Whose Children Are We?
1 John 3:1-17
A Sermon by the Reverend Ron Parker

As I wind up an extension cord in my basement, I notice myself doing it exactly the way my father taught me more than fifty years ago:  put the two ends together, wrap it from wrist to elbow, slide the loop through the center of the coil and over the top, cinch it down.

Not only that … as I hold the cord, I notice that the wrinkles on my hands have begun to resemble the ones I watched coil those cords a half-century earlier.

Whether we like it or not and for good or for ill, all of us are our parent’s children.

Sometimes it’s a blessing.  Sometimes we have to fight against it.

Loving and wise parents jump-start love and wisdom in the next generation.  Abusive or addicted parents require their children’s life-long vigilance against repetition.

These are facts of life, but they need not be fate.

I saw Senator Ted Kennedy on TV this week.   Suffering from a malignant brain tumor and walking with a cane, he mounted the podium in the Senate to speak on behalf of a bill that he had co-sponsored creating a national service program for young people.  

Teddy was last-born in the large family of a father who sent a powerful mixed message to his children – grab all the power you can and devote your life to public service.  He was always overshadowed by his siblings – one brother who died in war, two assassinated in the midst of public service, one sister lost to a botched lobotomy, another to a plane crash.

Then his came Teddy’s own checkered career:  flunking out of school, caught cheating on an exam, leaving the scene at Chappaquidic where Mary Lou Kopechne died.

What kept him going?  He certainly didn’t need his paltry Senate salary.

I can only think that there was something of his father’s legacy that lived on in him and in the end was transformed for good:  use the power you have been given for the public good.

***

The writer of the first letter of John we heard earlier – probably not the John of the Gospel – calls on this powerful parental metaphor to speak of the influence of our relationship to God:  something in our bones or our unconscious, but also something to be appropriated.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:2)

I take this to mean that we all have a good start, but what we make of it is up to us.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

Of course being God’s children, even claiming to know that we are God’s children, is no guarantee.  Fifteen years ago this month, we watched with horror, the genocide in Rawanda.

In The Christian Century a few years back, theologian David Gushee asked how such brutality could have occurred in what he called “the most Christianized country in Africa.”  Ninety percent of Rwandans claimed to be Christians.  “And yet,” Gushee wrote, “all that Christianity did not prevent genocide, a genocide which church officials did little to resist, in which large numbers of Christians participated, and in which, according to African Rights, ‘more people died in churches and parishes than anywhere else.’” (“Church Failure, Remembering Rwanda,” April 20, 2004, p. 28)

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

Of course, the Rwanda genocide is no isolated incident.  The Holocaust of Christian Germany, the Inquisition of Christian Spain, the witch hunts of Puritan Salem, and on and on.

So what does it mean that “…we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

What it means is that we have the possibility, but it is up to us to appropriate it.

Make no mistake – this is a better scenario than the one offered by those who say that our only possibility is the inclination toward self-interest and brutality.

This is the good news – we have been given a chance to live for good.

So how do we do it?

We do it by continuing to grow into God’s children.

And how do we do that?

We do it more by imitating images than by obeying rules.

In other words, we become more like our parents – the parents we have and the parents we choose.

We are all, to some degree, stuck with the parents we have.  But we also have a chance to choose the parents who will influence us.

The friends we hang out with, the mentors we choose, the novels we read, the TV shows we watch – these are all the parents of who we are becoming.  We start out as God’s children, but the other parents that we adopt are powerful forces in persons we become.

Yesterday, Ruth and I went the Greek Theater to hear the Dalai Lama. – How many of you were there? ….

He talked about the importance of compassion as the way to peace.  I couldn’t agree with him more.  I think I have heard His Holiness give approximately the same talk two or three times before.  So why go hear him again?

I think that I don’t go to hear the Dalai Lama so much for what he has to say as to soak up who he is.  His humility, compassion, humor, commitment, and openness to all sorts of people are infectious. After you have hung out with him for an hour or so, it’s hard to look at others as enemies or people to be exploited.  So I’ve come to think of the Dalai Lama as one of my adopted parents.

One of the things he told us yesterday was that we can’t just decide to be compassionate, but that it takes practice.  Practice is what we are doing when we are imitating our biological parents and our adopted parents.

And, of course, it follows that our own children and all the other young people who are watching us will learn by imitating us.  We can lay down the law of honesty every day, but if we are dishonest ourselves, our children will learn from that.  We can tell them to be generous and share their toys, but if we are stingy with what we have, that’s what our children will learn.

They are our children now, who they will become has not yet been revealed.

One more thing I have learned from the Dalai Lama ... his humility.  He often ends a talk with these words (which I end with this morning):

“I hope this talk has been helpful to you; but if it hasn’t, just forget about it.”