Kendall's Notebook Page 3
Sermon Title: Parenting
Some sharing by Kendall and Cheryl Brown
Delivered on Red Door Pre-School Sunday
February 9, 2003
Text: Mark 1: 29-38
A number of worshippers commented that I seemed to be in pretty good form in the pulpit last Sunday. You didn't have to act quite so surprised! The only problem with a Sunday like last Sunday for me is trying to figure out how I am going to top it the next Sunday. I stewed and fretted until Tuesday or Wednesday without finding a solution. Then I figured it out. - I will get someone else to preach today. So today, I have asked Cheryl to share in this pulpit presentation. It is a sure bet that with her on board, we will do as well today as last week.
Our Gospel lesson from Mark today, takes us to a very appropriate place on this Sunday when we are celebrating the Red Door Pre-School ministry here at Christ Church. All of our lessons this past month have been from the first chapter of Mark. Each lesson has offered another little scene in the opening weeks of Jesus ministry in Galilee. Last week, the lesson took us to the synagogue where Jesus publicly exorcised a demon from the possessed man. The synagogue was crowded with people and very noisy.
Today's lesson takes us to the quiet and private interior of Peter's mother-in-law's home. Peter's mother-in-law is ill, knocked out of commission with a fever. Jesus with a simple touch, quietly healed her. Jesus did more for her that day than just heal her of a physical illness. In those days, to play the role of host to an important guest in your home was a high honor. It was an honor that someone like Peter's mother-in-law would have been distressed not to be able to carry out. By healing her, Jesus enabled her to be the person of value and worth in the household and world that God intended her to be.
In that sense, Jesus role modeled parenting in Peter's household for it is the purpose of every household to enable the home's members to be the persons of worth and value that God intends for each one of us to be. This is not only true of parenting but it is also true of marriage. Even if there are no children in the household, the spiritual purpose of the home is to help and enable our partners to be all that God has put into their lives to be.
In one sense, I believe that Jesus had a leg up on the rest of us in the exercise of his parental role as we see it in today's lesson. As we have been encountering Jesus this past month in scene after scene at the very beginning of his ministry, something fascinating strikes me about Jesus. Jesus is the same person on the opening day of his ministry when he went to the River Jordan to be baptized as he was on the last day of his ministry when he died on the cross.
He carries the same authority. He has as much confidence in himself in the Capernaum synagogue as he had three years later before Pilate in Jerusalem. Jesus is as wise, as faith-filled, as caring and loving, as determined and directed on the first day of his public as he was on the last.
Jesus did not need any on the job training. He was always at his prime. He didn't have to learn the hard way by experience or go through the pain of gaining insight by making monstrous mistakes. Jesus didn't have to grow with the job. He seemed to be all grown up from the very beginning.
The biggest mistake that any parent, father or mother, can make is to forget that when it comes to parenting, you aren't Jesus.
We have to grow in our parenting skills. We don't become parents fully equipped to be parents as Jesus seemed to be fully equipped for his ministry from the very beginning. We will make mistakes. And lo and behold our children will be strong enough to survive our mistakes.
Some parents' parenting goes far beyond making a few mistakes. Some parents are total disasters as parents and their children survive and many grow up very successfully even without any real help from, and with no thanks to, Ma and Dad. Children are tough.
Growing children need growing parents. Growing is tough and sometimes it is tempting to delude ourselves that we really are like Jesus, no one needs to tell us anything, we know it all, there is no place where I need to grow.
If the choice is made to grow and the commitment is kept, the rewards will be great and far beyond anything that you could imagine or anticipate.
Before Cheryl and I became parents, there was one thing we both knew about our lives. We both held a burning desire that the experience of growing up and home-life be different, substantially different in our own home, from what we had experienced as children. Last summer, Cheryl shared with you some of her childhood story that included years in a children's home and the wonders of having a completely absent father and an alcoholic step-father.
On my side there were a few issues too. I grew up in a parsonage where family life always played second fiddle to church life. Our home was no more private than the local public library. In fact, I discovered that I could get more privacy in the library than at home – thus beginning my love affair with books, reading and scholarship. I had a few toys but none were really mine. The 150 kids in our Sunday School could be with their parents dropping by any hour of any day. And when they arrived, the children would head for my bedroom, which for them was just another church playroom. If the library was open and I could get away with it, I jumped on my bike and headed downtown.
