We cannot care for you the way we wanted

Children’s graves, Sandbach cemetery.

Today’s hymn is ‘We cannot care for you the way you wanted’ by John Bell and Graham Maule.   When I planned the hymns for the year I took into account the seasons of the Church’s calendar but not the lectionary readings for Morning Prayer, because it was only later that John decided to include them.  But he has sensibly suggested a swap here, putting this hymn in the service that includes the account of the Holy Innocents, the slaughter of all the young children in Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. For this hymn, following on from yesterday’s, is also about death and our feelings around it, and specifically where the death was of a baby or young child.  So in singing it we join with the mothers of Bethlehem of old, with ‘Rachel refusing to be comforted because her children are no more’, and with the countless parents who lose children in or own time to disease, starvation or war.  I read only this week in the context of the topical discussion of climate change that hundreds of children are dying every day in Africa from drought alone. Each one made in God’s image, each one loved by God, each death the cause of grief. 

As an aside, and with a linguistic link since Rachel means ‘ewe’, I saw a story on social media this week of a ewe whose lamb had been stillborn, grieving for it until another ewe in the flock ‘donated’ one of her own pair to the grieving mother to adopt.  These emotions are not only human.

To the lyrics, then: the first three verses are written from the point of the view of parents, expressing regret at not having been able to fulfil their own potential as parents or that of their offspring: ‘We cannot care for you the way we wanted, cannot watch you growing into childhood, cannot know the pain or the potential which passing years would summon or reveal’. Instead, a word of hope is offered, a promise by Jesus to cling to: ‘love will not die’, ‘you will still stay’, ‘we hope and feel [for promised fulfilment]’. The fourth verse recognises the complex of emotions experienced – anger, grief, tiredness, unresolved tensions. The very sorrow that this death has created is offered back to God along with the child itself, not reluctantly or as sacrifice but as ‘worship’.  

Although I wrote yesterday of the difficulty of squaring the ‘everyone goes to heaven’ attitude with the theology of the Bible, when it comes to a stillbirth or the death of a very young child, few people today would argue that a child dying unbaptised would be rejected by God because of ‘original sin’. And pastorally, it’s more important surely to grieve with the family in their loss than to speculate exactly what has happened to the child’s soul.  So, the hymn ends with placing the child into God’s arms with the words ‘believing that s/he now, alive in heaven, breathes with your breath’. 

The poignancy of grief, especially at a tragic loss, is expressed exquisitely in the music of Schubert’s song ‘Litany for the feast of all Souls’, sung in the original German at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrqIEwQhRMo (with subtitles, but only two verses) or https://youtu.be/9eUPVDPkdHM (all three verses, no subtitles).

The Bible in a Year – 1 November

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

1 November. Matthew chapters 21-22

Today’s reading starts with the “triumphal entry”, as Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, followed by overturning the tables of the moneychangers.  In the Christian calendar this is usually read at the start of Holy Week, leading up to Easter.  That last week or so of Jesus’ life was marked by increasing conflict with the Temple authorities. Many of the parables in these chapters were told in the Temple, making reference to its activities, and were (as Matthew explicitly says) told against the Pharisees and Sadducees.   He seems to have set these two rival groups against each other, as first one and then the other tests him to see if they can catch him out.

But they cannot.  Jesus’s wise answers leaves them dumbfounded.  You can’t say that the popular prophet John was sent from God without accepting that I am too, he tells them.  It’s OK to pay taxes to the Romans as long as you also honour God and give to the work of the Temple or church.  Heaven is a completely new kind of existence where concepts such as marriage and parenthood have no meaning. The most important thing to do is love God – but it’s equally important to love other people as much as yourself. And finally, Jesus himself was greater than David, the king who everyone remembered as being God’s favourite.    No-one could contradict him on those points, although his interpretation of the Jewish scriptures was radically different from accepted teachings.

All through this time, these Jewish leaders were criticising Jesus, not praising him.  But the ordinary people praised him, and most of all the children.  As we saw yesterday, the faith of children is something precious and special, to be protected.   Jesus saw in their enthusiastic response to his teaching and healing a fulfilment of a verse from the Psalms – “Out of the mouths of infants and babies you have prepared praise for yourself” (21:1, based on Psalm 8:2).  It was in those children that Jesus saw his Kingdom starting to grow.

The Bible in a Year – 31 October.

