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Isaiah 11:
1-6
June 14, 2009 OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES: A FEW CHILDREN'S SERMONS With this being Children's Day at our 9 AM service, I thought we would continue that theme with a few Children's Sermons for this our 11 AM service. Now, I realize that in speaking of "Children's Sermons" people automatically and understandably think of those sermons that we older people offer to our children, and at the 9 AM service, over the years we've heard some extraordinarily creative sermons for our children. I'm fortunate to have one of the best seats in the house for those sermons, as the children are all facing forward, and I love to look at their faces during these sermons. Although it's sometimes hard to hear the children; I also love how they answer the questions, sometimes rather difficult questions, questions that sometimes I wonder whether or not they have the cognitive maturity to answer, and yet sometimes there is great profundity in what they say. And oftentimes, their responses are so right on target that I wish that everyone were able to hear them. And that's what I have in mind for this morning in these "Children Sermons" – not sermons that we would offer to our children, but rather, the other way around. I'd like to share with you some of the sermons that I, myself, have received from children. In our scripture lesson for this morning, in speaking of the "peaceable Kingdom", the prophet Isaiah says, "and a little child shall lead them." And likewise, in the book of Psalms, we find those familiar words, "out of the mouths of babes", an expression that is now part of our vernacular. Children, despite their immaturity, can sometimes sound so surprisingly wise. Likewise, we should remember that Jesus was but a young 12-year-old child when he first spoke in the synagogue in Nazareth. So, it would behoove us to listen to our children. Not that I'm of the persuasion as some seem to be that children are innately, inherently loveable and without any sort of blemish. Children can be unbelievably cruel and manipulative as any casual observer can attest. Be that as it may, here are but a few of the sermons I have received from our children, and sometimes the best of our sermons end in a question mark. Take for example the time when I was talking to our children about God's Creation, how God created us all, how there is wonderful diversity in God's Creation and how everything in nature is but a beautiful and exquisite mirror image of God's love. This was probably preceded by singing some such hymn as "All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small." At the end of my spiel, one child raised his hand and said, "what about ticks?" Needless to say, it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for, but it was a helpful sermon nevertheless, a reminder that Nature isn't quite so pretty as some of our sentimental hymns and poems and sermons would lead us to believe. Nature can be almost unbelievably brutal, and while some might claim that ticks and cancer cells play some kind of pivotal role in God's design, I think many of us find that hard to reconcile with the God of Love that we associate with Jesus. As much as I love nature, especially during this beautiful season of the year, this season in which the peonies are so magnificent, that child's question, posed to me many years ago, is a reminder, a sermonic reminder that nature, at times, can be brutal and much of what we do as a church is, in fact, contrary to the forces of nature. While some might see God's design in every critter and every infirmity, saying that everything that is, is exactly as God created it to be, everything that happens, happens exactly according to God's design; I do not see it that way. Rather, I see God in all those who stand in the way of the so-called "natural order of things." If the "survival of the fittest" is the natural order of things, we do all we can for the weak and the broken and those who otherwise might be left behind and forgotten. We celebrate the work of doctors and nurses and research scientists that work toward the alleviation of disease, those who ignore so called "natural selection" and do everything they can to save a human life, those who refuse to believe that we live in a dog-eat-dog world, those who use all their God-given faculties to find a cure for such things as Lyme Disease and cancer, and while ticks and cancer cells may play an important role in nature, we need to be careful about what we attribute to God or God's design, and that child's question to me was an important sermon for all of us to remember. The best of our sermons are not those that tell us what we want to hear but rather what we need to hear, and our children, in this regard, are natural born preachers. They have an uncanny ability to cut to the chase, and despite their diminutive size, they know how to deliver a knock out punch. If you were to study the prophets, you would find comfort in the easy listening music of Isaiah, you would find beautiful poetry in Hosea, you would find exquisite, even lyrical simplicity in Micah, you would find fascinating, mythological images akin to the poetry of William Blake in Ezekiel, but if you want or rather need someone to tell you the blunt unadorned truth, Amos is the one you need, and our children and grandchildren can easily give Amos a run for his money. I remember being in a family's home a number of years ago and hearing a father tell me that it was the comment of a child that finally woke him up to the realization that he had a drinking problem that needed to be addressed. All the rest of us had tried to tell him, using our own more gentle methodologies, but what really woke him up was when his 5-year-old child said to him, "daddy, why are you so drunk all the time." I wouldn't at all want to encourage such a blunt approach to anyone's problem, for I can only imagine how painful this must have been for the father, and it might very well have destroyed him, but for this particular man, it was just the wake-up call that he needed. In short, we need to listen to our children and grandchildren, no matter how difficult or painful it might be, for it might very well