BLESS THE CHILDREN
May 24, 2009
Genesis 27: 1-38 John 14: 15-21
Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack
Prospect United Methodist Church
Bristol, Connecticut
Two weeks ago, on Mothers’ Day, the sermon focused on the subject of home and family. This morning, I want to focus on the part of family life that involves children. Some of you have children at home, but most present this Memorial Day weekend Sunday don’t. However, you are hardly off the hook!
For this sermon is really for everyone here who is privileged to have a child know you by name even if that name is grandma or grandpa or uncle or aunt or even as a close neighbor. That surely is a majority of us. To help you with this sermon, I invite you to fix a mental image of the child or children in your life.
What I want to talk about has to do with what we most want to give the children and young people whom we are privileged to know. If you've looked at the sermon title, "Bless The Children," you've already determined the kind of answer to this matter. I think far more than giving our children educational advantages or material possessions, as important as they may be, we need to be most concerned to give our children our personal blessing.
If blessing is a bit of a foreign concept to our modern ears, it certainly wasn't to biblical people. The curiously fascinating story of Jacob and Esau exemplifies this. Apparently, Isaac, who is Abraham's son, is near death. Before he dies he wants to give the blessing of God to his eldest son, Esau.
A father giving his eldest son his blessing was the custom of his day. It was considered as tangible, as irrevocable, as signing over the deed to the house. In fact, one’s father’s blessing was a combination of a financial and political set-up for life.
Isaac, of course, assumed he would give his blessing to his oldest boy, Esau. Rebekah, though, favored Jacob, who was more like her, more sensitive, probably more spiritual and maybe even brighter. Long story short, Rebekah tricked her husband in one of the most ingenious plots ever concocted. Thus, having been deceived, Isaac blessed the younger son, Jacob.
When Esau learned about this he was distraught. He knew his father could not take back the words. Which made his plea to his father even more poignant: "Have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!"
Where I'm coming from today is that I think a blessing from parents and others close to a child or young person is every bit as important now as then. I think Esau’s cry is the cry of every child to parents and significant adults in his or her life: bless me too!
Of course, the blessings our children seek from us are not one time only blessings. Fortunately, we have multiple opportunities to bless our children. And, as I’ve suggested, this blessing business is not only for parents or for grandparents: it’s a privilege any of us have who have children in our circle of influence.
So, then, what to do? How do we bless our children? I want to suggest 5 ways that all of us who have any influence with children, but particularly parents, can bless our children:
First, let’s not be sparse with words of encouragement for our children. This is hardly a new idea, to be sure. Studies show that when children are criticized their physical energy takes a nose dive. But when given a word of praise, the machine measuring physical energy notes a decided upturn.
It’s tragic, but I’ve known scores of adults who don't remember even once being praised by a parent. Adults, maybe some of you, who never remember a mother or father even once saying I'm proud of you. And they suffer still!
Words of praise are essential. I don't care how demanding we might be on the job or on ourselves, let’s give the kids in our lives a break. Let’s be generous with your praise and encouragement.
Second, is a modern problem relating to praise-giving. That is, we need to give encouragement always, reward honest effort always, but we need to be careful about going overboard with insincere praise.
I read an article recently that talked about how so many young adults who are entering the work-place are absolutely shocked that their employers aren’t falling all over themselves praising their work, telling them they’re the greatest! The authors explained this by saying it has to do with the young people always having been told that they’re the best all their lives in everything they’ve attempted, even in their mediocre moments.
Clearly, we need to encourage our children or the children in our lives always. We need to praise the children for good effort put out. We need to celebrate good character, of course. But we also need to help our children accept being average in many things. And we also need to help our children fail, because we all know they’re going to be doing plenty of that in their lifetimes. If we can do both then we will have done a good job, and thus blessed our children.
Third, children are blessed if they learn they are not the center of the universe.
Herb Miller tells about a Dad who was trying to be a modern parent. One morning at breakfast his little daughter pushed her cereal away, announcing that she didn't like that kind of breakfast.
