9/30/56

Scripture: Ephesians 5: 1-17.

Sometimes folk rush in where angels fear to tread. I was not certain that I had not been such a fool when, on the occasion of my college class graduation, I delivered one of the two class speeches. The title of my student oration was “The Home and the Future.” After I had delivered this distillation of four years’ maturing thought, the main speaker of the day was introduced. He made some wise quip about the preceding presentations which made it clear that he was amused over a college youth, with no children, not even married, and with only a parental home as yet, getting so learned over “the home and the future,” both of which were all ahead of him. I begrudged him the laugh which he got at my expense from his audience. He had a name which suggested that he might have been related in some way to one of my maternal ancestors. But I confess that I lost interest in any family connection in my mild resentment over his superior experience.

Well, our class has now had some years of experience in what was then the future. And several of us have learned quite a bit, at first hand, about home and family. And I still think that the subject is worthy of thoughtful consideration by persons of almost any age.

Today is the beginning of Christian Education Week. In our way of life, education begins in the home. A good deal of it continues there. And since this appears to be the truth, we do well to consider, for a while, the Christian home, its setting and influence, and its responsibility to our time.

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1) Long before there was any America, or any of the present nations of the earth, there was the experience of Creation. In the book of Genesis, we are given a poetic description of it. How beautiful and stately are the phrases: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Darkness became light, earth appeared from the waters, order appeared out of the cosmic confusion; and life appeared under the will of that Creative Spirit.

2) Then mankind appeared. “God created man in his own image.” Man was endowed with the capacity to become ruler over the rest of the creation. He could know communion with his Creator-Father-God. He was entrusted with the power of choice. What patience and determination the Creator must have had, to evolve mankind through the other evidences of life until the splendor of the human face and voice, and the mystery of the human soul could appear! [Genesis 1 & 2].

3) And then in the Genesis story, God said: “It is not good that man should dwell alone.” And the continuing creation provided that the solitary were to be set in families. Father, mother, and growing children lived in the same dwelling, be it cave or eventually castle. It has taken centuries of trial and error, experiment in experience, to establish the thrilling experience: one man and one woman loving each other so much that they do not care to love anyone else in the same way; building a home, whatever or wherever the house may be, that is the strong security of abiding affection; children born and reared in the assurance of that affection. The home, then, is thought of as divine in its created origin, and it is the product of the struggle and emerging wisdom of the ages. Civilizations have been built around it. Nations have been lost over its corruption. It is the keystone of civilization. To us, in this nation, the home is the sanctuary from life’s storm, the center of highest loyalty, the inspiration of noble action. When the home is less than that, the nation is less than it ought to be.

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Now, of course, the present state of the American home is disturbed. The average home is not up to its potential. Our homes are not as bad off as some of the croaking ravens would have us believe. But its shortcomings are serious enough to be earnestly considered by all thoughtful and worthy people.

Some of our present way of life tends to undermine the permanence and unity of the home. Far too many couples discover that they have not fitted themselves sufficiently for the comradeship and mutual help of family life. Rather than refit themselves, they decide on separation and divorce. Old, established fidelities are frequently discarded. Both parents and children bring unhappiness to each other by their complexes and misdeeds. And so the unity of the family dissolves in disharmony. Things once vital and glad become old and sad.

Many homes of fifty years ago were the center of work and play, activity and amusement. Now, many outside interests pull the family apart. Parents must share the interest and the presence of their children with many others in the community. In urban areas there are fewer commodious yards, and more small houses and apartments where children haven’t the facilities or space for healthy development of mind and muscle. If the fathers of an earlier generation spent most of their evenings at home, today much of business takes fathers in so many directions and to such distances that many fathers are too seldom at the fireside. Many mothers have gone to outside employment and community activity.

Somehow, the backwash of three wars bears its impact on tens of thousands of children. In the rush of moving to strategic areas and essential jobs and necessary military service, far too many children have been left to the unguided, undisciplined treatment of their own wills, robbed by circumstances of the stability that should have surrounded them. And there has been the growth of a kind of “democratic ideal” which stresses equality and stresses the individual rather than the whole family.

