Father of the Man

                           Genesis  18: 19,   Matthew 19: 13, 14

 

 

It’s time again. In just a few days, school starts.  Everyone who could has been on vacation to the mountains, to the beach, to Disney World. Everyone has bathed in the easiness and heat of the summer. The heat is still here, but summer is fading. If you don’t believe it, ask the teachers and teacher assistants gathered here with us. They went back a week ago to begin preparations for the coming school year.

Just a few minutes ago, we did a special blessing for the children and their backpacks now pressed again into duty. A few hours from now, we will all gather at the splash pad for one more fling at summer. But though the days of summer are still with us, thoughts are quickly turning to the beginning of another term of school, of the promise of a chill in the air, of the call to another year of learning in the classroom. For some, it will be their first time; for others, their last. For those in college, another step toward adulthood and jobs and responsibilities.  We are about to send our children off to learn. We are about to put them in the hands of others for hours every day. We kiss them goodbye and watch them leave the car or get on the bus and we entrust a major portion of our children’s lives to others in the hope and prayer that they will learn, that they will adapt, that they will thrive in that environment. But what we cannot do is to think that our job as parents is done. It has only become more complicated.

I was driving to the church the other day and was listening to public radio. A news piece was on about the move by some public school systems to have high schools teach a segment on the prevention of sexual violence. California has made it state law.  While the piece was airing, a mother in a nearby state called in to ask why such a course wasn’t taught in her state. She commented what a problem it was to have to teach such things at home, and didn’t appreciate the schools not teaching her children about why it is wrong to be sexually violent.

Whatever your feelings may be about the merits of such courses in the public schools, I hope your feelings about that mother are much more clear. She was actually advocating that the schools were the place to learn how not to be sexually violent, and that she would rather not be troubled with such a task.  Suffice it to say that such an approach is far from biblical.

In the 19^th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has left Galilee and journeyed beyond the Jordan River to the region of Judea, where he is in the midst of a large crowd, preaching and healing. Pharisees are there and continue to test him. He offers comments about divorce and then children are brought up to him. From the text, we might suppose that the children are bigger than toddlers and younger than teens. They seem to be brought up by their parents. The disciples appear to be telling the parents to keep the children away, but Jesus overrules the disciples. Bring the children up, he says. Don’t stop them. Let them come to me. It was fairly common practice in that time for children to be blessed by a “holy man.” It was common practice for children to be brought to the elders during the Day of Atonement for “blessing, strengthening and prayer.” But Jesus went a step further. He said that “to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”  Here’s a teaching moment. When Jesus says “such” rather than “these”, he is opening the field.  He doesn’t mean children literally, but he does use children to help illustrate what he does mean, which is that one has to come to Jesus spiritually vulnerable, even innocent, if one is to be able to enter the kingdom, indeed even to grasp the meaning of the kingdom. Jesus said it again in chapter 18: “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

So we send our children off to school and each year, they learn more about the world. They learn academically. They need those skills to get by in this world. They learn socially. They need those skills as well, but unlike academics, there will be learning that is unhealthy, prejudiced, biased, narrow, even just plain wrong. This is the collateral damage that we inflict upon ourselves in our education systems. There is no avoiding such exposure.

But the answer is not to hide our heads in the sand or to rest the presence or absence of our children’s ethics in what is or is not taught in the public schools. It is not the province of our educational system to teach ethics. Nor should we ask our schools to teach religious ethics. That is what the church is all about. That is why God devised and ordained family life as the cornerstone of relationships. The parents and the church cannot abdicate the teachings of Christian ethics and expect the church, much less their children, to survive.

One of my favorite poets is William Wordsworth. I have long since forgotten all the reasons I liked his work, but one line has stuck with me since senior English in high school. It comes from a poem entitled My Heart Leaps Up. It’s a short, simple poem about how Wordsworth has always felt joy when he sees a rainbow, a joy he has felt since childhood. He describes this long experienced feeling in verse this way:

So it was when my life began;

So it is now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

 

Then, Wordsworth makes an observation: The Child is father of the Man. Scholars argue about his meaning, but to me it is clear enough. Wordsworth is saying that as surely as events and behavior and experiences form one’s childhood, so too will they influence who that person becomes. What happens to the child is what makes him the kind of man or woman he or she becomes.

          Wordsworth is not unique in his sentiment. The book of Proverbs has something similar to say. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”  The proverb reminds us that behavior is learned and that it starts early…as a child. It is founded on God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant that every Christian parent should adopt. In the 18^th chapter of Genesis, as God debates whether to tell Abraham about his plans for Sodom and Gomorrah, God talks aloud about that covenant and says this in his pondering: “For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice…”

          It’s time to go back to school. That’s a good thing. But in the jargon of computer speak,  public school is an add-on, an app, to life. It is a place of learning, but not the place of learning. It cannot and should not ever assume to take the place of all the training and learning that takes place in the home and in the church. He has chosen us, parents, that we may command our children to keep the way of the Lord.

Children, listen to me. You’re learning all the time. You learn from teachers. You learn from your parents and grandparents. You learn from me. You learn from reading and fishing and playing and sports and even from your dog. Learning is your job. but there is another job I want you to begin to try to do. Please begin to learn to discern what is worth learning. What is discernment? It’s seeing with eyes of understanding, not just vision. When you see with discernment, you are making decisions about what is important. Not everything is. That poet Mr. Wordsworth learned early that seeing a rainbow made him happy. That’s worth learning.

Jesus taught us that children can see God the easiest. But you won’t stay children and you need to keep seeing Jesus in this world. As you grow, try to learn how to keep that which is pure and clean, and how to reject that which is ugly and will hurt you or others. It won’t be easy. But we will help you. We, your parents. We, your church. We, your friends.

Our prayer for you is that you learn to keep that which is of value to your life and to shed that which is not. No matter what you learn, if it means leaving Jesus behind, it’s bad teaching.