Tag Archives: parenting

Lectionary Psalms

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Mothering Sunday – Psalm 127

Now that we’re all woke up it has become almost a cliché to say that Mothers’ Day can be a very difficult day for many people, so while some of us are busy celebrating mums who love us, of course others will be missing those who have died, or grieving for difficult or even estranged relationships, or desperately wishing that they could become mums themselves. Today really is a minefield, and our thoughts and prayers need to be sensitive to whose who have different things to say to God. I have chosen from the options Psalm 127, another of the Psalms of Ascent which we have looked at previously, perhaps used during a pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple for a major festival. Psalm 127 is also a Wisdom Psalm, containing teaching on how to live well. Whilst it seemingly has two unconnected parts, v.1-2 about the need for reliance on God if we are to be successful and v.3-5 about the blessings of children, there may be an interesting precedent for linking these two themes. We have a song from the Sumerian empire, the oldest known human civilisation which dates back to around 5500BC in southern Iraq. This is a song of praise to the goddess Nisaba who was believed to be the deity without whom no house, palace or city can successfully be built, but who also built families through her gift of children. It may be that this song was known and used later for the worship of Yahweh. It is unlikely either that the ‘house’ is the Temple, or that the author was Solomon, easy though it may be to make those connections. Interestingly Deuteronomy 25:9, among other places in the OT, refers to ‘building up’ the family line through bearing children.

So actually this is not a Psalm in praise of mothers or motherhood, but rather of the God who grants children and builds up the community through them. In biblical thought children, and sons in particular, were the first line of defence of the family when times became hard, particularly for widows with no husbands to provide for them. The picture of your kids as arrows in your quiver speaks of this idea of children as weapons of survival. And of course sons born early in your life will be reaching their prime just as you are getting a bit past yours! This idea is perhaps echoed in the NT’s instructions to children to care for their parents, an apposite comment in a time when we have the ability to pay for others to care for our elderly.

What else can we learn about God from this text? Our dependence on him, of course. It is customary in Church to begin business meetings with a prayer that God will guide us, and the more seriously we take that prayer, according to this text, the more likely we are to be successful in our enterprises. It can be so easy simply to pray the prayer and then get on with our own agendas. After many years of chairing PCC meetings I think I would say that the times when we have most clearly known God’s very specific guidance have been the times when we have been most desperate. God loves it when we simply have nowhere else to turn but to him: that’s why he allows us to get there from time to time. But perhaps it can also give some help to those who are parents about how we treat our kids. I realised pretty early on as a parent that the most important part of my role was always to treat my kids as God would treat them, so that I would reveal through earthly parenting what divine parenting was like, and how my imperfect fatherhood was completed and perfected in the fatherhood of God. That meant, of course, that I had to know how God would treat them in any given situation, which meant that my own discipleship became a vital task if my parenting was to be the best it could. We rarely think of parenting as a theological task, but it really is, and it’s one which doesn’t end when our kids leave home.

Therefore I’m reassured by the first part of the Psalm. Unless God is involved in my parenting, unless he builds me up so that I can build up others, it’s all in vain. Like all parents I felt, and continue to feel, daunted by the task, so it’s great to know that behind all my hard work, joy and tears is the wisdom of a loving Father who, if I let him, will work together with me to build a strong family. You’ll have to ask Steve, Paul and Vicki how well God, their mum and I have done between us!

Reflections on Discipleship – Evil in the eyes of the Lord

My job at the moment is developing discipleship in one Anglican diocese, so as you can imagine I do quite a bit of thinking about what discipleship is, what it means, and what it looks like. Here are some random thoughts, gleaned from my reflection on the Bible and current thinking …

Funny how things work out. Last week in this series I had a rant about parenting and discipleship, and elsewhere I’ve been blogging about the Deuteronomic history and the decline and fall of the Israelite empire. What an exciting life I lead! Then this morning we were reading about Manesseh, the king of Judah who led Israel into occult practices so that ‘they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before them’. The interesting part of this tragic tale, though, comes in 2 Chronicles 33:3 where we discover that Manasseh was the son of Hezekiah. Reading on, we discover that after his radical turn-around and repentance following Assyrian torture, he was succeeded by his son Amon, who again ‘did evil in the eyes of the Lord’.