The traditional family often emphasized the father as “head” of the household, exercising an authority that was compulsory when necessary. Now, not only mother, but children as well, feel entitled to a larger say. And this represents a change that brings its difficulties as well as its rewards.

A great deal of the climate in which the family must live is being altered. It is hard to maintain a sense of solidarity amidst the changes -- but not too hard. The American family is not a stranger to change. And, if the familiar trailer is different from the covered wagon, it is only faster and more comfortable. The home of the present can weather moves for military service, was jobs, and shifting industry, if earlier homes could weather the California gold rush, the sea-going whalers, the pioneering sweeps to the west. What we need is constant correction and improving care in our homes.

Christian people can profit by a thoughtful pondering of certain statistics. The Philadelphia Crime Prevention Association brings out a report, based on 14 years of cases heard in the courts, showing the percentage of juvenile delinquents coming from various religious backgrounds. Jewish children had the smallest representation on the list! One reason offered for the fact is this: “The close family life which exists among the Jews is one preventive factor.” Another is the manner in which the Jewish boy is impressed with his responsibility. In the traditional Jewish family, the boy knows that from the age of 12 to 13 he is preparing for that ceremony in which he becomes a man with responsibilities toward his family, his community and his faith. The lack of responsibility is often a cause of laxness and delinquency among adolescents. And the learning of responsibility removes this cause of delinquency.

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Now, as old as he is in religious history, Paul is yet contemporary in some of the comments which he made to the Christians at Ephesus. Listen to him again: “Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right ..... Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” A Christian home is a two-way proposition. A balance of responsibility must be accepted by all members of the family. It is not fair nor right for the father to say, “I run the business end of things; it is up to my wife to run the family.” And of course a mother is derelict if she deprives her family of her fair and generous share of love and direction. And the children should have some fair share in the building of home conditions. Respective responsibilities must be recognized and cheerfully accepted. What are some of these responsibilities -- first on the part of parents?

1) First let us acknowledge that we parents have a responsibility to teach our children to live rightly and acceptably in society. Even those children who are over-protected and held on to must go into the world of play and of school, of marriage and society and business. They all carry with them the training they received at home. They have a right to receive guidance and instruction in religion, morals, home-making, culture, social behavior. Any parent who tries to unload this responsibility upon the governess or the baby sitter, the social worker, the public school teacher, the clergyman or the Sunday School teacher, is cheating the child out of something irreplaceable. Teachers and church workers, group leaders and the helpers to the household may be regarded as valuable assistants in the training of children. But the inescapable first responsibility rests with the home and upon parents. The Scriptural assurance: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart therefrom” was spoken to us present fathers and mothers just as it was to our household ancestors. [Proverbs 22: 6].

2) It is our responsibility to teach character to our children both by precept and by example. Our children have a right to see in us what we expect them to show forth to their world. A frivolous, non-church-going mother exclaimed to a neighboring minister: “I don’t know what has got into my Jane. Anything I say to her just goes in one ear and out the other.” It would have been surprising if it had been otherwise. She was utterly unrealistic in expecting virtues she commended to her daughter, but which could not be found in herself. What really “got into” Jane was her mother. If we are to urge our children, successfully, to honesty, fidelity, truthfulness, purity, sobriety, sacrifice, social responsibility, religion, church-going, wholesomeness, it must be not only the words of our mouths, but the action of our lives that teaches them. If we do not practice these ourselves, we are like noisy gong and tinkling cymbal -- and no more effective.

We may as well acknowledge the demands of truth upon ourselves, The perception of children is keen enough so that we do not “put anything over” on them. They are quick to learn and to understand sincerity or insincerity in adults anywhere, including their own home. And we do well to remember the imitative capacity of our children. How often our sins return to us in this area. The quarrelsomeness, the mocking tone, that we deplore in our children often turn out to be the very things they observed in us when we let down our tempers and gave them something to remember and repeat later!

My father was a man who believed in clean speech. Not only did he believe in it; he practiced it. I have seen him white-hot with righteous anger. But I never once heard a profane, foul or crude expression fall from his lips. In my own conscience, every temptation to me to use the gutter language I did hear from hired hands, from some other school kids, and from construction gangs, is rebuked by my own memory of my father’s rightness at that point. He lived out his convictions with his own family. We parents have the responsibility of example.

