Western Presbyterian Church
Washington, D.C.
December 27, 2009
Text: John 1:1-14
I was talking to a friend, another pastor, who had four boys, and the youngest child was very energetic, physical and active. He loved to move his arms and run around all the time. He was like a tiny tornado, destroying everything in his path. Andrew was shocked, because after having three well-behaved children, he and his wife thought that they had parenting pretty much figured out. Then they had this boy who would just beat up everyone who moved. The parents watched, amazed, as this tiny three-year-old guy hit his brothers who were twice his size.
“What did you do about it?” I asked.
They tried everything. Punishing, distracting, and talking–all of it worked a little bit, but they effects were always temporary. They watched how other their other children went through stages, and grew out of them quickly like a pair of shoes. But this seemed different, and they didn’t quite know what to do about it. They realized that they needed to do more than just work on the behavior; they needed to make sure that the boy himself moved in the right direction.
So with care and concern they began to experiment, until they figured out that the best way to work with him was to appeal to his sense of fantasy. They noticed that he loved to play “Jedi.” So they started allowing him to wear his Jedi outfit, they began calling him “Jedi,” and their home became a Jedi training camp. They told him that he needed to be a good Jedi and to work for good things. When he would hit someone, they took him aside and asked, “Is this what a good Jedi would do?”
As a result, the child just might see the age of five.
His parents are teaching him to fight for justice, to defend those who are smaller than he is, to look out for children who might be more vulnerable. He is learning to make sure that good will win over the bad things in the world, so that there will be peace on earth. And around the dinner table.
A Jedi is a Star Wars character. I know this fact, because when he was telling me this story, I remembered my light saber and my Princess Leia outfit. The saber was a large glow-in-the-dark piece of plastic that I kept in the bathroom, over the fluorescent light rod. It rested there, so that it would be charged up and ready when I needed to go into action. I loved playing with it, and saying cryptic things, like, “May the force be with you.”
In fact, all sorts of scenes flashed in my mind as Andrew talked. I thought of all the boys and girls who play, imagining themselves as Superheroes, defenders of justice and good. I never really thought about how that acting can form them into better people, stirring up their merciful imaginations, helping them the construct the framework that they needed to distinguish right from wrong, to be sensitive to others who were in distress or being hurt, to defend those who were smaller or weaker than they were, and to fight for justice.
I found it fascinating that the real world didn’t motivate the child—yelling, counting to three, time-outs, or taking away privileges. He couldn’t seem to make the cause and effect connection between bad behavior and punishment. The fact that every time he hit his brother, he had to stop playing and sit quietly in a room, didn’t seem to bother him. But being plugged into something much bigger concept did. Somehow he could understand this cosmic reality between justice and evil, and appealing to that made the difference.
Which seems so odd to me. I mean, “If you hit, you will be punished” seems simple and straightforward. Wouldn’t that fight between good and evil be a much more difficult concept to grasp? For the boy, it wasn’t. “Fighting for justice” made more sense to him than “don’t hit your brother.”
Andrew was still worried. He was nervous that the child’s playing still seemed too violent, and he was concerned that this would alter the child’s view of God. Star Wars is a great movie, but it’s not like George Lucas is a great theologian.
“We’ll sort out the theological implications later,” Andrew said, “but right now, he needs to identify with the good. He needs to be on the right side. When he hits people, he knows that he is not being a good Jedi.” The child is able to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad, not by appealing to the sensible nature of rules and regulations, of discipline, but of appealing to this more abstract idea–his sense of fantasy.
It’s difficult to understand just how the minds of children work. Of course, each child is different, but as religious leaders, we are concerned about the formation of a child’s spiritual life, and how we can convey a loving, compassionate faith to them. We surrounded Owen this morning in his baptism, and we take those promises to heart. We are to care for our children, providing a nurturing place for their faith to form.
A lot of Christian educators will say that children only understand concrete ideas, and so we should not try to make them comprehend abstract notions about God. They just won’t be able to wrap their heads around them.
For instance, when we are children, we may understand God as our Father. Yet, as we grow older, we begin to realize that this image is a metaphor. It’s incomplete. God may be like a father, but the word “Father” does not encapsulate who God is. God is not a white man on a gold throne. God does not have a white flowing beard. As we get older we can begin to look at these metaphors more critically, and we begin to relate to God in the best way that we can. Realizing that our words cannot capture who God is, that none of our ideas about God are big enough for this divine reality, we can move from a concrete idea of God to something that might be more abstract. And yet, part of the beauty of the spiritual life is this endeavor to catch a glimpse of the beauty of this unfathomable God.
The theologian, Augustine, calls this “faith seeking understanding.” We realize that we are not able to understand the vast complexities of God. We know that God has “thoughts that are not our thoughts and ways that are not our ways.” And yet, think of all the beauty and acts of compassion that spilled out of our human striving to understand God. For thousands of years, seminaries have been filled with theologians who write libraries full of books about God, preachers could expound for centuries, musicians could compose choral works and symphonies, artists could cover canvas after canvas, mystics could pray and try to understand what it means to be one with God, and men and women commit their lives to working with the poor and outcast. We do all of this to try to understand and convey the wonders of God. And even if we worked for the rest of our days, trying to know God, to understand who God is, and striving to live with the compassion of loving Creator, we only come up with a sliver of understanding. We would only know one ray of light that is reflected in that complicated diamond. And at the end of our days, we would realize that the more we know, the greater the mysteries are. We could never capture the enormity, the abundance, the love of our Creator.
And then, we enter this season. This first Sunday after Christmas, we move from trying to grasp the complexities of God, these cosmic realities. And suddenly we are confronted with the opposite! We are confronted with the claim that God becomes flesh, and walked around with us.
It’s hard to imagine. A friend was at the airport yesterday, sitting next to a man who was full of nervous worry from the recent bombing attempt, and he explained loudly, “I’m all for racial profiling,” blurting out a string of racist comments against Middle Eastern men. Then he sat down, pulled out his Bible.
She just shook her head, and debated in her mind whether to inform him that Jesus was a Middle Eastern man who would have fit his profile.
But we forget about the particularities of being human when we move into this cosmic idea of God—until Christmas, when we talk about a God who is with us. We proclaim that God became a child. God was an infant whose neck was so wobbly that he could not hold it up himself. God cried because it was the only way he knew how to say that he was hungry. God reached out for his mother’s milk. God learned to walk. God was potty trained and went through puberty, just like all of us.
And in Christmas, we realize that our writings, and our sermons, and our symphonies, and our paintings and our prayers could not encapsulate God, but somehow, this baby does. This child, in all of his vulnerability.
And somehow, it doesn’t only affect our image of God, but it I think it makes us look at humanity differently. It makes us look at children a bit differently. Because in this season, we understand the fullness of God by glimpsing into that manger and seeing that tiny child, who paws in the air with his clenched fists, all wrapped up like a burrito.
It makes us look at our own flesh differently. Until we learn to be human, we learn the difference between good and bad, we learn to construct systems of justice, not by relating to some Superhero, or fighting the causes for justice with super-human strength. But by studying the works and words of a human who walked alongside us, listening to those who were in need, reaching out to those who were vulnerable, filling the hungry with good things, and thereby bringing about peace and salvation.
May we go out, with the knowledge that Jesus Christ, that baby in a manger, is God with us. And may that reality change who we are.
To the glory of God, our Creator,
God, our Liberator,
and God our Sustainer. Amen.
