Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

Hired Guns

by Dave Wilkinson

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

June 11, 2000

After I graduated from college and before I entered seminary, I spent one long year working as a substitute teacher. Now I am sure that you have all heard stories about substitute teachers. I just want to let you know that all of those stories are true.

A person can learn a lot about himself or herself as a teacher. Personally, I discovered a very strong authoritarian streak -- which reminds me. Every time I have to ask the back row to be quiet during the sermon, I'm going to keep the whole congregation five minutes into the coffee hour.

Not all of the problems of a substitute come from the kids. Some come from the teachers -- especially in the English classes. The district I served required that each English class spend a certain number of days each year on basic grammar -- nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

No one has yet discovered a way to make grammar "fun to learn" -- though teachers have tried everything including dressing kids up as Norman Noun and Veronica Verb and having them do a dance.

So the regular teacher thinks to herself: "This week I will call in sick so I can fly to Mazatlan with Raoul. And while I'm gone, I will have the substitute teacher give a grammar lesson. If I try to teach grammar they'll just hate me. Let someone else do the dirty work."

Now before all the teachers in the congregation, whom I admire very much, confront me after the service -- or, even worse, go back and look at my permanent record, let me say I am exaggerating the problem. All of the teachers I know or have ever head about are extremely dedicated. They would never pass off their responsibilities. They would never dream of flying off to Mazatlan with Raoul -- unless they are married to Raoul and plan to take the children with them.

The reason I so grossly exaggerated and unfairly stereotyped was to point up a situation. The situation is getting other people to do what we are unwilling or afraid to do.

I call this the "hired gun syndrome" -- like the parent who called a school superintendent friend of mine and asked: "When are the schools going to start teaching kids to respect their parents?"

This hired gun syndrome takes many forms in different areas of life and business. I'm sure you could all tell me stories.

But, this morning, we are concerned with the hired gun syndrome in the Christian nurture of our children. For Christian parents have, before God the primary responsibility for the Christian training and upbringing of their children. Like it or not, it is not a role we can turn over to anyone else.

Now we as a church, can assist and support parents in a variety of ways. We have a very strong Sunday school program, mid-week children's program and youth ministry. I am excited about the professional staff and volunteers who work with our ministry. It is obviously a huge priority for our church. This is reflected in the buildings we have built and the resources we have committed.

But none of this can take the place of what needs to happen in the home. In fact, if it's not happening in our home, it will not happen very effectively in our church school--no matter how good the curriculum and how gifted and loving the teachers.

Look with me at our scripture text. In this passage, God gives us His will for the religious nurture of children.

First of all, God's word is to be in our hearts. And from our hearts, His word is to flow into the lives of our children. We are to "teach them diligently". We are to talk of God's word when we sit in our houses and when we walk by the way and when we lie down and when we rise up. We are to keep God's words before ourselves and our families. We are to "bind them as signs on our hands hang them in front of our eyes and write them on our doorposts and our gates."

Do you get what God is telling us here about the religious nurture of children? He says it happens in the home -- not only through some kind of formal training but as an entire way of life. God is telling us that if Christian education is effective on Sunday morning, or Tuesday or Wednesday night, it is because it is happening first in our homes.

We parents telegraph to our children our true feelings about the priorities of life. That was the theme of the drama. Children learn what they live. Words alone don't do the job.

Out of a hundred and sixty hours in a week, a child spends about fifty hours asleep, around thirty six hours in school, one to three hours at church, and the remaining seventy two hours with family and friends. If the Christian life is not made real at home, it is not made real anywhere. Or, in the words of one anonymous humorist: "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy."

A while back a woman named Carol Schmelzel who, ironically, is a substitute teacher in Colorado, wrote an article telling how she and her husband began to make God a household word.

The first thing they did was to have a brief family prayer time before the children's bedtimes in which each person would have the opportunity to share and either Mrs. Schmelzel or her husband would pray for the family. The second thing they did was to make sure that they included God in family and personal decision and that the children knew that God was included just through a statement like: "I think God will give us the answer if we listen carefully.