My parents, and many of your parents too, taught the values of church participation not only by telling us, their children, to go to Sunday School and church, but by going with us -- taking us along. Father, busy as he was as a hard working layman in the business world, put in at least a dozen years as a Sunday School superintendent, more as a church board member, choir singer, faithful and regular attendant at worship. There never was a slightest doubt in my mind that he regarded his church as vitally important to life -- not because he said so, as much as because he acted like he believed it. And with Mother it was the same kind of example.

3) We parents must train our children to live acceptably in society; we must set them an example; and we must accept responsibility for their discipline. If we are careful to prune our flowers and shrubs, but let our children “run wild” in many ways, we are incompetent and neglectful of the lives given to our care when our children were born. We betray our children if we permit them to do just as they please, guided only by untrained minds and undeveloped wills. The heart of a little child seems so good. But his head has so little knowledge. The youthful emotions may be creditable, but judgments may be wrong. And parents should love their children enough to uphold, without yielding, the principles which experience has proved to be necessary guides.

It should go without saying, however, that the Christian home does not stop with parental responsibility. There must be reciprocal action between parents and children. Young people are highly human beings and they have responsibilities, too.

1) One of these responsibilities of children is that of recognition. The commandment in the decalogue puts it this way: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” [Exodus 20: 12]. Modern young folk should understand that the world’s hardest and most demanding job is good parenthood. It is a tremendous job to maintain family unity in a world of transition and division and a lot of licentiousness. There is an appalling variety of ways to be a bad parent.

When parents do counsel or discipline, these come out of both concern and experience. It may be hard to realize, but it is true, that all parents have gone through childhood and youth, with an astonishing amount of the same general kind of experience that the kids of today have. They are not keen on seeing their children burned at the same points where they were scorched, or having them miss the fine opportunities which they can see out of the eyes of experience. Parents are eager for the well-being of their children.

A young criminal wrote from his prison cell some years ago: “A child should realize that his parents can help him, and he should confide in them. Gee, I wish now I’d done what I am advising other kids to do.” Youth has the responsibility to recognized parents in the home.

2) Further, there is the responsibility of appreciation. Conceding all the mistakes of American parenthood, the fact remains that American youth are about as favored as any in history. From birth on (even before birth) American children have extraordinary food, housing, clothes, educational opportunities, leisure for physical, mental and spiritual development and even spending money. A big reason for parents’ desire to furnish these things to their children is that they themselves had to do with less in their childhood.

It is less than dignified or right for youth to sit in lordly judgment upon those whose love and sacrifice brought them into the world; to be truculent and ultra-critical is unworthy. To refer habitually to those who have your well-being so deeply at heart as “my old man” or “the old lady” is no more in keeping with proper family spirit than are parents’ references to their children as “the brats.” All of us who have living parents should happily assume the responsibility of appreciation.

3) There is the final responsibility of cooperation. Children have a lot to do with the happiness of the home. It is the one world that they greatly influence. The Boy Scout or Girl Scout who not only practices the “good turn” daily in the community, but takes a cheerful part in the duties, the work and the fun of the home is a sheer joy to his parents -- and usually to brothers and sisters as well. You can knock the heart out of parents, or you can be their greatest joy by your own active answer to the question, “How can I make my home a real place?” It is done by cooperation. That cooperation can be expressed not only by helpful acts, which are important, but by thoughtfulness, good humor, reasonable obedience, creative suggestions, and outgoing friendliness.

Don’t be afraid to pay your parents a compliment. Show your pride in them in the presence of others, just as they may show their pride in you. All of us do well to remember that we are human beings, and the things that make us hold up our heads in self-respect and confidence are the things that affect others in a similar way.

These, then, are things that characterize a Christian home:

On the part of parents -- (1) to teach children to live well and acceptably in society; (2) to set a Christian example and (3) to bestow a wise discipline.

On the part of children -- (1) to recognize parents and their problems; (2) to appreciate parents’ purposes and efforts and (3) to cooperate with parents’ efforts.

The Christian home is the beginning and the basis of Christian education. May God give us grace to build the Christian home continually.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 30, 1956.