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

31 October. Matthew chapters 18-20

The section headings in some modern Bibles are not part of the original text, but a good guide. In the NRSV chapter 18 is headed “True Greatness”.   That sounds like the title of a self-help book. What is the secret of being “truly great”?  Obviously we are not talking about “Making America great again” or similar political claims.  But what makes a great person?

As Shakespeare wrote, “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”  But his character was thinking in human terms – greatness as fame, or wealth, or power.  Some adults devote all their energies to achieving at least one of these, and few of us are completely immune to their temptations.

Jesus’ example of true greatness is that of young children. He does not immediately go on to explain that, but maybe he was contrasting children, presumably at an age (and in a culture without TV celebrities) when fame and wealth and power were of no concern to them, with the anxieties that drive adults to seek greatness in the wrong form.  But he does go to great lengths to stress the enormity of the sin of “causing [a child] who believes in me to stumble”.  That might include what we would now call child abuse, but Jesus was probably intending rather the sin of making a child aware too soon of the temptations of the world, including those of fame and power.

Further on in this reading (19:13-15) he repeats this in a different form: “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs”.  That verse (with its older translation “Suffer the little children…”) is carved into many a Victorian church font.  But the Victorian clergy marshalled the little children into Sunday School classes, taught them the Bible by rote, and in many cases probably also taught them to seek wealth and status in society.  They may well have been just the stumbling blocks that Jesus warned about.

The following passage refers not to children but to young adults, in particular the young man who wanted to follow Jesus but felt unable to comply with Jesus’ instruction to “go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (19:21).  In this respect, Jesus is not telling everyone they have to make themselves poor to be his followers.  He is acting more like a wise spiritual director who discerns what is really going on in someone’s life – in this instance, a love of money preventing him from really engaging with  Jesus’ teaching and ministry.  Someone had, at some stage in this young man’s upbringing, “caused him to stumble” by giving him the impression that maturity is about seeking wealth and fame, rather than about finding who you really are and seeking God’s will for your life.

So for those of us who minister in churches that include children in the congregation (and a church that has none is in real trouble!) our task is to draw them to “come to Jesus” without being “stumbling blocks”. That will involve helping each child to find his or her own identity as a person and guide them along their own path to maturity and spiritual awakening.  Along the way they will inevitably encounter the temptations to seek greatness in the world’s ways, but a Christian education is about equipping young people to seek a better path in life.   It’s a tall order, but as Jesus warned, if we fail, it is we who will bear the burden of guilt.

The Bible in a Year – 1 August

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this, and also my introduction to the Proverbs.

1 August. Proverbs chapters 19-21

Today, I am picking from the large number of short sayings those that relate to families, starting with husbands and wives.

 

“A wife’s quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain. House and wealth are inherited from parents, but a prudent wife is from the Lord.” (19:13-14); “It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house shared with a contentious wife.” (21:9); and a similar saying “It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and fretful wife.” (21:19).  It has been show by recent studies that a good relationship with one’s partner is a bigger factor in happiness than wealth or even health.

 

The patriarchal culture from which these sayings come assumes, of course, that the husband is head of the household, and there are no equivalent sayings about a good husband.  However there is much for husbands as breadwinners to take note of.  The first of the above sayings is followed by “Laziness brings on deep sleep; an idle person will suffer hunger.” (19:15) and – “Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread.” (20:13). There are also plenty of verses in here about how to raise children well.

 

Children (or perhaps rather young men) and their relationship with their parents are also the subject of many of these proverbs. “Those who do violence to their father and chase away their mother are children who cause shame and bring reproach” (19:26). “The righteous walk in integrity— happy are the children who follow them!” (20:7). “If you curse father or mother, your lamp will go out in utter darkness” (20:20).    A happy family is one where the parents live in harmony with each other, and children in peace with their parents.

 

Of course we know that many relationships are not like that, and there have always been ‘dysfunctional’ families.  It is hard for those brought up in a home where there is disrespect, argument, or even violence to learn a better way.  “Even children make themselves known by their acts, by whether what they do is pure and right” (20:11). No wonder that the Bible elsewhere speaks of the sins of fathers being visited on future generations. But it is possible to break out of the cycle. Maybe Solomon’s purpose in writing these proverbs aimed at young men was to hope that they might learn from his teaching what they failed to hear from their parents.