Teach your parents well

And when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, “Why has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?” then you shall say to them: It is because your ancestors have forsaken me, says the Lord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and have not kept my law; and because you have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are, every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me. Therefore I will hurl you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your ancestors have known, and there you shall serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.

Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when it shall no longer be said, “As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” but “As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.” For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors. I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks.

For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight. And I will doubly repay their iniquity and their sin, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations. O Lord, my strength and my stronghold, my refuge in the day of trouble, to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say: Our ancestors have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit. Can mortals make for themselves gods? Such are no gods! “Therefore I am surely going to teach them, this time I am going to teach them my power and my might, and they shall know that my name is the Lord.”

 - Jeremiah 16:10-21

The writings of the Hebrew prophets are chock full of scenes like this: God is angry, angry, angry, and is going to punish us! Yet that judgment is always placed beside a passage of mercy—usually God promising to bring the people back after their exile. I find that the best way to handle passages like this is to look through the lens of parenthood. Doubtless, people anthropomorphized God in the first place by looking through that lens.

My daughter Sarah threw a fit over something at bedtime. She wanted me to read her a comic book. I’d had a long day, and for some reason I didn’t want to read her a comic book. I asked her to pick out something else. And that’s when the screaming began.

So I took away her story—that is, I said I would read to her tomorrow night, but not tonight. Stories are central to our bedtime routine, and I never like to take them away, but it was the right thing to do. We moved on to the next step in her routine, when Christy reads her a story. After that comes “quiet time,” three minutes of silence often punctuated by thoughts about Sarah’s day.

As I sat down for quiet time, Sarah said, “Dad, I’m really sorry.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t like taking your stories away. But sometimes Mommy and I take things away from you to teach you how to control your emotions.”

“I know,” Sarah replied.

“You know,” I said, “Sometimes your emotions—especially anger and frustration—can become so strong that it feels like they’re controlling you.”

Sarah smiled. “Instead of you controlling them!” She got it.

I said, “Sometimes it feels like they sneak up behind you and grab you by the throat and try to choke you!” That got a good laugh. “Grownups deal with that, too. We also have a hard time controlling our emotions sometimes. But it’s something you’ll get better and better at as you grow up, and it’s Mommy’s and my job to help you.”

It was a wonderful conversation. Suddenly that screaming fit seemed a world away. And then, in the silence that followed, Sarah said, “Dad, I have a question to ask you.”

“Yes, Sarah?”

“Why don’t you like to read me comic books?”

Huh. That was a really good question. And I didn’t have a really good answer. Certainly I have the right to say, “No, I don’t want to read that--let’s read something else.” But would it have killed me to read her a comic book? Probably not.

Here are Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with a classic parenting song: “Teach Your Children.” Of course, children teach their parents, too.

Conversations with kids about death

We’ve been talking a lot about death in my family. Christy lost a beloved great-uncle last Friday; happily, she and Sarah got to pay him a visit a few days before he died. And one of our cats, Epitome, is getting very old and creaky, and we’re waiting for word from the vet on whether her kidneys are failing. Sarah is aware that our kitty will probably die in the next few months, if not sooner.

After all this, I found myself being asked last night, “What’s Ash Wednesday?” If the “sex talk” is the one that scares parents the most, the “death talk” may come in a close second. Yet kids don’t carry the same baggage we do about death. Sarah knows that we will all die someday, and we've talked about it many times since she was about two. So by now, I wasn't scared at all ... just a little overwhelmed.


I explained to Sarah that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and that at this service, a priest or deacon marks your forehead with ashes in the shape of a cross and says, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

"Dust?" Sarah laughed about that. I tried to explain a little about the idea of returning to the earth, but mostly, I just let the liturgical language speak for itself. Better yet, Sarah will get to experience it first-hand tomorrow night.

I love to tell the Godly Play story of Abraham and Sarah. Kids eat this story up—they love that it takes place in a giant sandbox, and they love the language about how “people don’t go into the desert unless they absolutely have to.” They love the language describing prayer: "Abraham came so close to God, and God came so close to him, that Abraham knew what God wanted him to do." And: "Abraham went up on a hill and prayed again, and God was there too. God wasn't just here or there ... God was everywhere!"

At one point late in the story, I tell the story of Sarah dying, and later, of Abraham dying. I dig a little pit in the sand with my finger to indicate the burial of a body. While I’m doing this, I quietly cover the figure of the dead person with my hand and remove it; most kids don’t notice where it went because they’re focusing on my finger digging in the sand.

I always ask the kids after a Godly Play story, “What was your favorite part?” The vast majority of kids talk about the deaths. Kids love to hear death spoken of gently, respectfully, reverently. And they love to hear, “By this time, Sarah was very old and full of years. She died, and Abraham buried her in a cave near the Oaks of Mamre.”

Kids make sense of the world by playing. For them, death is just one more thing about life that needs to have sense made of it. Liturgy is how adults play, to make sense of the most important things in life and beyond life.

