Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

April 20, 2008

Children and Our Moral Conviction

Deuteronomy 11:18-21

Have you ever seen those magazine covers that promise ten ways to live longer? You open up the magazine thinking that there is going to be some secret where you will have an advantage over your friends. Then you start to work down the list and the list consists of things like: Wear your seatbelt. People who wear seatbelts consistently avoid accidents and live a decade longer than people who don’t. Exercise every day. Consume fewer calories. Eat more vegetables and whole grains. You are reading the article and you are thinking, “I thought there was going to be something here that I didn’t know. I thought there was going to be something that would be a secret, something I had not known about before, like go out and buy a particular vitamin or herb and it would help me live longer.

There is a parallel. How do you help children have a faith that when they are older will provide meaning and purpose to their lives? There are no guarantees. You can wear your seatbelt and you can still end up in a very bad car accident. You can do these things and there is no God-guaranteed stamp on a Bible someplace that everything will go well with your children’s faith. But we know there are some very basic and simple things we can do.

Families who pray together. Families who participate in acts of Christian service together. Providing children with opportunities to have real leadership in church. It’s not magic. If you look at the children’s programs and see a lot of things that we do, we have a Children’s Led Worship Service in the course of the year to provide a concentrated effort for children to have leadership opportunities. Throughout the year, you can attend worship, and on a given Sunday, you might see a child pray, provide the opening music for meditation, take up the offering, or read the scripture. We do use children throughout the year. The Children’s Led Worship Service is a focused day to provide children with the opportunities that we hope someday will help plant faith deep within their hearts. We hope it will supplement what families have done together to encourage that faith.

Toward that end also, I want to speak about children. Not everybody has children, but I think most of us do care about children, the world they live in, and whether or not children of this church family develop faith. So that is the focus today.

I take my cue from Stephen Prothero who teaches at Boston University and wrote an article about a year ago that someone sent to me that they had found on the internet. Prothero was talking about the decline in religious literacy. He gave entering students at Boston University some tests. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“For the past two years, I have given students in my introductory religious-studies course at Boston University a religious-literacy quiz. I ask them to list the four Gospels, Roman Catholicism’s seven sacraments, and the Ten Commandments. I ask them to name the holy book of Islam. They do not fare well.

“In their quizzes, they inform me that Ramadan is a Jewish holiday, that Revelation is one of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, and that Paul led the Israelites on the Exodus out of Egypt. This year I had a Hindu student who couldn’t name one Hindu scripture, a Baptist student who didn’t know that “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is a Bible quote, and Catholic students unfamiliar with the golden rule. Over the past two years, only 17 percent of my students passed the quiz.

“‘Cultural literacy’ has been hotly debated ever since E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s best seller of that name injected the desideratum into the culture wars in 1987. Today religious illiteracy is at least as pervasive as cultural illiteracy, and certainly more dangerous. Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile constituent of culture. Religion has been, in addition to one of the greatest forces for good in world history, one of the greatest forces for evil.

“Nonetheless, Americans remain profoundly ignorant about their own religions and those of others. According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, and many high-school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A few years ago, no one in Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show audience could name any of the Twelve Apostles, but everyone was able to shout out the four Beatles.”

Prothero’s point is this: That we live in a time in this world when religion sets the parameters for political and world discussion in a way that it never has before. It has always been important and it has always set some of the discussion, but in the world of internet, cable, and satellite television where a person can speak in any country of the world and it be beamed to the rest of the world or it can be said or printed on the internet in one moment and billions of people can read it a second later on the internet, the situation has changed. Religion, particularly as we think about terrorism and people’s response to terrorism, never before has people’s faith set the tone for public and political discussion like it does today.

Prothero’s point is that in just the moment, people need to be knowledgeable of their faith, people need to be able to talk intelligently about what they believe as someone else is putting forth their beliefs in trying to set an agenda. At that very moment, the children of America knew less about their faith than they had ever known before. They know less about their holy books. It is not just Christianity. It is pretty much a culture wide thing in this country. At a time when we would hope that our children need to more about the discussion of religion in the world, they know the least. No wonder the religions that teach their children most diligently are some of the fastest growing. Islam, Mormonism. Some people decry Mormonism, but we all recognize that in this country Mormonism is growing. One of the attractive features of it is that very described set of beliefs and practices. People want that. We talked about making this a better world for our children, but if our children need to know how to be able to discuss their faith in the world arena and we don’t teach them what their faith is, then we are not giving them much ammunition to make a better world.

Why haven’t we done better? Most people will say, “It all started when they took prayer out of public schools.” I think that is a cop out. A lot of times when I hear people say that, I always want to know if they are praying with their children at home.

Some will say it started when they took the Ten Commandments down out of the classroom. Did you teach the Ten Commandments to your children? Is there a place in your home where they can see them? I don’t think you should expect the school to do something that you have not done.

Personally, I think the reason where we find ourselves in the situation that we do is because we ourselves have a lack of moral conviction about our faith. We are rather haphazard in how we lead our children to learn about faith and we even sometimes say we are going to let them make up their own minds when they are old enough. If there was ever an abdication of parenthood, it is that statement, “I am going to let them make up their mind about faith when they get older.” If you have said this, I don’t mean to step on your toes. It is just wrong.

Would you allow children to make up their minds as to whether or not they want to go to school? Whether or not they want to do their homework? Whether or not they want to learn long division? Would you say, “When they are 13, I will let them decide whether or not they want to learn long division? They will be old enough then.” Would you allow your child to make up his or her mind about whether or not they are going to get an inoculation? “They are afraid of shots. Shots hurt. OK. You don’t have to get shots. It’s OK. If you don’t want shots, no shots.” You would not do that.

