Justice for all

Today we continue our series called ‘All About Love,’ which comes from a book written by bell hooks. We are not doing the usual ‘love everybody’ song and dance, though. We are diving deep to make it clear what love really means. Last week we looked at how a clearer definition of love can help us choose well with the actions we take. Love is not abuse, love is not neglect; love is when we seek the spiritual growth of ourselves and those around us. When we are focused on whether every action we take will help someone grow spiritually or not, that’s when we can love well.

I know for myself this redefinition of love has helped reset my actions toward others. In the last week I’ve caught myself so much quicker when I shift into an unhealthy mindset. Having a clear goal, to always nurture my spirituality or someone else’s, is literally changing my life. Too often we’ve let the world define love for us, so that getting so angry you scream at them is seen as normal. Hitting people sometimes seems ordinary. Church, that is not love, and we can do better. We can love people well every day when we commit to helping them grow spiritually with every action we take.

So, now we look at another aspect of love, this time its about justice. Love works to bring justice, which means we do what we can to make things right. And we are going to come at this idea from a very unique perspective. We are exploring how justice makes things right for children. We just had our Vacation Bible School program this past week. We’ve welcomed fifty-plus little ones into our building, so what a great time to ask how we do right by them. How can we bring justice for all, including children?

We are going to hear our scripture for today from Charlene. She is a new member here at our church, so I am especially grateful to her for boldly standing in front of the church to share God’s word with all of you. We are going to hear from the Gospel according to Matthew. We don’t know who originally wrote this book, but early scholars said they thought it was the Disciple of Jesus named Matthew, so we started putting that at the front of the book. Matthew is writing to Christians in conflict with Jewish leadership, and wants people to hear Jesus’ teachings so they can become disciples of Jesus, too. This is Jesus teaching his disciples what it means to truly be great. Hear now the word of the Lord.

Matthew 18:1–9 NRSV

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes! “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than to have two hands or two feet and to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into the hell of fire.

And from

Ephesians 6:4 NRSV

And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

The word of the Lord for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Lets join together in prayer: God, may we be an inclusive community passionately following Jesus Christ. As we pursue real justice for all people, let it be an expression of our love for you. Help us to love others well, as you love each and every one of us. Open our hearts to your word. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.

I grew up in the 1980’s and the 80’s were a very interesting time. That’s when we were able to figure out a lot of things and begin some advances in society. The 80’s saw the start to Microsoft windows, mobile phones and Nintendo. Michael Jordan started playing in the NBA. The Berlin Wall was torn down. So many things were happening that would move us forward, but there were also a lot of things we still had to figure out. Things like parenting. I remember when I was little my parents didn’t have to do a lot to discipline me. I had two loud and rowdy older brothers who took up most of their attention. But there were certainly times where all of us children would get smacked on our behinds with a wooden spoon. Worse than the spoon, though, was when my dad would threaten us with the belt. He would do this particular thing, where he’d hold both ends of the belt in one hand and grab the middle with the other and make the belt crack over and over. That’s when you knew you were really in trouble. And I don’t know how many times he ever hit me, but I do recall one time. I don’t remember what I did, or what he said; I just remember that my dad hit me with a belt over and over as I cried.

Well, there was actually something far worse than either the spoon or the belt from dad. Sometimes we would go and visit my grandfather at his farm, and Grandpa didn’t mess around. Grandpa also had terrible aim. If he was going to spank you, he would hit you as hard as he could on your thighs and on your back. All it took was one spanking and you would behave the rest of your time on the farm.

Many of us, I’m sure, could tell similar stories. You were disciplined with physical pain so that you would learn to behave. This is called corporal punishment and used to be very common, especially because it got immediate results. If a child was hit for misbehaving, they would almost always change their behavior and do what you told them to do. Not only is this discipline still legal, in about half the country a public school can use spankings to discipline a student. That may surprise some of you, but perhaps even more bizarre is that we have an amendment to the Constitution of the United States that prevents “cruel and unusual punishments” but the Supreme Court ruled that this law of the land does not apply to students in school and that schools can hit children without a parent’s permission.