Consider bringing your kids to an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow night. Don’t worry about whether they sit quietly the whole time. Bring crayons and paper. You may not think they’re “getting anything out of it." But it is by bringing our children to church that, over time, they learn to speak the language of Christianity and make sense of the relationship they already have with God, who loves them and speaks to them in the silence of their hearts every day.

Reboot ...

I haven't written in an awfully long time. As I see Lent begin to rear its contemplative head ... later than at any other time in my young life, and yet still arriving surprisingly quickly ... I know I need to write more often.

I intend to blog every day during Lent. If I created a "YouTube Lent calendar" as I did for Advent, would you follow it?

In the meantime, here's a thought I also posted on Facebook:

Praise your children for being curious. Praise them for their hard work and persistence. Praise them for acts of compassion. But never praise them for being smart. They won't know how to replicate the results, and worse yet, they may begin to think everything worth doing should come easily to them.

Reading God’s Word with My Grandfather

I got a phone call this week from my Uncle Hal. He’s a Baptist pastor who is no longer working for the Church, and he called to offer me a complete collection of the Interpreter’s Bible, a multi-volume Bible with tons of helpful commentary. It’s the same set that both he and my grandfather used to write sermons many decades ago.

At first I resisted. I thought, “This gift will be heavy and bulky, and I’ll have to find shelf space for it. Besides, there’s a newer version of the Interpreter’s Bible out there that matches the translation we currently use in the Episcopal Church; that version would be much more useful to me.”

Then I thought more about my grandfather, Harold Fremont Smith, a Baptist pastor and a vital force in the American Baptist Church in the Pacific Northwest from the 1930s into the 1960s. He died in a car accident five years before I was born. To use the same books he used would be quite an honor. So I accepted the gift. See, it’s more than just words on a page. It’s the Word of God. I’ll take the books with me to seminary in Virginia this summer. I can imagine myself sitting there, writing papers or sermons with my grandfather right there at my shoulder, whispering inspiration into my ear. I hope I’ll be ready. I hope my ears will be open.

When I get ready to tell a Godly Play story with kids, I tell them, “You have to be ready! How do we get ready? Eyes open, ears open … mouths closed.” We adults could use the same advice in church on Sunday mornings. This is important stuff! We are gathered together to hear the Word of God: the family stories, the stories we tell again and again.

First we hear a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, a/k/a the Old Testament. Usually it’s something from one of the prophets, or a formative story of the people of Israel. Next we join with the choir for a psalm, one of the hymns of ancient Israel. These are so varied, and their themes so universal, that we still use the same 150 psalms today. Following the psalm is the Epistle: a reading from the Christian Scriptures, a/k/a New Testament. This is usually a letter written in the earliest years of the Christian Church to communicate something of vital importance to a budding Christian community.

Next we hear from one of the four Gospels, the stories of Jesus. We stand for this reading because the Gospels are at the center of our faith. “Gospel” means “Good News.” And could once a week possibly be too often to hear a piece of Good News? Finally, we hear a sermon, an original reflection that opens the Scriptures to us in our own place and time.

The Liturgy of the Word is a time to open our ears. You may think we tell the same stories over and over again in church, but that’s not exactly true. The difference is you: you are different now than you were the last time you heard the story. If you open your ears, you may well find that the words mean something very different now than they did earlier in your life.

Although I never met my grandfather, I am different now than I used to be. Had my uncle given me these volumes when I was 12 or 18 or 25 or 35, I might not have been able to appreciate such a caring gift. Now it will mean much more to me.

A YouTube Advent Calendar: December 20

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.

-      Isaiah 11:1-9

What do you want for Christmas? I hear adults ask children this question all the time. It’s an innocent enough question; I’ve asked it myself on a number of occasions.

But I wonder … could we be asking our children better questions? Deeper questions? Would it not be better to draw on their deepest hopes and desires, rather than on their shallower instincts? Would asking such questions awaken something in them that might not otherwise awake?

Of course we’re going to give gifts at Christmastime. We give our children Barbie dolls and trucks and Polly Pockets and Legos because, through their play, they learn about the world. They learn the wonder of story and the structure of science.

But what if we didn’t stop at asking which toy is their heart’s desire? What if we found out their real heart’s desire? In so doing, maybe we’d find out they’d really like there to be no more war in the world. No bullying at school. No hunger. No tears. No cancer. No divorce. No HIV. No loneliness. Maybe we’d learn they feel guilty about something and would like forgiveness. Maybe we’d learn they don’t want to be afraid of death. Maybe we’d learn that they want to know God loves them and cherishes them and will take care of them all their lives.

If we help make them aware of their longings, maybe we can begin to point them in a direction where they can dwell on those longings and start to make real decisions about what kind of people they want to become.

That sure would beat, “I want an Xbox more than anything else in the world.” Really? More than anything else? Wouldn’t you rather have Daddy home from Afghanistan? It may seem at first like a downer, but I think we adults can handle downers if we can also help children get in touch with their own feelings.

This year, let’s take our children seriously, and lovingly, and gently meet them where they really are—not where we would feel comfortable for them to be. Let’s give them the Xbox, if such a thing is possible, and then spend more time with them in conversation about what’s really important. This is how wisdom is taught.

Here are the Goo Goo Dolls with “Better Days.”