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A Sermon for June 17, 2007
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| 6/17/2007 |
Several months ago my sister came to visit. One evening we found ourselves down in the Italian Market gathering some special ingredients for a dish that we were preparing for dinner.
On the way home we happened to be walking by the McCall School. For those of you not familiar with the area, this is the elementary school in the Society Hill neighborhood. As we walked by, we noticed that there were a number of children and adults out on the playground. We remarked that it must have been the end of the school day. And then my sister made some remarks that I found surprising. She said “I wonder how all those adults got on the playground. Where is the security guard?” she said, and “I wonder who is checking to make sure they are in fact the parents of the children in the school. It looks to me,” she said, “like the security here is a little lax. “
What surprised me was that none of those observations or questions had crossed my mind. All I had seen was what looked to me like a fairly typical scene after school, where kids were waiting to walk home or to be picked up by their parents and where parents who were picking up their kids were chatting with other parents who were doing the same thing.
Now what you also need to know is that for the last several months my sister, now a grandmother, has been helping out with the child care of her two grandchildren who are living in the Boston suburbs.
“I am surprised at all these questions about security, “I said, “is it really that scary to be parenting these days?” “Oh yes,” she said, “big time. It is nothing like it was when you and I were kids or when you and I were raising our kids. You can’t let these kids out of your sight for a minute. You have to know where they are at all times and who they are with and who can get access to them.”
“When I was taking care of Eliza and Marshall,” she went on, “I always had to worry about these things and ask these kinds of questions. The world is a dangerous place,” she said “and most young parents that I know reflect the same attitude. Be careful and don’t let them out of your sight. “
Ever since that conversation I have found myself periodically thinking about what she had observed and what she had been saying about what it was like to be a kid these days and what it was like to be the parents raising them.
I have wondered to myself whether I think that the world we live in is as dangerous as she and other parents she claimed to be speaking for say it is.
Is she right that we live in an age of fear?
OR whether the age we live in is an age that is overreacting to the fear mongering that pervades our media and our world view?
It turns out that I am not the only one who is concerned about this. Last week when I was mulling this over, I happened to hear an interview with one author of a new book called “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” written by two brothers.
As I listened to the interview, it became clear that they too were worried about how kids were being treated these days by parents and grandparents who are afraid to let their children out of their sight for fear that some calamity will befall them. As they put it, in an age of PlayStations, mobile phones and iPods, today’s kids can in fact live in a virtual cocoon.
They can live inside their houses and entertain themselves for hours, never venturing out into the world to smell the roses (and get stung by the bees).
They can be protected by their parents from almost all hostility and danger if they choose, never to experience the dangers that many of us took for granted when we were growing up.
In the spirit of reintroducing parents and kids to some of the wonders of dangerous adventures, these brothers have put together a marvelous collection of things they did as kids with and without their fathers and mothers that taught them about life and how to have fun on their own.
Now mind you the suggestions are not outlandish, they are in fact the run of the mill things that I remember from my childhood, and many of you do as well.
How to make and compete in a soap box racer, how to grow a crystal, how to make and use invisible, disappearing ink. Not exactly things that make your hair stand on end, but according to the brothers, things that parents today either do not know how to do our have determined are too dangerous to do in this age of fear.
A year or so ago we had lunch with a friend who was in town who works as a school psychologist at a University down in Virginia. In discussing her life and work she began to make some interesting observations about kids who are finding their way into her University these days.
She said they are coming to us with an astounding lack of ability to take care of themselves. She went on to say that they have been so handled with kid gloves, so overprotected, and in many cases instilled with so much fear, that when they get some freedom, they either freak out because they don’t know how to keep themselves out of trouble or what they imagine to be dangerous, or they act out because they seem incapable of setting effective limits on themselves. Incapable of doing this since someone else has been doing it for so long.
The result she said is that my caseload is quite large, with far too many kids who should know better how to take care of themselves. “I find myself,” she said, “having to re-parent them to help them deal with their outsized fears or develop those protective self limits that they so desperately need.”
“I find myself having to give them a reality check on what the dangers in life really are.
I find myself having to help them question the basic assumptions that they are making about life and other people. “
“What assumptions are they making?” I said. “Many are concluding,” she went on, “that the world is an evil place, that life is a dog-eat-dog existence and that they must constantly be on their guard to protect against the many dangers that exist out there. “
I find this very sad. I find this sad as a fellow citizen, I find this sad as a parent, and I especially find it sad as a Christian believer.
My faith teaches me about what I believe to be the inherent goodness in God’s creation. The inherent goodness of others.
That is not to say that we do not all posses the capacity to do evil. The Old Testament lesson that we read this morning confirms this, as if we need any proof. David is punished by the Lord for taking advantage of Uriah and his wife. His child born by this union is struck by the Lord and becomes ill.
But another way to read this is that when the evil in us gets the better of us, eventually the justice of the Lord will prevail. It may not be in our time frame, but it will prevail.
Equally, this morning’s Gospel story is an affirmation of the essential goodness of people. The woman who was a sinner, the woman who had let the evil in her overwhelm the goodness, had decided to repent and sought the forgiveness of Jesus.
