Sermon: Unwrapped Gifts

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Unwrapped Gifts

By Charles Rush
In Collaboration with Michael Usey

June 10, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 5.1Mb) ]

was lunching with some four-and-a-half- year-olds and I realized how alive you are at that age. They don't edit themselves like adults do, so you heard some great stuff. I hear their opinions about life, food, God, and every thing in between. One of them told me that there are two kinds of boys—truck boys and action figure boys. His good friend Cason is a truck boy, but this young man, he himself was an action figure boy. At this same lunch I heard one of the boys say, “I hope we get to paint today. I love painting! I could paint all day.” I've been to this boy's house, and his parents have encouraged this budding Picasso. Their refrigerator is covered in artwork, and, when I was picking up a child from a play date, the boy was beaming when he showed his pictures to me. Despite what they think, four-a-half is really very young, but already this boy was experiencing the pleasure of doing something he loves to do. And his parents are already enjoying watching the self-esteem and confidence of their son bloom like a cherry blossom tree.

The Hebrew language is a difficult one to pin down. Consider, for example, the key verse for this morning, Proverbs 22.6. There are at least three different ways to translate this verse, and all of them make sense. One way to translate this verse is the manner in which you are probably most familiar: Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it. In this understanding, “the way he should go” is the way of moral instruction. The time to impart your values to her is when she is younger. Then is the time to teach that, as followers of Christ, our character is important. So we who are serious about being a Christian try to train our young children in our ethics, our morals, our character traits. We do this in a myriad of ways—we model it for them. We don't just say, “Prayer is important,” or “Reading is a big deal.” Instead we let them see us praying or reading. We also tell them stories about heroes (both male and female) and saints that we want them to be like. So we read to them from the Bible, from the Harry Potter novels, and tell them stories from Greek and Norse mythology, and American history, too. This is the first possibility for this verse, and it's the most familiar. We've all heard a sermon or three on moral and religious instruction for young children. It is very important: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. If he picks up his room at four, chances are go he'll do it at 53 too. If she tells the truth at age 6, she'll probably keep telling it until she's 66. This sermon is not about this significant truth.

Another possibility is a warning: Allow a child to grow up in the way he wants to, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. This too is pretty obvious. Allow a child to raise herself up, and she will become selfish, cruel, and petty—and nothing you can do will change her when she's older. There are a spate of teenage films out now that make this point, pretty clearly. I'm thinking of “Cruel Intentions” among others. In all these films, adults only hover in the background like props, but all the real action, all the real decisions and intrigue take place with the teenagers, who appear to be nearly autonomous, with access to considerable means. If a child makes the crucial decisions for himself, most of us will do whatever we can to avoid pain and to maximize pleasure. As you know, quite a few adults like by this creed—minimize pain, maximize pleasure. This is one of the reasons there are so many character disorders in our society today—you know, people who are narcissistic or mean or paranoid, and don't know it. In fact, they think these character flaws are strengths.

A child needs loving and caring adults to raise her up, and this love and care needs to be there early and consistently so that character flaws have little chance of taking root. This is not just the parents' job, but all of us who love children and teach them and are around them to help them grow. If I let my children make all significant decisions about their upbringing, Jessie would eat candy at every meal, and Ian (when he was a baby) would have been climbing on the roof with something sharp. I remember my Godson, when he was about 3 years old. I came home and the boys had all made themselves heaping bowls of ice cream, with chocolate sauce and whipped cream, even as dinner was about to be served. I came in the kitchen, took all the ice cream away. My godson starts crying (who is now 6'4” and weighs about 240 lbs) “you've ruined all my happiness.”

As you know, this is a critical problem in our society at present. It is a multiple vector problem. On the one hand, a greater percentage of us have the resources to give our children a wider range of opportunities and gifts. On the other hand, we have less and less time to spend with our children because our schedules are tighter. In the place of our time, we give our kids structured activities that will enable them to succeed in the classroom, succeed on the playing field, gain entrance to college, and manage the next generation.

