5/12/57

Scripture: Deuteronomy 6: 1-7; 20-25.

For some years now, the second Sunday in May has been marked as Mother’s Day. It is a time when special thought has been given, by countless men and women, boys and girls, to recognition of their mothers. Often a gift, or some flowers or a good letter carries the affection and love of son or daughter. Sometimes it is a family gathering that specially marks the day, the idea, and honors the mother. The commercial mind has found considerable possibilities in the day! And Mother’s Day is now said to be ahead of some other special occasions, and for a time was second only to the Christmas season in sales volume! It seems that the day catches the fancy of so many folk, and involves such a general sentiment, that it can be exploited into quite a thing! Much of it is over-sentimentalized. And, now and then, some expressions of the day are positively mawkish. But the idea of appreciation for one’s mother --- or for that matter of one’s neighbor, or of one’s children, or one’s wife or husband, or one’s teacher, or one’s employer or employees --- is a good idea.

It is a fine thing for a family when a mother’s “children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.” [Proverbs 31: 28]. It could happen any day of the year and should happen far more often than once a year. For most mothers deserve a return on the affection and effort they lavish on their families.

Part of the way we celebrate Mother’s Day may be a kind of urge to work off, in sentimental gifts, our own feeling of guilt over our neglect to express genuine appreciation. [Family “cleaning”]. But the day belongs to more than sentimental gifts to mothers. It is really a holiday about successful families, where “Growing up is not only possible but usual,” and wherein we see not only the agonies and absurdities of our time, but all that lives and lasts through our love. Wherever it is possible, it is fine that the day becomes a kind of “festival of the Christian home.”

Any family that is concerned for the Christian growth of its members can recognize certain feelings:

1) The feeling of trust; the assurance that things are OK; the atmosphere wherein the sureness of living gives us courage to grow strong and straight and pure.

2) The feeling that “I” --- that is each one --- am an individual person with peculiar and particular significance.

3) The feeling of importance coming out of recognition of what each can be and do.

4) The feeling of doing something I have in mind -- of initiative, of carrying out the ideas I have in mind.

5) The desire to “go to bat” for good ideas, great enthusiasms, swift changes.

6) The sense of joining with others in such worthy enterprise as caring for others in community, nation and world.

There is security, there is motivation, there is growth in the family where these feelings have their sway. And the Christian family, in particular, is one in which we long to find, or to provide, this atmosphere.

The widest love that the world has known is found in the life of one who, at length, found himself on a cross, being given for people like you and me, whom he had never even seen! And that love began and was nurtured, in a home in Nazareth, where the love of a fine mother was sure, the integrity of a father not to be doubted, the assurance of a God who cares was certain. The thing that can do most to strengthen the family in this or any other time is a deepening of its religious awareness. The greatest gift you can even give to your children, and the one for which they will one day have best occasion to return their gratitude, is the example of a real man or woman of God’s own making continually before them.

Elton Trueblood says that it is not necessary to invent a religious program for the home, because the home is intrinsically a religious institution. He suggests that sometimes the religion inculcated in a family is bad religion, self-centered and contemptuous of others. It may be as secular as Marxism, or it may be a veritable school of trust and joy in the wonderful and the Holy. In any case, it is in the home that most people receive their earliest and deepest convictions about that to which they are committed. It is the part of wisdom to do well what we do not want to avoid. So we must learn all that we can from one another about the ways in which the home may rightly perform its task.

For one thing, we would do well to get over whatever feeling we may have had in the last generation that one should not indoctrinate children, but should scrupulously refrain from specific training, so that a child may be left quite free to make his choices when he is mature enough to do so. The child who grows up in that atmosphere is actually robbed of any basis for choice. I once knew a family in which one child, a son, was being reared. The father had been born into an Irish Catholic home, but he paid very little attention to religion though he had at one time been sent to a school where his parents hoped he might be attracted to the priesthood. The mother was from a Norwegian Lutheran home, but she never went to any church because there was none of her persuasion in that county. In fact the only Lutheran church for a long way around was in a neighboring county. Since it was a German Lutheran church, she felt that it had little appeal for her.

