Tag: pride

The Perfect Parent

Sermon for Sunday, 18 June 2023, St Peter’s Bramley. Romans 5:1-8

Earlier this week, I was scrolling through social media – and yes, it can be a waste of time, but it also brings up some unexpected gems. I came across this story, which seems appropriate in this week of the Special Olympics, when we celebrate the sporting achievements of people with disabilities.

It concerned a parent. Her daughter enjoyed basketball and wanted to excel at it. There were just two small problems, if you’ll pardon the pun: the girl was very short, and also partially blind. Now as we all know, basketball players tend to be tall, because it’s easier to get the ball in the basket. They also need great eyesight for the hand-eye co-ordination to judge the throw just right. So that was a challenge. But her mother did everything she could to get her daughter onto a basketball team.

You can imagine the pride in the mother’s heart when she stood on the sidelines watching her daughter play a competitive match with her team for the first time. But then she heard the comments that other parents were making: ‘Who let that girl on the pitch?’ ‘She’ll be no good, she’s too small’. ‘She keeps missing the net!’ Despite this, the mother refused to answer the critics and continued to cheer her daughter on.

On this Father’s Day, let’s think about the relationship between ourselves and God with the imagery of the parent-child relationship that the Bible often uses.  Jesus constantly referred to God the creator as ‘my father’ and told us to pray to ‘our father in heaven’. Today’s passage from Romans tells us three ways in which God, as our heavenly Father, relates to us in the same way as the best human parents relate to their children – only more so.

Firstly, God is a proud parent. Unless there’s something seriously wrong in the family relationship, all parents express pride in their children from the very start, and in a way that doesn’t depend on the children’s successes and failures. My own father died relatively young, and had been unwell for some time following a stroke that left him with very little speech. But after his death, my mother told me that one of the last things he said to her was, “I’m so proud of all our children”.

We can also see that in the story I quoted. The mother was proud of the fact that her daughter had made it onto the basketball team. It didn’t matter at that moment that she wasn’t scoring points, what mattered was it was her daughter out theredoing what she loved. Parents who are proud of their kids will boast about the fact to other people. And because of that pride, they do want the best for their children, whatever the cost. In the same way, we mean so much to our heavenly Father, whatever our shortcomings, that he is proud of each of us, and wants each and very one of us to be the best people that we can. In fact he boasts of us.

‘Boasting’ is a word that Paul uses several times in the letter to the Romans. He uses it to make a distinction between the good sort of boasting – that celebrates goodness in other people – and the bad sort that’s all about seeking glory for ourselves. He uses it twice in this short passage, firstly to say that because we stand in the grace of God, we can boast about sharing in the glory of God. What can give me the confidence to say that I stand in the grace of God and boast about sharing his glory? Nothing that I’ve done, only this: that I know God is proud of me as he is of all his sons and daughters, each of us differently unique as we are.

Secondly, God is a patient parent. That girl who made it onto the basketball team – she clearly wan’t going to be a star overnight. Her height and disability meant it would take extra effort and time to become good at her sport. But her mum was behind her all the way, and the coach obviously believed in her potential as well, to have let her on to the team.

The second time Paul uses the word ‘boast’ here, always strikes me as strange: he says we can ‘boast in our sufferings’ (or our ‘troubles’ or ‘tribulations’ depending which Bible translation you have). The patience of God means that he will work with us, whatever sufferings we experience. That may include physical limitations and mental health, our difficult backgrounds and failed relationships.

‘While we were weak’, Paul writes, (some translations say ‘helpless’), ‘Christ died for us’. Or as it says in our gospel reading today, ‘When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. Whatever may make you feel weak, harassed and helpless, for that very reason Christ died for you. 

But boasting in weakness and suffering? It doesn’t make sense until you read the rest of the sentence: ‘for suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope’. Like the parent who was willing to support her daughter in battling against the odds to become a good basketball player, God longs to work in and through us, to bring about virtues of endurance, strong character and hopefulness.

That’s what we can boast in – not the fact that we suffer, but that our patient Father is with us for the long haul to help us overcome our sufferings and reach the position where we can confidently hope in the glory of God. There will be setbacks – times when the ball misses the net, times when we experience injury or criticism – but none of that stops God’s patience from working itself out in our lives.

If you heard Jon Swales preach last week, you may remember he talked about fast miracles and slow miracles: people who come to faith instantly, and others whose faith grows slowly over many years. It’s the same principle: ‘Christ died for the ungodly’ refers to what happened on one day when he was crucified; but the progression that enables us to grow from our weak, helpless and troubled state to full maturity of faith in Christ may take many years. As one commentary puts it, ‘salvation is a healing process’.

Thirdly, God is a provident parent.   Verse 5: ‘Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ That basketball mother provided for her child: she obviously provided the sports kit, but more importantly she came along to watch, to cheer her on despite the unfair criticism of other parents, to provide the encouragement that we all need when we engage in a difficult task.  A proud and patient parent will provide everything their child needs to become a success, whatever the cost to themselves.

What God provides for us is the Holy Spirit, God himself poured out into our hearts. That phrase ‘poured out’ implies something extravagant and overly generous, like the woman who poured all her perfume over Jesus’ feet without counting the cost.  Elsewhere in Paul’s letters he lists nine fruits of the Spirit, ways that all of us can expect to be changed as he is poured out into us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Just the sort of qualities any parent might wish their child to display, but our provident Father offers all of them to each one of us.