be the spirit of the prophet Amos telling us not what we want to hear but what we need to hear. But the sermons of our children are not always like Amos, thank God. Sometimes they can be so wonderfully, even outrageously idealistic, and for us older folk, as we sometime get jaded with too much reality, too much cynicism and skepticism and fatalism, God help us if we didn't have the idealism of our children. A few years ago, the United Nations had a project in which they put together a long Peace Poem that was made up of 2 lines of poetry from children from all around the world. I was looking at some of the entries recently, and it did my soul a world of good to see what children had said, and not only what they said, but also how they said it. For those of us who sometimes become far to linear and sequential and didactic and yes preachy in our manner of expression, we need to listen to our children and their wonderful, if, at times, elliptical and whimsical way of expressing themselves. Take for example the words of a child from Arkansas: World peace is like a frog and a fly hugging each other. Peace is like strawberries in the sky. Now, that's what I would call a great sermon! The prophet Isaiah was also but a child when he began his prophecy, and many of us are familiar with how he said that someday, " the wolf shall lie down with the lamb", and as much as I love this image, I love how this child from Arkansas has taken it even one step further, "a frog and a fly hugging each other." "Peace is like strawberries in the sky." And what a beautiful image that is! On one hand, in this so called realistic world in which we live, this world in which we sometimes mistakenly think that world peace is dependent upon our ability to maintain ad infinitum a delicate balance of very indelicate weaponry, this child's imagery does not seem to make any sense, but maybe for our own salvation – spiritual and otherwise – we would do well to imagine "strawberries in the sky." I also like how another child, a child from South Africa, wrote this for that long Peace Poem: "There comes an army; here comes another. They meet in the middle and declare peace.
Or how about the practical wisdom of a child from New York who said this,
Apologize when you are wrong; It will show that you are strong.
When Germany apologizes as it has for the holocaust, that's surely not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. When the United States apologizes for the way in which people of color have been treated, that's not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength, and in our families, too often we become so stubborn in defense of our own pride and personal sovereignty that we think that an apology will put us on the slippery slope of self-annihilation, and if and when that happens to us, hopefully there will be a child nearby with these simple words of wisdom, "apologize when you are wrong; it will show that you are strong." I also like how yet another child said, "peace is like yeast, it helps nations rise." This should be a reminder for us all that it is the little things and the so-called "little people" that count. As important as governments are, as important as our elected officials are, as important as summit meetings and special envoys are, ultimately it is the little things we do, the little adjustments we make in the way we think and the way we behave -- the little contributions that we make are like yeast, and maybe we need little children to remind us of how just important those little things and so-called "little people" are. Finally, I'd like to share with a children's sermon that we received just last Sunday. Eileen was offering an excellent children's sermon, trying to help the children to think about this summer and how and where they might be able to find God. Some spoke about how God can be found in the beauty of nature, and others talked about how God could be found in their families, their mothers and fathers and the love and support they receive from them. All of which is very important, but I love how one child said quite quietly that we can also find God in our hearts. Out of the mouths of babes! If in nature, a child encounters one too many ticks or is allergic to poison ivy or stays too long in the sun and gets Sunburn, thank God there are other places – places other than nature – where God can be found. And if, for another child, his or her family is not the quintessential Norman Rockwell family we would want it to be, if for that child "home" and "family" do not have the same warm and reassuring associations that they have for the rest of us, thank God and thank our Sunday School teachers and thank all of our volunteers and thank our parents that our children are also being taught that there is a sacred place in us all, an inward temple, where, no matter what, God can always and everywhere be found. On Thursday, I'll be leading our next journey out to the Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota and one of the things we have learned from our friends out there is the idea of the 7th direction – The Heart. We all know about North, South, East and West, and in addition to these, we also know about "up" and "down" and so those are the 6 basic directions, but our Native American friends would say that the 7th direction is the most important. You can have a keen sense of direction and even without a compass or a gps unit you might be able to tell where you are and which way is North, but without that 7th direction we are always and forever lost. And so I give thanks for the children's sermon I received last week. If for some of our children, the doors of a church are literally or figuratively locked, if a church's theology is forbidding, foreboding and exclusive, and if for some of our children nature is a scary place of war and ticks and poison ivy and cancer cells, then, thank God our children are learning and teaching the rest of us that there is a sacred place within ourselves, a portable sanctuary, the seventh direction, a place where God can always be found. That's a children's sermon that will sustain me during these days of summer. Amen
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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