I invited them to send their boy to the Union Church Sunday School, sponsored by the only Protestant church of the community. The answer to me was, “No, we think we will let him grow up without trying to influence him one way or another. He is to be free to choose his own religion when he grows up.”

What those parents piteously failed to see was that their neglect was not the atmosphere for freedom at all! Freedom involves a basis for choice. It involves responsibility. And the boy was given no basis whatever, except rank secularism, upon which he could ever make any decision whatever about religion. Meanwhile, he was exposed to rank selfishness, to race prejudice, to community whims. And though the parents were kidding themselves, nobody was fooling that boy. Whether he ever put it into words or not, he knew that whatever appeared important to his parents was probably important for him; and what they considered non-essential for them was hardly commended to him. Any child is wise enough to know that parents who do not feel keenly enough about any living faith to pass it on to their children do not have a faith worth mentioning!

Children know perfectly well that they are not left “absolutely free and uninfluenced” while they make up their minds about drugs or traffic rules or germs or scientific knowledge. Therefore the child reared in that kind of home senses that his parents consider religion insignificant. What looked like a throw for freedom was made with loaded dice. What looked like free choice turned out to be indoctrination of a secular viewpoint.

The refusal of some parents to indoctrinate children with an appreciation of a Christian viewpoint has another interesting and challenging facet. It is not uncommon to find young folk, coming to the end of adolescence, who revolt against the emptiness of their parents’ homes at this point. A boy complains to his counselor at school that he had been brought up without any acquaintance with the resources of the Bible and with no practice of prayer. What we once thought of as a revolt against these things, occasionally turns out to be revolt in another direction!

Fortunately there is something better than the indoctrination of neglect. It is the kind of home where religion is not only taught, but even more essential, is caught. Even if unstated, our real principles become apparent in the way we act, in the decisions we make, in the attitudes we have. Some of the strongest incentives in the development of character in children come from unargued assumptions. For instance, argument about the wisdom of attending public worship becomes trivial in comparison with the fact of being there as a steady habit. A child’s good fortune lies, in great measure, in being part of an ongoing little society in which a high sense of integrity and reverence is expected, but not debated. [“Our family goes to church.”]

In the ancient Hebrew home, the law of the Hebrew religion pervaded all of the ordinary existence. The divine order was not something apart from the rest of life. It was the substance of life! This is the point of the great and moving declaration in the book of Deuteronomy. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart and in thy soul; and thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.” [Deuteronomy 11: 18-20].

An important way to apply this ancient wisdom today is to use it, noticeably in the home. The tiny baby in its crib may have only a dim impression, but nonetheless a real impression, if the mother bows her head above that crib in prayer. A 4-year-old sitting on his father’s lap may misunderstand the meaning of some words if his father is reading aloud one of the Psalms. But he does not miss the fact that Daddy thinks this is something good. And it will grow in meaning through the years.

The stories from Genesis and from the Lord’s parables first heard, the verses and paragraphs first memorized take an added meaning as one grows older. But it is well that they be known early, and in the home.

The Church School is one of the most important parts of a church’s program and activity. But the home looms far more important. The church school can be nearly nullified if the home does not support it by a favorable climate. The best working philosophy at this point is for church and home to work closely together -- religious interest and expression being normal in the home and supported and nurtured in the church.

There is no way to overestimate the importance of the sense of belonging in the good homes where there is both intellectual curiosity and a wholesome awe of that which is holy, and beyond measured comprehension.

Hard-pressed men and women in little homes, faced with difficulties every day, can feel that they, in rightly maintaining families, are doing what the world sorely needs, and without which the world goes to pieces.

Mother’s Day is a rich store of private revelation of our own feelings. It may even be a time for some of us of homesickness. But beyond that the day proposes to us frankly that we give nothing but the highest quality to our moments as they pass. It is in this way that children rise up to call blessed the mother and father whom they have known through the years. It is in this way that they, in turn, lay hold upon that which, by God’s grace, may make them, in their time, worthy parents.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 12, 1957.

Also in Wisconsin Rapids, May 13, 1962.