. Discipline and instruction. Hear the word of God: "And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."
Let's talk not just about fathers, nor just about parents, but about the church. Bringing children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord is the church’s business. This is what we are all about. I'm going to ask you to brainstorm with me about we could be doing to accomplish that. I'm going to invite you to dream with me about how to invest in our children. I remember that years ago, when my home church in Louisville was getting ready to construct a new education building, they showed lots of pictures of our small children, jammed into crowded and unpleasant classrooms, and captioned the whole business, "Our worst for our best"! That spoke volumes and got that church moving to do something.
So how would you see us invest in our children? What kind of water treatment plants can we build so that we can head off disease? Would it be improvements to our facility? Would it be staff? Would it be program? What would it take for our church to accomplish discipline and instruction in the Lord?
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
I want to close by focusing on one more phrase in this passage of Scripture: "so that it may be well with you". Children are told to honor their parents in the Lord so that it may be well with them. So that they can be safe at home.
A few years ago, there was a movie called "Safe At Home". It was the story of what scrapes and adventures a child left on his own gets into. It was a comedy, but it was also a tragedy, because not every child feels safe at home, safe in the community, safe at school, safe anywhere. It ought to be our aim to see to it that every child feels safe at home, and maybe that begins with his feeling safe at church. Maybe that begins with the church being a place of refuge for children at risk. Maybe that begins with you and me, the family of Christ, reaching out to understand, listen, embrace, teach, love, each child. And maybe that means, too, that we will receive the redemptive love of Christ for every breaking family.
For I profoundly believe that Jesus Christ wants to redeem the home and make it safe. And so He has established the church as a spiritual safe place. When those little ones come into my office and hug me; when they go into their classrooms and smile at their teachers; when they approach the deacon or just the person in the pew and give a greeting, they are not just hugging me or smiling at the teacher or greeting the deacon. They are hugging and smiling and greeting the whole church! They are hugging and smiling at and greeting Christ Himself!
Jesus Christ wants to redeem the home and make it safe. He wants to embrace that adult survivor or child abuser and counteract all those negative messages that told that person she was dirty. For she is not. She is cleansed by His blood. She is His.
He wants to care for the abuser. Listen carefully. I am not condoning any sin. But the line between sin and sickness gets blurry sometimes. Jesus Christ is the redeemer and the healer. He can forgive and He can restore the abuser.
Jesus Christ wants to redeem the home and make it safe. He wants to speak to that cohabiting couple and show them that there is something better than sexual attraction, and that is lifelong covenanted marriage. He wants to speak to that person, driven from one fling to another, and show them the power of companionship. He wants to make them safe at home.
Jesus Christ wants to redeem the home and make it safe. He wants to reconcile the brokenness between parents and children, and He wants to help people understand one another, with respect. He wants to assure that divorcee that, whatever the issues that brought about the breakup, there is a way to face them and grow beyond them. He wants to partner with that single parent and help him or her get on with that awesome responsibility. He wants to take those barren marriages that are little more than two lonely people living under the same roof and breathe life into them. He wants to make of each home a haven, not from crime alone, nor from society's ills, but a haven for the spirit to grow and for children to thrive. He wants us to be safe at home here and now, and finally saved in the home He has prepared for us. My dream is that because of us, some day every child in this community can sing the little chorus I grew up with, "Safe am, I; safe am I, in the hollow of His hand. No ill can harm me, no foe aIarm me, for He keeps both day and night. Safe am I, safe am I, in the hollow of His hand."