I think a lot of us would draw the line there. If a teacher hit our child, we’d be meeting with the principle and calling for the teacher to be fired. But strangely, we don’t apply that same standard in our own homes. There’s a story of a woman who met with her neighborhood friends. They were all parents of children and were talking about this kind of physical punishment of their children. Just about everyone had some kind of experience of being whipped or beaten as children and the people over thirty all agreed, “yes, physical punishment is a must.” The men were the most vocal in defending it, but even the women said hitting is needed as a last resort. That’s when one woman stood up in defense of these children. As one man bragged about the aggressive beatings he had received from his mother and that “they had been good for him,” she interrupted him and suggested that maybe he might not be such a misogynistic woman-hater if he hadn’t been beaten by a woman as a child.

I’m sure that didn’t go over well with him. I’m sure most people looked at her in stunned silence. But even then, the next person bragged how she never hit her children. Instead, if they misbehaved, she would clamp down on their flesh, pinching them as hard as she could until they got the message. Folks, if I told you that I did that to my wife, you would not tolerate it. Let me be clear, I would never do that, but if part of a story I told here involved me inflicting that kind of pain on Emily, you would be hauling me in for a meeting to see if this is the right church for me to pastor. You’d be calling my boss telling them, “hey, look, this guy hurts his wife. He can’t preach here.” And if that’s the standard for two adults, why is it so different when we are talking about children?

I think this is an important point. We seem to be ready to justify violence towards children, but violence breeds violence. There was a man in prison who noticed that all the inmates were covered with scars. He had assumed, like most of us would, that these scars were from their adult lives, from crimes or fights with others. But as he read up on the subject and spoke with the men in prison, he came to realize that the scars were actually from their childhoods. They were given to them by mothers and fathers and other caregivers that would physically beat their children into submission. Violence leads to more violence.

And I think on some level we know this is true. My parents would tell me, just before spanking me, “this is going to hurt me more than its going to hurt you.” They were saying inflicting physical harm on their child does psychological injury to the parents. Nobody wants to hurt their children. No one wants to physically punish their children if they don’t have to. Its simply what many of us were taught. And we see the immediate behavioral change after a physical punishment and we think, “oh, maybe this does work?” Maybe spanking my kids will lead to hitting them less in the long run. I can certainly appreciate that mindset.

Now, I don’t want to pretend like I have all this figured out myself. We don’t spank or hit our kids, but I have absolutely bear hugged my kid into submission. Was that the right move? Probably not, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. What’s most important to me is not telling you how you should raise your kids, but to be very clear about what the Bible says on this topic.

In fact, I’d guess there’s more than one person who has been thinking in their head about a verse I heard a lot growing up. My parents quoted to me time and time again, “spare the rod, spoil the child.” The idea is if you don’t use the rod to hit your child, to discipline them now, then later on they will “spoil” and be far worse than they are now. But here’s the thing, when you look at that quote you’ll find this wisdom from on high isn’t even in the Bible. Its actually from the 16th century when someone was trying to summarize their interpretation of other sayings from the Bible. Here are the actual verses:

Proverbs 29:15 NRSV

The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a mother is disgraced by a neglected child.

Proverbs 23:13 NRSV

Do not withhold discipline from your children; if you beat them with a rod, they will not die.

Proverbs 13:24 NRSV

Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them.

Maybe you would say “spare the rod, spoil the child” is a fair summary of those verses, but I know when I was growing up I heard “rod” and I thought of a metal bar, a king’s scepter or maybe a heavy stick, but in biblical times the rod had a very different meaning. The rod was actually the shepherd’s staff. It was curved at the end specifically to hook an animal in danger and bring it back to safety. It was also used to separate thick undergrowth to find a lost sheep. You could use it as a weapon, sure, but not to hit the sheep; no shepherd would do that. It was used to hit predators and protect the sheep from death. Go back to those verses with this in mind. Even ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ looks totally different now. If you spare the rod (if you do not rescue your child from danger, if you do not search for them when they are lost, if you do not protect them from dangerous predators), the child will be spoiled, (they will be destroyed).