I made the point when writing about this era of history that although there were some high points and some godly reforming kings, the general trend was downhill and where there were reforms they were usually short-lived and only lasted as long as the good king in question. So Joash, who repaired and re-opened the Temple, was succeeded by his son Amaziah, who, while he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, failed to stamp out idolatry. Hezekiah, as we have seen, was followed by Manesseh, the nadir of evil, and the other great reformer, Josiah, was succeeded by his son Jehoahaz, who lasted in his evil practices for 3 months, before being succeeded in turn by Jehoiakim, who again ‘did evil in the eyes of the Lord’.

I couldn’t help but think that wonderful though their attempts to renew and reform the nation were, as parents these godly kings left a certain amount to be desired. They had clearly failed totally to form their children as godly people, with a heart for the Lord and a desire to see the nation blessed and prospering through its faithfulness to God. In fact we see this quite a bit in the pages of Scripture, and again it screams out at me about the vital importance of discipling our kids. What’s the point of being godly and wise, of seeking to bring health to our communities, if within a whisker of our death things revert to how they were, or worse?

I sense from the evidence in last week’s blog that we have a serious problem in the church, a massive loss of nerve among parents, and a lot of work to do among young couples on the edge of being parents. One commentator on 2 Chronicles says that we shouldn’t be too hard on poor Manesseh, because the political scene at the time made godliness very difficult. Does that let us off the hook, because we live in a time when political correctness has eaten away at stable family life almost to the point of extinction? Or do we not need to bring much further up our agenda in the church the equipping of parents faithfully to disciple their kids? The life of our nation might just be at stake.

(That’s enough parenting rants. Ed.)

Reflections on Discipleship – Teach your Children

My job at the moment is developing discipleship in one Anglican diocese, so as you can imagine I do quite a bit of thinking about what discipleship is, what it means, and what it looks like. Here are some random thoughts, gleaned from my reflection on the Bible and current thinking …

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.          (Deut 6)

 We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his power, and the wonders he has done. 5 He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, 6 so that the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. 7 Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget his deeds but would keep his commands.                                                                                               (Ps 78)

It was my privilege recently to attend a conference following up the Anecdote to Evidence report. It was a great day, but there was one moment of deep shock and sadness for me. The one major headline of the whole day was that as a church if we don’t begin to take seriously the desperate need to engage with younger generations, we simply have no future. But one speaker asked the question ‘How have we got to this stage?’ Why are parents not passing on Christian commitment to their children?

He spoke of some research in which parents were given a list of ‘values’ – nice, positive qualities such as kindness, respect, honesty, diligence, law-abidingness (if that’s a real word), and also religious faith. The parents were asked to list the top five of these qualities which they would like to see imbued in their children as they grew up. The results were shocking:

  •  Of those who called themselves ‘Anglicans’ only 11% had ‘faith’ in their top five
  • Of those who were ‘active Anglicans’ (attending church regularly) only 28% did, and
  • Of ‘Committed Anglicans’ only 36% did.

Anglicans don’t seem to care whether or not their children grow up with faith! This news cut me to the core. As I pondered it, I reflected that the figures spoke of even committed Christians who regarded their faith as an optional extra, a leisure activity, or a lifestyle choice which, in our tolerant age, they would not be so presumptuous as to try to force on anyone else, even their own kids.

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I am aware that there are many many parents in the churches of our land who know the grief of seeing their children grow up to abandon the religion in which they have been faithfully brought up, and choose lifestyles which they would not want for them. I am sometimes made to feel guilty because all three of my grown-up children are as passionate about God as they ever were, and all seeking to serve him in different ways as their top priority. I also know that for many parents of lost children the reaction is shoulder-shrugging resignation, because the alternative is far too uncomfortable to contemplate.

But if I could address new parents of those contemplating parenthood, I would point them to the passages above and tell them that their single highest calling in life is to make sure that their children have vibrant faith, and that God’s way of achieving this is through parents, and not through Church or Sunday School. If you feel inadequate to this task , welcome to the club. You need to attend seriously to your own discipleship, because you won’t create in your kids what isn’t in you.

And if I could address parents with kids no longer living for God, I would call them to deep, grief-stricken and anguished prayer and intercession, rather than merely believing that ‘everyone does it nowadays’. I know this is uncomfortable: I’ve got myself into deep trouble more than once for saying this, but unless we start taking our children’s faith seriously, there quite simply is no future.