There is a receding lack of solidarity among parents from Middle School onwards which means that we tend to withdraw from setting limits and boundaries, essentially allowing our children greater and greater autonomy over their budding adolescent lives. It is producing a number of unintended consequences. There is the perpetual allure of sex and drugs that have plagued young teens since time immemorial. The only difference today is that with less total supervision (there is always someone's parents who are not at home), with greater social permission (that comes through the Movies, TV), with an increased influence from their peers that grows in inverse proportion to the lack of total parental structure -- they are allowed more opportunities to experiment at younger and younger ages. As a society, we have decided to let our children decide for themselves the parameters of their sex lives and their drug use. Little surprise what paths they will take.

And there are indirect consequences to this as well. When they are given so many things, so many opportunities, combined with such a wide autonomy to choose for themselves, they grow up with an expanded sense of entitlement. I'm mulling this idea over in my mind so I invite your help, but I am tempted to say that this sense of entitlement is likely to bloom into something that is very nearly the polar opposite of gratitude.

Hand in hand with that sense of entitlement is an indifference towards authority in general. You get a lot of attitude, a greater percentage of young people that don't take the rules seriously, don't seem to have any reverence -- let alone fear -- of the principal, the police officer, their teachers.

I think all of these trends are apparent, not just in your family, not just in Summit but across our nation. They are a reflection of broad changes in our social mores and should constitute some concern. We intended to empower our children but at precisely the same time, our generation had increasing demands on our time- from our jobs, our divorces, not to mention our own increased opportunities- the result is, we have given our children more opportunity for self-direction than they can handle.

We ought not to allow a child to grow up in the way that seems right to her, because when she is old, she will not depart from it. This sermon is not about this truth either.

The first two are general truths about child rearing, which simply says the patterns that we set for children during their early years will eventually take root in their lives and become their own. So if we teach our children compassion, kindness, respect for others, diligence and responsibility, eventually they will internalize those values. Obvious, right? As with other scriptures, this passage is not a promise—it offers not guarantee that our children will respond to our training positively. It is however a clear statement about how life works, and what we can expect.

But there is a third slant on this verse: Raise a child in the way she ought to go, according to her interests and abilities. Perhaps this proverb is challenging us to help children discover and develop their natural aptitudes, their core motivations, and competencies. In this view, training up a child “in the way he should go” means helping that child discover the path in life that is best for him or her.

Beyond offering our children massive amounts of love and appropriate limits, I believe the next great gift we can give them is a gradual drawing out of the special abilities that God has given them. This allows children to sense at a young age, “I'm very good at this activity. I enjoy using these skills. I have competency in this area.”

As children grow up and move into the world, they will be attacked, insulted, criticized, and undermined from many different directions. Those children who have already established a core of competence on which to build self-confidence will have a tremendous advantage when they face verbal and psychological foes.

I knew an architect who was one of the best in the city. He was my age, and I knew he enjoyed his work. He told me once, “Going to work feels like going out to recess. I love it almost every day.” When is the last time you said that… honestly!

I asked how he ended up in that field. He said, “When I was seven years old, my dad saw that I had mechanical interests and construction abilities. So he bought me every kind of building set he could find at the toy store. Later he helped me draw plans for a tree house, and he personally supervised me in building it. Then he made sure I took mechanical drawing classes in high school, and helped me get into a college with a great architecture department. After graduating, I did more work, and had to work hard to establish myself. But my dad is the one who got me started.” I asked him, did he think he would have been able to find this path on his own. He said, “I doubt it. I had never heard of architecture, nor had I met an architect. I was just a boy—I didn't know there was anything special about my passion for designing things. Unless my dad noticed it, I doubt I would have ever taken it seriously.”

