YOU CAN TELL THE KIDS, IT=S NOT A SECRET!
(Preached on Sunday, November 9, 2008)
We=re not keeping this to ourselves, we=re passing it along to the next generation C God=s fame and fortune, the marvelous things he has done. -Psalm 78:4
What are the things we teach our children?
Anyone who is a parent would likely confess that they have taught the following things to their children: Don=t talk to strangers; look both ways before crossing the street; don=t do drugs or alcohol; and keep your room clean. The point is, there are things that children need to be taught. Essentially, these things relate to survival. All good moms and dads want their kids to be okay. It=s just that basic.
The author of Psalm 78 understood this truth. But when he or she beckons people to come listen, to be let in on the sweet old truths, that is not referring to inappropriate strangers or traffic lights. No, the Psalmist is talking about the truth and stories about God. The Psalmist reminds us that God has always placed a witness to God=s presence and
activity in the land, among people, and God wants us to share the stories of that witness among ourselves and with our children, so the next generation, and all generations to come, will know the truth and tell the stories about God=s faithful activity among God=s people, so their children can trust in God as they live their lives in the world.
It is growing hard and harder to live in the world today.
It is especially growing harder to live with joy, enthusiasm, kindness, gratitude, determination, character and hope. It is a struggle keeping the faith among people who despise or ignore God. More and more employers and customers and clients and concerned only with the Abottom line@ and with what you can do for them. Less and less are they concerned about the quality of your life, about your concerns for justice and fairness and equality, about your desire for nurturing your life and the lives of loved ones, outside of and beyond your workplace life.
Our faith in God is all the more necessary today and as we move into the future. It will be just as important even further in the future for our children. His name was Joseph and he fled Stalin=s armies and settled in Hinsdale, Illinois. There he found employment as the custodian of Union Church which is where my colleague and friend Mike Heath met him, the year he spent as a seminary student working at Union Church. Through his Baltic accent and in the English he was still learning, Joseph taught Mike the finer points of operating a floor polisher (a skill every seminary student should learn, but which they forget to teach us in the classroom.) Mike and Joseph became friends. At the end of the school year Mike went to say good-bye to Joseph. He gave Mike one piece of advice. ABuy wool.@ Joseph was telling Mike that the best fabric for durability, warmth, and warmth even when wet, was wool. More fundamentally, Joseph was telling him to spend his money wisely. Even though Joseph=s life in the US was relatively good, he had survived hard years in his home country of Lithuania. His experience taught him that good times do not last and that you should prepare for the inevitable difficult times by buying wool, that is by spending wisely.
Faith is no guarantee against the hard times. The Bible is full of stories that demonstrate that faith is not a guarantee that your life will be lived in exclusively good times. What faith does offer you is support and ways to cope with the hard times. The Bible encourages us to trust in God and let our faith in God be the foundation of our hope for better days to come. It also encourages us to patiently endure and to continue to live faithfully. That is why it is so important we pass on the stories of faith to our children, and by doing so, remind ourselves of them at the same time.
Which means we need to share all the faith stories and share them honestly. Not just the sweetness and light stories. Not just the images of Jesus with the little children on his lap: pleasant and welcoming for sure, but if all we present are the one-sided testimonies of God then God feels too far away, especially in the dark and tough times. So we need to share all the stories. The father who went through a brutal wartime experience, yet somehow knew God to be present and caring for him in the midst of all the horror and terror, that story is important to share. The mother who shares her own life struggles and how God was present in them, that story is also important to share. After all, the story of a people of faith is, or ought to be, an accumulating volume of the felt experiences of God. It is vitally important to witness daily to God=s present power in our lives. In this way children will learn to seek God=s power in their own life experiences.
Someone has rightly pointed out that AChristianity is always only one generation away from extinction.@ If we don=t remind ourselves of the stories of how God has been there in the past to see our ancestors through the tough times; if we don=t share those stories and our own stories of how God has seen us through, with our children, so they know the truth and the stories about God; then how will their children know to Aset their hope in God@?
When I was a child growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, we always had not only Sunday morning worship, but we also had a Sunday evening gathering time. An important element in the evening worship was called Atestimonies.@ That was a time when worshipers were invited to stand up and speak about what God had done in their lives. Some people never spoke, others spoke almost every week and still others only occasionally, but the point was, we were encouraged to talk about our experiences of God so that others present might be helped in their own faith journeys. Many of those who spoke were not well-educated. They were not used to public speaking, and they often stumbled over themselves and were not real flowery in their speech. While I don=t remember much of what they said, what I do remember is the sincerity and conviction with which many of them spoke. Their witness had a bearing on my own faith journey. In fact, one thing that helped me grow in my faith was that I heard the adults around me, including my parents, talk about their faith.
Maybe we should consider trying to find a time when we can gather and have a time for sharing Atestimonies@ from our own lives. It would be an important time for strengthening all of us in our faith journeys, not just our children. But whether we ever share our stories in a public gathering or not, we can learn to talk comfortably about our faith at the dinner table, in our family gatherings, where younger people are listening. In fact, it is important that we learn to do that and then do it, especially for the sake of our children and the importance those stories hold for nurturing their faith in God for the future.
The best our lives can be is achieved not through accumulating, says Jesus, but by following Christ=s way: loving God and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Which includes loving our enemies and being kind to those who treat us harshly; reaching out to those we discover hurting and lying in a ditch; caring for the widow and orphan, all those cast aside by society as worthless and a burden. This is the way we experience the best of life.
These are uncertain times and anxious times. So, trust God, have hope, patiently endure, love God and love your neighbor, spend wisely, and Abuy wool.@ And be sure to share the stories of how God has been present for you in the past and how God is still present and seeing you through these tough times. And remember, all this is not a secret, you can tell the kids, too.