The third thing they did was that Mr. and Mrs. Schmelzel began to talk with each other about the things of God. At first this was difficult. But they sparked their communication through discussing or even arguing about a stimulating book on faith. After a while, communication came easier and they were able to share with each other and with their children their deeper hopes, thoughts and feelings about their Christian faith and life in general.

The fourth thing they did was to reserve the ride home from church and the Sunday noon meal, for a discussion of the service and the church school. This was a time for open discussion, questions and clearing up confusion.

We are blessed here at Moorpark Presbyterian with able and dedicated leaders for our church school. It is one of our strengths as a congregation. But it has to start and end in the home.

The second important role that parents play is in the support of our church school through insuring their children's regular participation. The lessons in the church school are designed to build on each other. It is hard for a child who comes only occasionally to feel connected or to receive what is offered.

In our society there has been an emphasis in recent decades on each person "doing his or her own thing" and no one giving guidance to others in lifestyle or ethics. Now the phrase, "do your own thing" is long gone. But the concept is very much alive.

Now I realize that I sound almost reactionary in saying this but I do not believe that every seven or ten or twelve or even seventeen year old is capable of choosing a personally rewarding, satisfying and successful lifestyle. And, to a certain extent, society as a whole agrees with my reactionary belief. We make kids go to school and do their homework whether they want to or not. We make them go to the dentist even when it is not immediately relevant to their "thing." But we sometimes treat what 1 Peter 2 refers to as "the very words of eternal life" as an option they can select or reject like deciding whether or not to play Little League baseball.

The Christian nurture of children has much more eternal importance than having straight teeth, getting into the right university, or riding in a white Hummer limo to the senior prom.

We do not have the option of treating the Christian education of our children in a casual manner. God has appointed us as parents as His stewards for the care and upbringing of our children. This is reflected in the sacrament of baptism where parents promise before God and the congregation to bring their child up to love God and serve Him, so that their child may continue in the fellowship of the church and confess Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

Now some of you, like me, are parents of older sons or daughters. They may be out of the house. They may not be active in the church. You may feel like you've failed.

Take a measure of comfort in the words of Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it." I think it is realistic and hopeful that it doesn't say, "When he is young or in college he won't depart from it." It is realistic and hopeful because we all know any number of people who were given a very strong Christian background in their homes but who departed from it for several years --often the college years or the years of being single in the city. Many of you sitting here this morning could raise your hand and say, "Yeah, that was me." But you're here now. Many of you are here now because of the foundation that was laid by faithful parents. That foundation said, "When you're ready to build for yourselves and your children, here is were to turn."

That foundation is important and is becoming increasingly more important. This is because of the widening gap between the church and society as a whole.

Thirty years ago or more it could be assumed that Christian values were not all that different from American societal values. Whether or not that was ever true, there is no mistaking the enormous gap which now exists between biblical values and social realities.

The result is that we have come to the point that a recent article in our local newspaper spoke of a Federal initiative to place an armed, full-time police officer in every school in America. The news also carried the story of a ten-year-old boy whose father handed him a knife during an argument and said; "If you hate me that much then go ahead and stab me." The boy plunged the knife into father's chest. The father was pronounced dead at a local hospital one hour later.

A recent PBS Frontline program tells of an outbreak of venereal disease among a group of upper middle-class adolescents, some as young as 12, in an affluent suburb of Atlanta.

Children are also under attack. We see this in the courts where 12 year olds are being tried as adults for various crimes. Even babies aren’t immune in the new society.

For example, a newly- appointed Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University; Peter Singer; has written that we should be prepared, under certain conditions, to put aside our emotional feelings about the cute appearance, helplessness or innocence of human infants. He writes; "If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants." (Singer, Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press 1993, p.171)

What in heaven's name is going on in American society. What is happening to the children? And with the kind of Nazi ethics espoused at Princeton, what will happen to the children?