In our germaphobic world, would you allow your children to make up their own minds about whether or not they wash their hands? We are very intent on teaching our children when and how to wash their hands. We would not let them make up their own minds about that, but yet we would say, “I am going to let them make up their own minds about faith when they are old enough.” This makes no sense, and it reveals that we think faith in Jesus Christ is nice. It’s a nice thing to have in your life, but we also reveal that we really don’t think it is necessary. It’s an option. Let them choose later.

The name of the Book of Deuteronomy means “the second word to.” It is a re-giving of the law that the children of Israel received at Sinai. Only now, Moses delivers it all together as a sermon of sorts, a farewell sermon. They are getting ready to take the Promised Land. He is not going in with them, and he wants to give them the law one more time. In this long-extended sermon in which Moses reminds them and repeats for them the law, he consistently says, “Remember, learn,” and he also says, “Teach your children.” This is a theme that he repeats throughout the Book of Deuteronomy.

We have a problem because when we hear about the law in the Bible, we think that is a bad thing. We often hear when we read New Testament stories about Jesus arguing with the Pharisees and some of the silly things that Pharisees did with the law. We think, “Oh, good, we don’t have to care about the law.” Just because the Pharisees did silly things with the law doesn’t mean that the law is bad. The law in the eyes of the children of Israel as they receive this second telling of the law from Moses is a great gift.

Let’s try to understand the gift this way. Imagine that when your children are old enough to drive, every day they are going to have to drive a narrow, mountainous road with no guardrail. Every day of their lives, they are going to drive this road where they come to the edge and they can look down and see nothing but ravine to the right. To the left, they are right up against the mountain. They don’t know when traffic is going to come the other way. Every day, they are going to drive this route.

What if you could provide them with a guardrail? What if you could put a guardrail up on that road so that every day of their lives when they drove it, they could have protection on that side so that it would, hopefully, help and prohibit them from falling off into the ravine? Wouldn’t that be a great gift that you could give them?

That’s the way the Israelites saw the law. The law was a guard. It was a way of protection. It kept them on the path. It kept them focused on the journey of life which is certainly sometimes narrow, twisted, and dangerous. They saw that the law of God was this gift. It was a gift, and by teaching their children, the children could keep on the road. When they made the decision to accept the law, they thought, “What a wonderful thing! I want to pass this on to my children. I want my children to have the guardrail, too.” That is why they remember every day. Keep it in front of you every day. Learn it every day and tell. Tell your families. Tell your children.

Look at the blessing. Is there is a blessing in there so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth? It’s a promise. Not a promise, “Be good and I will be OK to you,” but a promise that the law is a guide there for you. Who would not want to teach their children? It would not just be nice. It would be a necessity. If we honestly, genuinely believe that this is the truth, would we leave it to children to make up their minds on their own later? I think not.

It is a demonstration of our own conviction about what we believe when we teach our children. Whether or not we teach our children, how earnestly we teach our children, how regularly, how much of a duty and obligation, a treat and a blessing we consider it to teach our children what we believe about the things we read in the Bible is a demonstration of our own conviction about our faith. Do we believe? Do we teach our children?

For me, one of the most powerful demonstrations of this occurred in 1964 in Birmingham, Alabama. On April 20, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy were released from a Birmingham jail. They were released and they came back to an organization that had been demonstrating for freedom and equality and was just about in shambles. They did not know if they could get anybody else to make the march. So many people who were willing were already in jail, and people felt very threatened about loss of jobs and income. Someone hit upon the idea to get high school and college students to come and lead a demonstration. What they didn’t count on was that when they came, they brought their younger brothers and sisters with them. They came to 16th Street Baptist Church as young as six years old, ready to be a part of the demonstration. They went out. Many of them were arrested and it wasn’t altogether pretty, but it was a conviction. The next time they tried it, about a week later, even more children showed up, some this time with their parents. When you see those old black-and-white movies of Bull Connor and his German shepherds, and you see the fire cannon knocking down African-Americans on a street in a southern town, you are looking at children being knocked down by a fire cannon, being attacked by German shepherds. One policeman looked at an eight-year-old girl who was walking with her mother and said, “What do you want?” She looked up at him, and her one-word answer was, “Freedom.” It broke the back of resistance and there are civil rights in this country in large part today because of the children of the African-American community in Birmingham, Alabama. They believed enough in what they believed as Christians to teach their children so that when the time came, the children willingly, adamantly, volunteered to be a part of it.

You might think in this message that I am saying, “Everybody ought to bring their children to Sunday school.” This story says it is more than that. It is more than that. It is shaping children with a culture of faith that guarantees they will have the same convictions that their parents and their families have. You don’t get that by just going to Sunday school, but you also don’t get it by never going to Sunday school.

I think one of our problems as parents today is that we want to spare our children of any pain. We want to spare them the pain of disappointment so we argue with the teacher that they should have gotten an A instead of a C. We want to avoid their disappointment that they don’t start on the soccer team or the Little League baseball team so we argue with the coaches and belittle them until they let them start. I think we are afraid our children may suffer some pain if they don’t have deep convictions. So we just don’t push quite as much on some of these things. There is no conviction without some pain.

Most people say they want their children to be happy. Stanley Hauerwas asked a very powerful question in a book. He says, “What do you really want for your children? Do you want your children to be happy or do you want them to have something worth dying for?”

Happiness is a nice thing. We all like to be happy, but happiness doesn’t guarantee meaning and purpose. Having something to die for that comes out of the conviction of what children have learned about right and wrong, faith and truth, and God and Jesus Christ from their families and from their family of faith is a great gift. If I could give my children one thing, that would be it.

Copyright 2008. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.

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