"Well, darling, what would you like?" the father asked. "I want a worm," she whimpered. So Daddy went to the garden, got a fat worm, washed it, and laid it on her plate.
"But I want it cooked!" she sobbed. After the worm was rolled in butter and fried, she demanded, "I want Daddy to have half!"
So Daddy dutifully divided the fried worm and managed to choke down his portion.
This time, it was even louder howls and sobs. "But that was the part I wanted."
I understand a growing problem in nursery schools has to do with children who come to nursery school who have never heard the word "no." Thus, they have no boundaries. No sense of where they end and another begins. No respect that others have equal rights.
We do our children an incredible disservice, if we don't teach them that other people are just as special as they are and deserve respect and courtesy.
So, blessed indeed are our children if they learn that they, as important as they are, aren't the center of the universe.
Our children are also blessed if they learn that God IS the center of the universe. Specifically, if they learn that their life makes the most sense only if it is lived in conscious relationship with the personal God that Jesus revealed. Blessed are they indeed if they learn that God has a plan for all creation, and that each one of us – including them -- has a part to play. That life isn't just about getting jobs and houses and bigger and bigger toys and having fun.
The late comedian George Carlin used to poke fun at Americans and our stuff. He pointed out that we have stuff and take stuff with us when we go places. There we buy more stuff and bring it home. Then, to appease our guilt, we set up a table in front of our home every summer and sell our stuff to our neighbors. And then we walk around the neighborhood and buy their stuff, at a bargain.
We do like our stuff. We are thing-oriented, aren’t we?
But, think about it: Wouldn’t it be better if we tried to be different from our neighbors? If we weren’t so caught up in getting things? If we worked hard to teach our children and the children in our circle of influence that what it's mostly all about is helping God love our neighbors in eternal ways?
Blessed indeed are children who learn that it’s mostly not about them or about things. But that it’s about God and loving people and caring for God’s creation.
Last, but not least, we bless the children in our lives when they see that our deeds match our words. No surprise here. Probably most of us can remember our parents and how some of their deeds didn’t match their words. “Do as I say and not as I do.”
Don’t smoke, my parents said, but they smoked. So as soon as I could I sneaked off to smoke. Maybe you can think of some ways your parents’ words didn’t match their deeds. Even if these ways are few, fact is they are the things our children will remember longest about us. And they also serve to lower our credibility in the meantime about other matters.
If our children have to choose between our words and our deeds, 100 times out of 100 they’ll pay attention to our deeds.
As we think about blessing our children, it's enlightening to think about how our parents blessed us, to whatever extent they did. That is, we can learn from our own positive and negative experiences the ways we will choose to bless our children. Let me tell you when a final parental blessing came to me.
My father died when I was seven years old. Two years later, my mother married my step-father. My step-father was a quiet man. I don't think he ever said he loved me. I don't think he ever said he was proud of me. Fortunately, my mother was not so reserved. My step-father was of a generation where most males didn’t say things like that. He just wasn't into words. Nor was he physically demonstrative. If he ever kissed me, I don't remember it.
When my step-father died in 1990, five years after my mother, Jeanne and I went back to Kansas City to put all the affairs in order. There we found most of his personal effects stashed away in boxes in the dining room which had become his place to write letters, and pay bills. While rummaging through these boxes trying to make heads and tails of his book-keeping, we found a few special boxes.
There, inside them was every report card I'd ever gotten, every letter I'd ever written home up to a few months before, every copy of a sermon I’d sent home including some within that last year. We could tell from the bent corners that they’d been read. While my mother had surely begun the collection, he clearly had kept it up and added to it. I couldn’t believe it!
As I looked through all that stuff I began to feel -- blessed.
Sometimes it doesn’t take all that much to give someone a powerful blessing.
Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, those who are privileged to have children call us by name: it’s never too late to bless the children. It’s never too late. But there’s also no better time than the present to do it.