So we have seen in these few verses the different ways that God shows himself to be the perfect parent to all of us – the proud parent, the patient parent and the provident parent. May all of us experience this grace of God in our own lives today. And to those of you who are parents, grandparents, carers or who have the chance to be an influence in anyone else’s life, may God by his Spirit pour these qualities into your life as well. Amen.

The Bible in a Year – 19 October

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

19 October. 2 Corinthians chapters 10-13

In these final chapters of his last letter to the Corinthians, Paul is not giving any new teaching, but rather is exploring the nature of his relationship with them.  In many different ways he explains that Jesus has called him, appointed and equipped him to spread the Gospel, a charge which he has been faithful to keep despite all the hardships and punishments that he says he has experienced.  That, he says, would be enough to justify having authority over them.  But instead he has taught them with humility. Only reluctantly does he go into detail of his qualifications and experiences, in order to prove that he is no less qualified as a teacher of the faith than certain other men (never named in these letters) who have been teaching an incompatible approach to Christianity – probably based on Jewish law.

We also learn here something of Paul’s personality.  He says he is bold in his writings, but weak when speaking. He quotes some of them as saying ‘His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible’ (10:10).  Paul seems to have been a very well educated and wise man, but small, unattractive and not a powerful speaker.  The written word was his best way of communicating.   And then there is the mysterious ‘thorn in the flesh’ (12:7), also described as a ‘messenger from Satan’.  Many people have tried to guess what this may be, from something as simple as a stammer or some physical disability, to some kind of mental illness, or sexual temptation.

God does indeed call many different people, widely different in age, physical and intellectual ability, temperament and personality.  He gives them a wide variety of gifts, as explained in the first letter to the Corinthians.  But no-one is ‘top trumps’ having every possible advantage.  In each person there are some weaknesses, maybe only known to themselves like Paul’s “thorn”, or maybe all too obvious.  The important thing is that any pride (or ‘boasting’ as Paul calls it) should be pride in the gifts that God gives, and never in ourselves.  Also, it is never helpful to compare ourselves with others, as Paul does only reluctantly to show that he is more worthy of being listened to than the ‘false’ teachers.

The Bible in a Year – 11 July

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this, and the introduction to the Psalms for this book of the Bible in particular.

11 July. Psalms 78-79

Psalm 78 is one of the longest, and yet mostly covers a single theme: the re-telling, as found in so many places in the Hebrew scriptures, of the story of the Exodus. Once again the stories of the plagues of Egypt, the crossing of the Reed Sea and God’s miraculous provision of food and water in the desert are recounted with pride, as the truth that has to be passed from generation to generation.

 

But this is no mere tale of national glory. Within this story is the dark side, bits of history that most writers would leave out.  How the Israelites failed to keep the covenant with God (10), rebelled against him and tested him by demanding food (17-18), made a token repentance but in their hearts flattered God and lied to him (36). And that was only in the desert.  Things were no better after the conquest of the promised land, when God was so angry with the people of Israel that “he abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh, the tent where he dwelt among mortals” (60).  And to understand that we have to realise that the Psalms were written in Judah at a time when the two halves of the nation had split, so that the remainder of Israel was seen as at best an estranged brother, at worst an enemy.  And the psalm ends with a clear statement that God “did not choose the tribe of Ephraim; but he chose the tribe of Judah … he shoes his servant David” (67,70).

 

So what seems at first like an honest account of the failings of the writer’s ancestors is in fact more of a criticism of “them” – the other tribes – by the one – Judah. The fact is, of course, that God was just as displeased with Judah as with the rest, and they all ended up being taken into captivity.  It is always a temptation to think that one has the moral high ground over one’s rivals, but to quote an English saying, “pride comes before a fall”, or the Biblical original “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

 

 

The Bible in a Year – 8 June

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

8 June. Ezekiel chapters 26-31

Chapters 26-28 are an extended prophecy against the cities of Tyre and Sidon – the cities of the Phoenecians, long enemies of Israel and differing from them in being a seagoing nation (whereas the Israelites never were known as sailors, and seem to have regarded the sea as inherently evil).  The great sin of the Phoenecians, it seems, was pride.  They had become rich through trading with many other nations, and thought that they were superior to all other peoples, and had no need of God.  Indeed they are charged her with thinking of themselves as gods (28:2-6) – the ultimate sin.  As St Paul famously wrote  “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). We could think of examples today – for instance those who would “make America great again” when in fact only humility before God, rather than national pride, can truly bring about such an outcome.

 

In chapters 29-31 the Lord’s judgement is turned southwards towards Egypt.  For the sins of idolatry and pride (pictured as claiming that the river Nile which brought fertility to the land was their own creation) they too would be brought low, as Assyria had been.  In fact the land of Egypt was to be made uninhabitable for forty years (29:11), perhaps echoing the forty years in which Israel had been condemned to live in the wilderness after leaving Egypt) and would never become a world power again.  That has indeed come to pass – Egypt which once was the leading culture of the near east for many centuries has never again risen to such prominence.

 

In between these two extended judgements is a short but positive affirmation of the settled future that God had in mind for Israel after dealing with all the other nations around them (28:25-26).  Sometimes a short work of affirmation is all it takes to boost someone’s self-esteem, whereas criticism often has to be repeated at length before it is accepted.