Troon Old Parish Church

Sermon preached  on 5 September 2010

Judges 13 v 8 ‘Teach us what to do with the boy.’

 There’s scarce a sentence at all in the Bible that could be more easily transported straight into our own times. Children, youngsters, teenagers – and people like we adults here are no different from Manoah in asking and wondering how to handle them – how to cope with them – how to do things for them that are for the best.

Teach us what to do. All the more so teach us, in a society which looks on with horror at the answer given by the pervert and paedophile – in a society which is gripped by common despair at the catalogue of child victims of adult crime – in a society which finds it easier to wash its hands of the rebellious young than to face up to the issues many young people feel go unaddressed – in a society where our schools try very hard to instil the moral dimension into the lives of their students but often receive less than full support from the homes where these children live – in a society where parents can look the minister in the eyes when taking solemn baptismal vows and then proceed to do nothing about them – in a society where children can be dropped off at a Sunday School to be picked up an  hour later after what is a free hour of Sunday morning child-minding....in that sort of society which is our sort of society, it’s good to ask the question again: Teach us what to do with this girl, teach us what to do with this boy.

So we can ask the question today – but we can also be encouraged. For I am persuaded that there are good parents in this place even now who know the answer: and there’s a church here in this parish and community trying to respond to the need: and there is a Sunday School here and a Youth Fellowship here with outstanding leadership whose work in this coming year we want today to commend to Almighty God. And there are days when we talk about good things in the church – good things we do and try to do – and today we have a very evident sign of such good things.

So Manoah’s plea was ‘Teach me what to do’. Given a son to raise in times that were really hard, times when people could very easily have made excuses for not being too concerned for the boy’s spiritual welfare, nonetheless ‘teach me’...not about the boy’s school or career path or sporting achievement.......but about his soul and his spirit and his development into a man of faith. And Manoah did a good job, for the boy was Samson – a man who grew in God to become a hero of faith.

It was the same sort of story with Samuel’s parents, Hannah and Elkanah – they did a great job in putting an awareness of God into the mind and the soul of little Samuel so that, when the nation was foundering in godlessness, he was there as a rock and foundation for their future.

And Jeremiah too – a son of the Manse in modern parlance, growing up in a home where God was honoured and loved – and so in the midst of the calamity that overtook the people when Israel was defeated in a catastrophic war and Jerusalem captured and the people herded into exile, Jeremiah was there, the young adult preacher, giving the word that was so needed for the start of what God called the new covenant with the people.

And then what about the home in Nazareth. Don’t you think Mary and Joseph prayed for the same thing as Manoah had done?  Given someone patently special into their charge - aware of that from the first second of His life in the Bethlehem stable – and though the Bible is almost silent about the years of His childhood, we can’t begin to imagine that Mary and Joseph did nothing. That because Jesus was seemingly the Son of God, they did nothing. That born to be one of us in flesh and blood, He didn’t need to be told the stories of faith....no, no....for sure the prayer was daily on their lips: Teach us what to do with the boy....and because of it and because they did it, a boy became a man who became the saviour He had been destined always to be.

My friends, it is the mark of greatness in parenthood to want to nurture your son or daughter in these things of faith which will never perish or fail. And I believe too that there comes the day when you and I must look the great Advocate in the face and He will, in love, ask us to account for who we were in this first part of our life and what we did.
And some may say that I gave my son friendship – I gave my daughter love – I gave my child the chance to work in comfort and retire with plenty – I spent time playing with them and I enjoyed holidays with them – and when they rebelled, I tried harder than most to understand them. But no, I never saw fit, or I never had the time to tell them of God, or to set them an example of adult faith, or to challenge them to face up to most of the deepest issues in life. I didn’t do that. I didn’t ask for help to do it. And the Advocate will forgive us for that is His nature. But He’ll forgive us with a heaviness in His heart and a redness in His eye.

And so here today we meet in the fullness of worship and the joy of practising our faith. We meet, as I always say, as God’s family in worship. We dedicate our Sunday School and our Youth Fellowship to God’s care and we ask God to go on teaching us what to do with these young ones.

So a handful of scattered thoughts about what we might think of teaching. And first what about something of the joy of religion. I know we’re not immediately seen as a nation where the first adjective to use about our practice of religion would be joy....but why not? I know of a friend whose weekly diet of religion in her home church is to do with death, even in the time set aside for a word to the children. And I’m told the whole atmosphere is a weekly one of dourness and depression. And that attitude needs to be binned.

Rather, the joy of our religion and faith – the joy of talking about life in Christ and opportunities for people of faith. And even if we know that death is a reality for us all, nonetheless its but a mere comma length interruption in the continuing glorious story of our life in Christ. So teach them the joy of religion.

And then, secondly, teach them the friendship of religion. I know that someone once said, I can’t recall who it was, that our faith is far better caught than taught. And surely that’s so. Not just a childhood for learning stories about God with a sort of examination rigour about it all – though learning is an important part of our faith – but a childhood which also teaches them that God is love and the church is love and His people are love. And then perhaps we could welcome into adulthood a generation a bit less suspicious and a bit less repressed than our own can sometimes be.

And thirdly, teach them the uniqueness of our religion. Oh yes, it’s the done thing now to teach children to respect t the integrity of those who have other religions or no religion. But that need not stop us from teaching the uniqueness of our faith – that we are not, as many a school curriculum might tacitly suggest, one of many spiritual options. Teach them that Jesus Christ is the Way and the Truth and the Life. Teach them that mission remains an important part of our faith. Teach them to proclaim God’s word in Christ Jesus by word and by the way in which they live. Teach them that we’re all called to walk the road of the Church that is unaltered in its direction since the day of Pentecost – no matter that now we live in a relativist world.

And then, fourthly, teach them – and this maybe the most important of all, teach them that religion means every bit as much to you today as you want it to mean to them. It’s a devastatingly negative message to give your child if you bring him to Sunday School and them go away to do patently more important and patently more adult things. It tells than that the faith is of lesser importance and ultimately grown up people neither need it nor want it. There’s no more eloquent word that for a child to sit beside mum or dad or both and pray together in church – nothing more vital than sharing bread and wine together as they grow up. So teach them that God s at the heart of our life....and there’s an even better chance that He will end up at the heart of theirs too.

There’s a lovely story told by John Gibson Lockhart in his Life of Sir Walter Scott. It deals with the first time that Lockhart met Scott in Edinburgh at a dinner party. Talk got around to the contemporary poets who then abounded in Britain. One of the men present was the Principal of the Theology Faculty at St Andrew’s University and in conversation about Byron, the Principal noted that though Byron had been in St Andrews, he hadn’t met him face to face. He’d only seen what he looked like on a sort of pencil print. And Scott looked at him and said: Professor, the prints give you no idea of him. The lustre is there, but it is not lighted up. It’s a good image – a sort of parable, if you like.

Today, as we look round our community and see the abundance of youth in our midst, fresh and good and ready – so many of them – to build a better tomorrow than we have built today – as we look round, the lustre is surely there. But it is our task, as men and women in Christ, as members of the parish church in our town, as teachers and leaders of the young...it is our task to light them up – shining beacons, shining lights of the rising generations.