The scriptures aren’t advocating violence toward children; they are advocating nurture and protection like a shepherd to his sheep. Jesus points in the same direction in Matthew 18. The disciples are arguing about who is the most important. They want to know how they rank among themselves, and Jesus brings in front of them a child. Children, at that time, had the lowest rank of any citizen. They were utterly powerless; they had no protection without their parents.

Jesus is so protective of these most vulnerable citizens he says it would be better if we ended our lives than to cause them to sin, meaning, fall away from the faith. Then he goes on to include not just children, but everyone who is weak. If your hand causes you to lead others away from God, cut it off! If its the eyes, gouge them out! Do these things to protect the weak! You must shield them from the enemy! Now let me be clear, Jesus is not saying we should kill ourselves or cut our hands off. This is hyperbole. This is a dramatic statement meant to help us take it seriously. Children, and the weak among us, need our help. They need us so desperately that we must act on their behalf. Stop worrying about whose the best or brightest. Stop bickering about the little details of life. Let’s get to work on helping these kids know Jesus and making this world a better place for them.

So I mentioned we just had our Vacation Bible School program this week. I have to say, I am very impressed with the volunteers in our program. I hate to say it out loud cause I don’t want to jinx it, but when Chris, our VBS coordinator, called staff meetings at 8:30 in the morning…everybody showed up on time! I have never seen that before with VBS volunteers. When we sing and dance all the crew leaders and adults were singing and dancing! They were an incredible example to the children. This has been an awesome week of connecting with the children in this community and sharing with them the love of Jesus.

We had a moment, though, in one of our volunteer meetings where someone said, “I had a student say, ‘I don’t believe in any of this stuff. None of this matters.’” When she first heard it she was stunned, so she wanted to know what to say; how do you respond to a child who says ‘I don’t care about God.’ And I shared with the group, look, we want that child here. We love them and care for them and want them to know God loves them and cares for them, too. If they don’t believe today, does that mean we somehow love them less? No, of course not! We might pursue them even more, because we are going to go after the lost sheep! We are going to work even harder to protect them from the enemy and the ills that are out there that they may not even understand yet! I’ve seen a fifth and sixth grader who hates God go through confirmation classes and become a ninth and tenth grader who is deeply religious, pursuing God’s love for everyone. That’s what can happen when we take our job seriously to protect and rescue and search for the lost. When I stopped talking in the meeting, I could see people nodding their heads. Yeah, that’s right. We do keep loving them. Their doubt doesn’t make us shy away one bit. That’s been our approach all week - love these little ones with the love of God, no matter how tired we might be, no matter how challenging their responses are, keep searching, keep rescuing, keep loving them.

Let’s end with this: there was a middle school student who was misbehaving in class. The teacher had told him to take his hat off and he outright refused. That meant he was sent to the principal’s office. With the principal, the young boy, Anthony, was just as defiant. He refused to take his hat off, so the principal, instead of berating him, instead of demanding that he respect his authority and remove his hat immediately, asked a question. He said, “What's wrong? This is a pretty simple request, so why won’t you take your hat off? And Anthony explained that his parents took him to get a haircut and he didn't like the results. He was too embarrassed to take his hat off!

But listen to this, the principal had been cutting people’s hair since he was a teenager. He showed the boy the hair cuts he had given to his own children and said, “If I go home and get my clippers and fix your hair, will you go back to class?” The boy hesitated, but he agreed. After calling the parents to get their permission, the principal got his clippers, cut the boys hair with style and sent him back to class. No problems with his hat whatsoever. The principal used his gifts to bless a child, to work through a problem without violence, without threats or conning. He found the root of the problem and he fixed it for a child who could not do it on their own.

That’s what we are called to do. That’s what love for the weak among us looks like. We keep working for answers, knowing that violence isn’t going to solve anything. Jesus invites us to seek and rescue those who can’t do it for themselves. May we be a place that nurtures all those who are vulnerable. May we always offer God’s love with justice no matter the circumstance. Amen? Amen.

VBS video?

(prayer for families…true religion is to care for orphans and widows; its not about our biological connection. Its about our spiritual connection as the church of Christ).