The need for ritual

Heather McDougal, who blogs at Cabinet of Wonders, has a brilliant post up on ritual and the reasons that drive us to create rituals—including, especially, why children do. I won’t even try to summarize it—I’ll just encourage you to go read it—but I will say that of the various points she makes, I think I appreciate this one most:

Mindfulness is not a bad thing, and making up rules to make one’s life more interesting can be a good thing. Eating your apple and raisin tart in small bites, and dividing each raisin in half to get at the sweet bit as you go, can be a way to help bring yourself into the present, to pay attention. It means you are tasting, exploring, nodding to each part of what you’re eating. Going through life like this can mean you are not gulping down experiences, not rushing yourself, but making a way to see things, feel things, notice things.

A children’s Bible for grownups, too

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.
The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of
are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.”
—C.S. LewisGiven that, one would hope that children’s Bibles would be books worth reading at the age of fifty; one would hope they would be a joy to read to our children. Unfortunately, however (at least from my experience), that isn’t often the case. It’s too bad, because our older two really enjoy the one we kept; it isn’t great, but it’s good enough. Still, you always want something better for your kids—and now, I think we may have found it. Ben Patterson, who was something of a mentor of mine during his time as Dean of the Chapel at Hope College, and whose judgment I trust implicitly, has a thoroughly positive review up on the Christianity Today website of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name; Sara and I got halfway through it and decided we want a copy. It’s not just the review itself, either, because there’s a link to The Jesus Storybook Bible‘s version of Genesis 3, which I think validates Ben’s glowing comments. Of all the things for which he praises this book, I think the most important is that it “manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ.” That’s something too many adults don’t see—perhaps, in part, because they never learned it from their children’s Bibles.

Let the little children come

Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”—Luke 18:15-17, ESVMaybe it’s just me, but I think we find it easier to ding the disciples here than we ought to. After all, we know they shouldn’t have done this—Jesus tells us so—but too often, we don’t stop and think about why they did it. We don’t have to, because we don’t hear what they heard: babies crying (if not screaming) as their mothers struggle through the crowds to get to Jesus; bigger kids running around, shrieking, laughing, crying, throwing themselves on the ground; probably a few of them coming up to Jesus, climbing up in his lap, tugging on his robe, and asking him off-the-wall questions. We don’t hear the disruptions or see the distractions, because they’re between the lines—but kids being kids, you can bet this wasn’t a quiet, peaceful scene. If you stop to think about it, you can see where the disciples were coming from. No doubt they saw all these kids as interruptions, disruptions, distractions, interfering with the real work Jesus was doing—not as part of that work; and so they tried to push the kids out of the way so Jesus could get on with the important stuff.Jesus, of course, rebukes them for that, and in the process he identifies the root problem underlying their attitude: pride. Children have no social status, so they can’t do anything for you; if Jesus is spending his time with children, that’s time taken away from teaching and ministering to adults who do have status in society, who can increase his social standing and the respect he receives as an important and influential teacher and scholar—and thus, not incidentally, raise the standing of his disciples, as well. Part of their concern, Jesus sees, is that they want people around Israel to respect them, to look up to them, to admire them—“See Thomas over there? He’s studying under Jesus.” “Oooh, impressive!”—and Jesus taking the time to bless and teach children does absolutely nothing for that, because children don’t really count. That’s not to say they weren’t valued, or that they weren’t loved—they were; but they had no legal standing, no social standing, no reputation, no right to their own opinions, indeed, no rights to be considered at all. As such, welcoming children just wasn’t a priority for the disciples.You can see where they’re coming from, but Jesus will not let their resistance stand. “Let the children come,” he says, “and don’t hinder them.” Let them come, because the kingdom of God is for them, too; let them come, because as Matthew 18 tells us, whoever welcomes a child in Jesus’ name welcomes Jesus, while anyone who drives them away bears some of the responsibility for their sin, and thus is open to judgment. This isn’t just a matter of bringing them to church and warehousing them in the basement doing crafts while the grownups are in worship, either. That kind of approach brings children to church but not to Christ; I’m convinced it’s much of the reason why we see so few people between the ages of 18 and 30 in our churches in this country, because they’ve grown up in a church that, from the only perspective they’ve been given, has no Christ in it.No, letting the children come to Jesus is a two-part responsibility, I think. One, it means loving them the way Jesus does—which means the focus has to be on what’s best for them, not what’s most comfortable and convenient for the grownups. This is harder than it sounds, because we have a real pattern in this country of doing things in the name of children that aren’t really about them. It’s all well and good to say that children are the future, but too often that comes with the unspoken corollary that we grownups are the present. We need to begin by acknowledging that our children count in the present, too; the kids in the church are our equals in the body of Christ, and “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Consider others more significant than yourself” apply to them just as much as they do to anyone else.The other part of letting the children come to Jesus is discipling them—and he himself told us what he expects from us there. Here’s the Great Commission as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message:

“Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.”

Children’s ministry is not about keeping children out of sight, out of earshot, and out from underfoot; it’s not even about teaching them to be nice to each other and quiet in church, though those things have their place in the process. It’s about training them in this way of life, instructing them in how to live out everything that Jesus has commanded us, teaching them what it means to follow Jesus, day after day after day, week after week after week, right up to the end of the age. It’s about, in other words, nothing less than discipleship, raising the children of the church to live as saints of God; it is, or should be, all of a piece with what we do in the rest of our ministry as the church. And there’s no clause in there to say, “Only the easy ones—only the ones who already know how to behave—only the ones you’re already comfortable having around.” Indeed, the ones who make us most uncomfortable, the ones who haven’t been taught how to behave, the ones full of anger they don’t know how to express against parents who have betrayed them and let them down, though they’re the hardest to reach, are the ones we have to try hardest to love; because if we don’t take them in, who will?