She came to the dinner at the Pharisee’s house and with a very expensive jar of ointment she began to anoint the feet of Jesus and then bathe his feet with her tears.
Now it would have been easy for Jesus to dismiss her or pay her no mind or ask for her to be removed from the house, for she was an avowed sinner and everyone in the community knew it. The Pharisee in fact said as much when he questioned what Jesus is doing by continuing to associate with her.
Simon says to himself, “If this man Jesus who claims to be a prophet were really a prophet, he would know that she was a sinner and he would not associate with her. He would ask for her to be banished from his presence and from this house. “
But Jesus does not do this. Rather he recognizes her readiness to repent, He recognizes the goodness within her and chooses to leap over the stumbling block of the evil that she had done to get to the goodness that resided within her. The goodness that God had given her and has given to all of us.
We have a choice, it seems to me, in life about what basic assumptions we are going to make that will then guide many of our actions and our decisions from then on.
One of those key decisions, one of those key assumptions, is what we conclude about the inherent goodness or evil of the creation and its people.
This decision will determine much of how we live our lives and, to the subject of parenting that I am addressing this morning, this decision will determine to a large extent how you and I will parent our children and how they then will parent subsequent generations.
If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the fear and fear mongering of our present age, it will be hard for us to avoid concluding that the world is an evil place and that my role as a parent is to teach my children to be afraid of others in the world, many of which would do them harm.
If I adopt this assumption then I see that my role as a parent is to teach my children to defend themselves and to protect themselves from those out there who would do them harm. This can foster a high degree of competitiveness , wariness and defensiveness.
This may find me telling my kids that life is tough and they need to get their part of the finite share of what there is out there for them before others get it first.
This may find me telling my kids that, given half a chance people, will get away with what they can, do short cuts, lie, cheat, etc.
If I base my life on the assumption that the creation is good, that life is good and that at their core people are good, even though we all have the capacity for evil. Then might I make some different decisions, do some different things as a parent?
What I hope I would do as a parent, with this core assumption as my base, is to have some healthy skepticism about the amount of fear mongering that goes on by the media and others.
I would hope that I would try to bring some perspective to my judgments about how dangerous a place the world is.
For example did you know that by some calculations there are fewer conflicts going on in the world right now than at any other time in recorded history? That story is buried on page 23 of the newspaper while the conflict in Iraq and others in the Middle East would have us believe that the world is about to come apart.
I would hope that if I operated from the core assumption that God’s creation is essentially good that as a parent I would teach my children how to be self protective, rather than hostile and combative.
How many of life’s altercations could be de-escalated if I adopted this stance rather than the aggressive stance that “I have to get you before you get me. “
If I operated as a parent from this goodness assumption I hope that I would teach my children something about how to do conflict resolution from a life affirming position rather than from a win-lose position. I would hope to teach them something about Jesus and his willingness to forgive, and move on, his willingness to give others another chance, rather than to punish.
If I operated from a position of affirming the goodness of creation I would hope that I would not try to build a bubble around my children, but rather teach them by experience how to take appropriate risks. To do this I as a parent I would have to take some risks myself.
I would have to risk the possibility that my child may do some things where he or she might get hurt, might get mistreated by others, might get temporarily lost.
I would have to take the risk to live with the criticism that others might level at me for not being protective enough.
I remember a situation like this years ago in our own family. We lived in the Washington area at the time, and Judy and I had decided that there was an interesting art program being offered during the summer break by the Corcoran Gallery in downtown Washington. In order for them to get there we had to decide whether we would put them in the car and drive them down there or whether we would take the risk to have them take public transportation on their own.
Our son and daughter were at the time about 9 and 11. We made the decision to let them take the bus and subway into town on their own. WE did a couple of trial runs with them; then they were on their own. Everything was going along fine for the first couple of weeks of the program until one day I get a panic call from Judy saying that she had just heard from Josh our oldest that he had lost Jessica on the subway and that he did not know where she was. He had ridden on past the appointed stop to get off and she was not at the next stop either.
As you might imagine a whole array of thoughts went through my mind and Judy’s at this point. Had she been kidnapped, was she lost on the subway somewhere in the wilds of Washington? What bad parents we must be to have let them do this in the first place, etc, etc.
Well, the good news is that Jessica had in fact just lost sight of her brother and had gotten off of the train at the appropriate stop and was sitting in the class room wondering where Josh was.
We were able to let him know this and he rode the subway back and all was well.
The good news also was that we had taken the risk to let them learn how to navigate on their own. And while there were some heart stopping moments along the way, it had worked out.
One of the most affirming things about it was how helpful perfect strangers had been to the kids when they got lost from each other.
I am sure that Josh will never forget the station master in the Washington subway who took our sobbing young son under his wing, helped him find a phone to call us and got him back on the subway after Jessica was found, on his way to school.
I personally believe that most of us are good people.
I am perfectly willing to admit that there are also in the world some bad actors, some very bad actors, but most of us are good people, decent people. Caring people. One thing we can not do in this age we live in is to allow the bad actors of life to cause us to question our basic assumptions about the goodness of God’s creation and its people.
We can not let them win that war for our minds and our beliefs.
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