Cheryl and I both knew that we wanted something different in our parenting. I didn't want my children thinking that the only privacy they could ever find was somewhere outside the home in the public arena. And Cheryl had lots of things in her childhood that she hoped and prayed would never become a part of her adulthood and lived in dread and constant fear that they might.
For myself, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I wanted to offer a different parenting in my own household. That meant for me, being a different father than what my father was. And that meant for me being a different minister from what my father was. And that meant for me becoming a different person from the person I had always known myself as.
It is one thing to know you want to be somewhere else. It is quite another thing knowing how to get there. Cheryl and I both, like Peter's step-mom, had a fever and were by it incapacitated from becoming the host in an inviting household to our children. We needed a healing touch to be released from our feverish demons of the past.
The healing touch came. It came from years of counseling with all the soul searching and self examination that goes with counseling and psychoanalysis. That is what counseling is really all about – looking in a mirror and seeing the places where you need to change. If you never see them you will never change.
It took a lot of help from friends. Sometimes I think that is one of the greatest gifts that Red Door Pre School has to offer. I see some pretty wonderful loving and caring of children going on around here and offered by the Pre School Staff. I think they are here to be parents' friends too. If you have a few questions – remember you aren't Jesus ready equipped where the rest of us need on the job training – or if you are having a few trials at home and feeling yourself on a stuck spot, talk to a staff member. Those stuck spots, those places where we find ourselves in repetitive behavior patterns that we don't like but can't seem to break from – those are the very places where we need a friend. A real friend that is and real friends are those who help us look at ourselves and change. The pre-school staff are good friends.
It takes taking risks to change. Cheryl is here to tell you a little more about that from her story.
"When Hannah, our daughter, was about ten years old, her grandparents made a rare visit to our home in Massachusetts. On one particular day, the three of them had just returned from a shopping trip. As they came into the house and up the stairs, one look at Hannah's face told her father and me that something unpleasant had transpired. She was very quiet, her shoulders hunched over, her eyes downcast and the very obvious lines of a frown were deepening on her face. There was no time for the ritual dance of "Is everything all right?" because we were all supposed to be at some church function and probably in about ten minutes and probably Hannah had to change her clothes.
And then it happened. Hannah exploded – she started yelling and crying; she announced that she was NOT going to church, turned on heel, ran down the hall, into her room, and promptly slammed the door shut! At this stage of our lives, Kendall and I had both undergone some radical changes in our parenting. Two years earlier, I would have gone after Hannah, yelling and screaming and I probably would have landed a whack on her behind as well. But two years earlier, I was miserable about my lack of parenting skills and I made a conscious decision to become a different parent.
Through counseling and Al-Anon, new options appeared before me. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain; the old ways of parenting never felt right. I took a deep breath, walked calmly down the hall and knocked on Hannah's door. "WHAT?" she croaked through her pillow and her tears. "May I come in?" I asked. "Yes," she said quietly. I went into her room and quietly coaxed
her to talk to me. "Take your time," I said. And I meant it – she was obviously in crisis and the church could wait.
Slowly, her story unfolded. Her grandmother had taken her to a toy store and had told her that she could have anything that cost no more than $5.00. Hannah had found a nerf ball and basket for $4.99. It was the genuine article, brand name Nerf. Her grandmother had found an imitation for $.99 – and then insisted that Hannah could only have the imitation since it was "just as good."
Hannah did not want the imitation and a battle of the wills ensued. Guess who won?? But I had one miserable little girl on my hands; she was wracked with sobs. I listened – and I affirmed Hannah as best I could. I told her that she had done nothing wrong and that, under the circumstances, I would be pretty upset if the same thing had happened to me. I let her calm down, I held her and when she was ready, she changed her clothes.
We made it to church on time. Hannah never did play with the imitation nerf ball nor did she want the real one. The magic in the toy was long gone. But Hannah, Kendall and Cheryl came through the crisis quite well – and some other few that followed and some other few yet to come."