Becoming like children

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”—Matthew 18:1-4, NIVOver the centuries, people have taken Jesus’ words a lot of different ways; as the commentator Ulrich Luz has dryly noted, “every age to a great degree has read into the text its own understanding of what a child is. . . . For the most part the interpreters ask not what children are like; they ask instead what children should be. More often than not they read the text as if it said: ‘Become like good, well-behaved children.’ . . . Only infrequently do [they] remember that actual children can be quite different.”Part of the problem is with that word translated “little.” When we see “little children,” we think “young children,” but that’s not what’s in view here; what the word really means is “lowly”—one who is “insignificant, impotent, weak, and . . . in poor circumstances.” The point here is that children in that society had no social standing—nor for that matter legal standing; they were essentially property of their parents—and in fact weren’t quite regarded as fully human; they were seen as incomplete people, still unfinished. They were insigificant, physically weak, legally powerless, and utterly dependent on others. That’s why, elsewhere in the gospels, the disciples didn’t want Jesus “wasting” his time on them. But Jesus, as he so often does, flips that on his disciples and says, essentially, “I’m not wasting my time at all—you are, because your focus is in the wrong place. You’re worried about what the rich and the powerful folk think of you, and wanting to be like them—wanting to be great in the world’s eyes—when you ought to be looking at these children and learning from their example. You want to be great in the kingdom of God? Become like them—choose to be lowly. Set aside the world’s standards of importance, love those who can’t do anything for you, stop seeking honor and significance in the world’s eyes, acknowledge that you are wholly dependent on God and place all your trust in him, and serve others. Come to God not because you think you’ve earned it, but simply in the confidence that you are loved even though you haven’t.” That’s the life Jesus calls us to live; that’s the life of a child of his kingdom.

The idolatry of perfect parenthood

Jason Byassee has a review up on the First Things website of a book by Methodist theologian Amy Laura Hall titled Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction; the review is wonderful, and it sounds like the book is, too. I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just encourage you to read the piece and mull over the ways in which “mainline churches have pursued a theology of ‘Justification by meticulously planned procreation’ (emphasis original), exemplified in a mid-century conference at which Methodists pronounced the Christian family ‘the hope of the world’”—and to let yourself be challenged and (I hope) energized by Dr. Hall’s final words: “The call to be a Christian has become, for me, a call to risk seeming like just the sort of backward, crazy, Holy Spirit-inspired white girl that my grandmothers hoped I would progress beyond.”

Five things I’m thankful for

bearing in mind that “the best things in life aren’t things” . . .

For starters, and by way of introduction to this post, I’m thankful for Hap, who tagged me with this meme. Mind you, that’s not the reason I’m thankful for her, though it isn’t a bad thing, either. She’s been a dear, firm friend for—what are we on to now, fourteen years? a good chunk of my life, anyway—a woman steeped in the presence of God who’s as faithful as the sunrise and as true as eternity, and after my family, one of the people I love most on this planet. Glad you didn’t go to Spring Arbor, sis. 🙂

Carrying on, in reverse order . . .

Bronwyn, my youngest, currently snuggling on Daddy’s lap, chattering at me unintelligibly and pretending to drink water out of the cup in her older sister’s ball-and-cup toy. Almost 20 months and a complete Chaos Child, she’s also a complete charmer and something of a clown; I know she gets away with more than her sisters did because of it, but sometimes it’s hard to help.

Rebekah, my middle daughter—the original Chaos Child, she’s four now and more manageable, since she can be reasoned with (not that she always buys the reason). Absolutely fearless about most things, which is a good corrective and counterbalance to her older sister, she’s our rampant extrovert. We spent an hour or so one night standing in the hallway of a hotel in Ogallala, NE because of a tornado warning; when Rebekah wasn’t running full-tilt up and down the hall, she was walking up to total strangers, touching their elbows and asking them all sorts of questions. (Fortunately, they were all gracious about it.) She just loves everyone, and assumes they’ll all love her too.

Lydia, my oldest, my miracle child. Her delivery was a crisis, and then she needed an operation when she was two days old (albeit a minor one, if any surgery on a newborn can truly be called minor), so we kept her very close for the first few months; it still seems a little strange, when I think about it, that that was seven years ago. She’s an introvert, like both her parents (though oddly enough, our only one), but fortunately not too shy—certainly much less so than I was at her age. All our girls ask lots of questions, but she set the standard (and still does). She’s in first grade and absolutely loves school—she can be running a fever and throwing up, and she’s crying that she has to stay home; it no doubt helped that she had a certifiable genius for a kindergarten teacher (thank you, Jane Hill), but by nature, she’s the sort of kid who goes through life with her nose in a book. She’s a loving, generous, helpful child—even with her younger sisters, usually. 🙂

And finally, most of all, my wife Sara. Ten years is a pretty good start. I am richly, deeply blessed by her love, her wisdom, her insight, her care, her great gifts, her deep and strong relationship with God (even through the hard times we’ve had here) . . . I am blessed to know and love her, and to be known and loved in return. (I should note, she’s one of the reasons I’m thankful for Hap—who introduced us. 🙂 )

Anyway, I tag the Thinklings, both as a whole and in part. Y’all didn’t like the last meme, guys, but you should like this one.

“That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

Well, maybe not according to CBS execs back in 1965, when “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired; seems they thought it was way too religious—and they didn’t like the jazz, either. Apparently, even though they went ahead and ran it, they planned to bury it afterward. But then people loved it, and it won an Emmy, and so it was back the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that . . .

I can just imagine Lucy’s reaction to those network suits who tried to kill “the longest-running cartoon special known to man” 38 years ago: “You blockheads!”