I went to school with a girl named Leslie. She told me much later that the whole time she was growing up, her parents had noticed two things about her: that she loved books, and that she was always the ringleader of all the neighborhood kids. Her folks use to say, “Leslie, if you're awake, you either reading or leading.” That was important for her to know, especially as she grew older and thought about a job. Today she is senior management in a major book publishers. So how important were her parents' observations? She has built her life on those observations. To me, this is a great example of “training a child in the way she should go.”

This is where I think that parents who adopt a child have an advantage over birth parents. Those of us with children born to us often have these crazy expectations that our children turn out like us: my father, God bless him, pronounced me hopeless at baseball at 5. I thought about that, years later, when I was pitching American Legion at 17 in a playoff game. Same kid, only now I was throwing left handed instead of with that right handed glove that he bought me because he was right handed… Never occurred to him, despite the fact that both of my Grandmothers were left handed.

And almost every single one of us here, at some point, has presumed that because we went to Williams College, our children will just go to Duke at least, maybe Yale. Haven't you found yourself in this constricted imaginative trap? If not yet, you will.

It is like giving a gift that you would have liked as a child, but one that your child has little interest in.

But parents who adopt know there will be not genetic links between them and their child. So they tend to see their son or daughter as a gift to be unwrapped with surprises around every corner. I know with our foster kids, I didn't worry too much about Wake Forest. But I did find myself asking God to show me what was inside them that needed to bloom.

On my best days as a parent, I'm convinced that every child is a gift from God to be wrapped and cherished. Each of our children came with more preferences and opinions than I would have thought. I knew children were not tabula rasa; I never thought they were a blank page for us to write on. Even so, each person has gifts in both interests and abilities that can help us live with passion. Even small children have interests and abilities—and it's a wise parent, teacher, or caregiver that knows both about a child. I know children can have deeply destructive urges that much be acknowledged, controlled, and healed—I genuinely felt empathy for those parents of the kids that did the killing at Columbine High School. There is no guarantee that things are going to turn out okay with our kids. Probably the best we can hope for is that we pay attention to them, water their interests, and see what comes.

In our church, many children are in our care as the family of God. We make a pledge every time a child is baptized in our church to help to raise them as a follower of Christ, and to support Mom and Dad in their wonderful and difficult task as parents. We've taken this pledge over and over again, as each new child appeared in our midst. I had one father who just whispered to me before the beginning of a service how important that pledge really is. I asked him why? He explained that his own father was emotionally absence due to his alcoholism— and that when he was young Christian men in the church helped to parent him and love him. They pointed out his interests and abilities. It is what we can do—to ooh and ah over each new gift in our midst.

Recently, I saw a bookmark that had the four rules of parenting, according to somebody: Love them, Limit them, Listen to them, and Let them go. It's a good guideline for all of us as we deal with the young people in our midst. A colleague told me of a youth program they did at their church called Seen and Heard, in which the adults listened to their High School aged young people in our midst, to find our what was important to them, and why. They listened to them to remind themselves that young people have their own joys and fears that they daily deal with as well.

I hope each child comes to church with the knowledge that they are loved and appreciated here. It is so important that we get this right. Doing so requires great discernment, hours of observation, and deep wisdom from God. But when we do get it right, we can help each child discover his or her motivated abilities. In helping them discover the mix of their God given gifts and passions, we give them a huge blessing, nourish their self-esteem and build their confidence.

In doing so, we give ourselves a huge blessing too. Nothing in ministry is better than watching children use their gifts and pursue their passion. One of the reasons I love being the pastor of this Church is that you are committed to helping our children discover their uniqueness. So we wait and watch and water and encourage and teach and listen and love, waiting to see what each child will become: Heidi, Jack, Scott, Sammy, Corinne, Evan, Fiona, Clara, Warren, Emma, Andrew, Max, Jasper, Caroline, Kathryn, and many, many others. We're God's children, surrounded by presents, unwrapping our gifts, discovering the presence of our God in our children. Train up a child in the manner of her gifts and abilities, and when she is old, she'll know her way in the world. Amen.