The Christian community must offer alternatives.

There is a sense in which it does take a village to raise a child. The question is, which village and what values? Christian values now are so different from mainstream culture that the task of Christian education has become enormous. It certainly can't be accomplished in a one hour a week Sunday school class.

Let me get real specific here.

As Christian parents, we need to make our child's regular participation in worship and church school a top priority. Many of you have done this already.

This may mean adjusting your schedule to allow them to come. One of the reasons we start worship so early is so that there is a lot of day left when every activity here on Sunday morning is through.

It may also mean putting pressure on the leaders of sports or social groups our children belong to, not to schedule events or activities on Sunday morning and if it "can't be helped," choosing in the words of Joshua, "For me and my house we will serve the Lord."

It also means requiring our children of whatever age to be active at church just the way we require activity at school. It should not be a negotiable. While they are in our homes, it should be a given.

One mother writes: "My daughter doesn't want to come to church because she says, it is "boring." (Recognize that word, parents?) She is at the age where she finds many things "boring" -- school, vegetables, and responsibility. I simply tell her that just because she finds something "boring" does not mean that it is therefore unimportant, and that as her parent, I know that her growth as a Christian is the most important growth of all.

Do you remember the cartoon "Calvin and Hobbs?" Every once in awhile, Calvin would come to his Dad with a piece of paper which indicated his Dad's latest "popularity rating." Then Calvin would suggest a few things his Dad could do to bolster his numbers.

Well, guess what? Our poll numbers don't really matter. God doesn't call us to be our children's pals. He calls us to be a parent His steward in the nurture of the children He has entrusted to our care. We don't have to answer to our children for doing our job. But we will answer to our God if we don't.

As parents, we need to recognize that we have the primary stewardship responsibility for the Christian education of our children. God has entrusted us with their lives. The promises made at baptism are much more than the empty formula of ancient ritual. They are a covenant made with God and God will hold us accountable.

The third important role for parents is to model Christian growth by our own participation in worship and church school.

There is a poem, which was written by Ayman Varily, an unknown, and understandably unpublished poet, which asks the question: "Do Infants Have More for Fun in Infancy than Adults in Adultery?"

"Christian growth, like youth.

And spontaneity and open anger and joy,

Is much too good a thing

To be confined to children and young people

While adults are confined in maintaining institutions.

Those who covenant together with God

To raise themselves and their children

May learn from their children

What it means to be a child of God.

While those who send a child to Sunday School

To soak up from others

A life they do not share,

Will find a child will only rarely move beyond

What his/her parents, care to be."

In other words, if it doesn't happen in us, it isn't going to happen through us. If we do not commit ourselves to obey God's desire for us to grow to maturity in Christ, how can we expect our children to make that commitment?

It is also important, for us as stewards of God for our children to know what is going on in the youth groups and church school.

I read of a youth worker who went to a house and asked to borrow the families' new van for a youth trip to the mountains. The father said: "No way! I don't even know you!" The youth worker replied: "That's true. You don't know me. But every week for the past three years, you have loaned me your son and your daughter. Never once have you come by to find out what's going on. Now, which is more important? Your van or your kids?" Good question.

We also need to examine ourselves and see what is happening in our own lives. If the Christian faith seems difficult or even "boring? to us, perhaps we need to look at ourselves. Nothing can happen through us that hasn't happened in us. Nothing can happen through us that hasn't happened in us and we must examine our lives and our priorities to see what kind of model we are setting for our children.

If we feel inadequate, we must see what we need to know in order to share effectively and then take steps to learn it. Take advantage of the adult Sunday morning class. Join us in the small groups. You will learn something, and you will be a model for your children. It is not right to expect them to show a zeal for growth that we don't demonstrate.

Christian education has a lot to offer. If we make this a priority, for ourselves and our families, we will give ourselves and our children a solid basis for faithful living that will open the doors to the fullness of God's promises.