Texts: Isaiah 43: 1-21; Luke 1: 57-70
Any of us who has held a newborn, whether ours or a baby belonging to another person -- interesting phrase “belonging” regarding a baby -- wonders what kind of child this baby will become. At Casa there’s rarely a day when I do not get to hold a newborn or small baby. I enjoy it: the smell of baby powder, the head nestled into my shoulder, the gurgling I sometimes hear, and even, from time to time, the wet burps that I have to wipe up. It reminds me of what I experienced with my own children and granddaughters, especially now that my children are grown and my granddaughters are now young women.
In this morning’s reading, we hear of different responses to the birth of Elizabeth’s baby. First the neighbors in this village in the hill country are mystified at the name chosen for the child. The English name John comes from Johannes, the Latin form derived from the Greek Ioannes, itself derived from the Hebrew יוֹחָנָן, transliterated as Yochanan, meaning “The LORD is gracious.”
Although the name occurs a few times in Hebrew Scripture, its popularity is connected to the historical figures we know as the Baptizer and one of Jesus’ disciples. We really don’t think much of the meaning of names in today’s world, but in the world of the ancients, names indicated a great deal including the expectations of what the bearer of the name would become. We usually think of John the Baptizer in terms of what he became, but how do we think of our own children or any child that is born?
As adults in a community, a society, whether parents or not, we have hopes of what a child will become. We hope that they will survive infancy, certainly a reasonable hope in our society but not in many other parts of the world where, much like ancient Palestine, close to half the babies did not survive the first year. We hope that children will have the opportunity to grow and develop, go to school and become educated, and become positive contributions to society.
Those hopes are largely determined by class, race, and often gender, and not just in other parts of the world. We know a white child in Middletown begins life with far more advantages than a minority child in Newark. In addition to the disparity in income and education, a child in Newark is far more likely to be the victim of a shooting, often, but not always, intended for him or her.
Then there are, of course, children as the victims of war. We see them as the photo of a drowned child or the child sitting in a chair with blood streaming down his face. The photographer captures the images of the victims of starvation, as in the iconic photo of the vulture waiting for the Somali child to keel over, dead. These children have no future reflecting their societies. These images stay in our minds as we consider the future of our own children.
Very few, if any, of us would have given the response of Zechariah at the circumcision of the baby named John. Not too many parents want their children to grow up and become activists in a society or nation where the price can be the child’s life. Aside from the fact that this passage may have been inserted to create the setting for the birth of Jesus, the passage, cobbled together from various Psalms and the passage we heard this morning also gives a startling picture of parental aspirations for a child.
As we look ahead for our own children in the broader sense of the word -- the children born into this America and this world in the 21st century, we often pause to wonder what kind of world will these children create. We also wonder what kind of world they are being born into. It is certainly not a world filled with love, the theme of this last Sunday of Advent; rather it is a world filled with the conflicts caused by ethnic and religious tensions, racism, and prejudice against peoples who may not fit within the demands of the power structure.
Many of us have worked in different ways to create a more hospitable world for our children, some by participating in political activities, others by being big sisters, and others by helping to feed the hungry. However, many of us shudder at increased international tensions and war, desecration of the environment, and the polarization of our own culture here at home and the effects of these events on future generations.
We often have the illusion that we can control the future. However, we often cannot even control our present. Often, the forces around us seem larger than us and often beyond our control. It is this illusion of being able to control our present and future that has led to this deep polarization in our society -- and in the world. A few years ago in the New York Times Magazine, Jim Yardley who had been spent the last thirteen years as a foreign correspondent for The Times, returned to an America he did not recognize. His piece is worth reading.
He writes: “We weren’t completely cut off. Most summers we visited family and friends in the States; the kids streamed the American shows; my wife listened to ‘Morning Edition.” I worked for an American company, for American bosses, and I wrote articles trying to explain the world to a mostly American audience. All of this created the gentle illusion that we were still truly connected to home.” But, upon his return, he realized that the country he left was no longer the same. So he decided to take a 29 day “sprint,” as he called it through 11 states and four time zones to rediscover America. He did so because he was concerned about the America his children live in now and how it will shape his children’s lives. He doesn’t have any easy answers for us as neither did Alex de Tocqueville when he made his journey through the United States in 1831. As de Tocqueville noted, “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder than learning how to use that freedom.” Many of his comments apply to America today.
Back to the original question: What kind of child will this be? What kind of children will we create by the way we raise them? What kinds of values do we want to instill in them? We may say we know the answers to these questions, for surely we want to raise children who are loving and caring, who will feed the hungry and clothe the naked, who will care for the environment, but the pressures of the larger society impinge on our ability to do this.
We know for sure that we cannot just pull children out of the larger society as was tried in the communes of the late 60s and early 70s. We need to raise the future generation in the larger society so that they will be able to bring about a gentler world. The way to raise children comes down to how we ourselves live our own lives. The question for us is how we respond to the vitriol and hatred we are seeing in the media which is such a large influence.
We know that already, we say, but so much gets lost as we struggle to live our own lives. The questions of what kind of children will we have raised in our society largely depends on what kind of society are we giving them. Over the last thirty years or so we have seen not only a rise in income disparity but a change in how we ourselves have viewed what we call the American dream.
The phrase “American dream” was popularized by the historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America, where he wrote of “a land where life should be better and richer and fuller for every man [sic], with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” He contrasted this to Europe where class divisions were fixed, but then he later added something even more important.
“The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”
This ideal has been reflected in the greatest of our writers, both of fiction and advocacy. Martin Luther King noted that our ideals were “dug deep” in the wells of our founding documents based on the “sacred values” of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Certainly those values can be found in every religious tradition and as we look to a future for our children, those values need to be reiterated so we know what kind of society our children will inherit. That is our responsibility as the communal parents of a new generation.
Those values cannot be destroyed by just one person or even a small group of people who have no stake in their importance. But the dream of freedom takes work and eternal vigilance, as one of our founders commented. So that is what we are called to do in this season of Advent: to be in expectation of the One who is our guide in maintaining the values that are most important for the future of our children. Then we can continue to create a world fit for the future.
Let us pray: Eternal God who imbued in a sense of your righteousness and justice, help us to live the values that we espouse. In the name of the One who embodied those values, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.