Christmas and the Child in Us
Matthew 18:1-14.
December 13, 1970
John M, Buchanan

How many times have you heard or said, “Christmas is really for children"?
Many times, I suspect, and the strange thing about that statement is that its
is both compellingly true and grossly untrue, depending on who is saying it
and why.

One thing is certain. The cultural year-end festival which happens at
the same time as Christmas is very moh oriented toward children. Ordinarily
the statement “Christmas is for children" means that they are the beneficiaries;
they get all the gifts: they express the innaras excitement: visions of
sugar plums dance in their heads. Mom and Dad just stay up late assembling all
the parts and then pay the bills. Mom and Dad are the ones who wear themselves

out with the seasonal traditions, so that expressions of happy affection become

‘just one more job to get done. Mom and Dad listen to and believe the commercials

that portray the joy of Christmas in terms of opening an even bigger Christmas
Savings Fund for next year.

That's really not for children, at all. That's some kind of emotional

“erutch for adults whe have yet to learn that children need year-reutid attention

far more than a new sub-maehine gun, and the security of love more then all
the gifts money can buy.

ind yet, the statement is profoundly true. Christmas is for ehildren.
Christmas is for all those whose adulthood has not robbed them ef the freedom
to laugh and love: for those ~ and there aren't many — who are still open
and spontaneous and unselfeonseious about expressing affeotion. Isn't that
why we always inelude a ehild in whatever mental image we have of Christmas?
We sense, I believe, that there is something abeut childhood that allows the
message of Christmas to get through, in a way that it has long since stopped
getting through to us. Christmas is for children; but more importantly,

Christmas is for the child in wall of us.

~2—

One time the disciples asked Jesus who was the greatest in the Kingdom
of God. He answered by bringing a little child in their midst and saying; “I
tell you this: unless you turn round and become like children you will never
enter the Kingdom." It was typical of him. He referred to children often,
using their games to punctuate a story he was telling, allowing them to come
+o him when everyone else was tired and grouchy. He paid speoial attention to
them, and I think it is safe to say that there was something about him that
reached out and prompted their trust and love.

Now, it is terribly easy to oversimplify and become sentimental and end
up totally missing the point here. He was not suggesting that grown men ought
to be childish. He was not suggesting that adults ought to go through life
mimicing children, living in the past, trying to capture something long gone.
I suppose we all do it, to a degree; but there is an essential difference
between childishness and childlikeness. One man puts it this way: the words
of Jesus give "rise to the most poignant kind of awareness of how we ourselves
were once children but are no longer, of the dreaming innocence we lost
without ever intending to lose it~...+.. Thus to read these words is to shed
an inward tear, and although the tear itself is good and has much to teach
us, we weep then to see ourselves weeping, and these are the tears of self-pity,
and by them our vision is distorted and blurred instead of washed clean."
[Frederick Buechner, The magnificent Defeat p. 132]

Jesus was not advocating childishness in things religious, although that
is how he is interpreted many times. He was certainly not suggesting flippancy
and irresponsibility and unthinking acceptance, That kind of religiosity is
childish = per to it are directed the words ef St. Paul: "when I was a child
my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish. When I grew up I
had finished with childish things." And later, ‘Do not be ehildish, my
friends. Be as innocent of evil as babes, but at least be grown-up in your
thinking. [I Cor. 13 and 14]

To be like a child, is not necessarily to be childish. What, then, did

-3=
he mean? What did he see in them? What is it, in us, that he was trying to
reach?

I would manent two approaches. There are characteristics of children
that disappear with adulthood. I am concerned, primarily with two. The first
may be called spontanaity, or freedom, or unselfconsciouness; the second falls
into the category of trust, and the ability to trust.

There is a child in all of us, whether we are aware of it or not. At
least so say the psychiatrists. 411 of us have three different persons inside -
a parent - an adult - and a child. They are there regardless of ee age:
they funetion like computers into which whave been fed all the experiences of
our past. Dr. Thomas Harris, summarizes the child in us as follows:

iJIn the child reside creativity, curiosity, the desire to explore and
know, the urges to touch, feel and experience, and the recordings of the
glorious, pristine feelings of first discovery..+++. In the child ane recorded
the countless, grand "sha" experiences, the firsts in the life of a small
person, the first drinking from the garden hose, the first stroking of the
soft kitten.... the first time the lights go out in response to his flicking
the switch, the first submarine chase of the bar of soapecs++" {I'm OK -
Yourtre OK, p. 27]

Something happens to that in nearly all of us. If you care picture the
parent ~ adult and child as three circles — the child circle keeps getting
smaller, coming under the influence of the business-like adult and the pro-
tective, judgemental parent. It's still there, to be sure, but in most of
us it remains pretty well hidden. And we don't respond freely and reach out
openly to others, and enjoy the thrill of discovery.

. The child in us, like real children, is not self conscious. I+ wants to
express how we feel without standing outside and weighing the matter carefully.
But part of maturing is the development of self consoiousness - and that, in

turn very quickly becomes image-cousciousness. We behave pretty much in

andes
accordance with the image wé attempt to project of ourselves. Thus certain
things are taboo — because people in our position just don't act that way. And
along the way, slowly — but surely - the child in us — the ability to laugh
and love — gets squeezed out of the picture.

I dislike reading the words of other men too mich from the pulpit, but
recently I discovered a story that says it all. In his book “To a Dancing
God" Dr. Sam Keen, philosopher and theologian discusses the loss of childlike
spontanaity in a chapter entitled ‘Education for Serendipity".

"Long ago, when I wore short pants and shot marbles with my left hand,
I formed an impression of education which has recently returned to haunt me.
Mrs. Jones! first-grade classroom always seemed dark, but on this day it was
more depressing than usual. For an eternal afternoon I sat practicing my
penmanship exercises, listening to Mrs. Jones’ monotone: ‘make your i's
come ell the way up to the middle line. ind don't forget to make your o's
nice end round. Circle, circle, circle. Period. Now repeat." Caught
somewhere between boredom and despair I struggled against tears and settled
in to wait for the resurection - the 3:00 bell.

ind then it happened. A movement in a tree outside the window caught
my eye and there, in the sweet and redeeming light of the springtime world,
was a summer warbler building a nest. Caught in wonder I followed the progress
of the nest construction and dreamt of the time when I would be a great orno—
thologist. My its and o's were forgotten until Mrs. Jones materialized over
my shoulder and demanded to know why three lines in my penmanship book were
empty. Instinet warned me that no seredipitious warbler, no private fascination,
could provide an excuse for the neglect of my serious educational duties. 5o
I bit my tongue, cherished my wonder in silence, and stayed in after gehool to
make up my lessons.

Mrs. Jones won more than the day. Sehooling became a habit for me and
I remained in the classroom for twenty-five years and five degrees without

seriously questioning the maxim that private enthusiasm mst be divoreed

=i

to wonder at a star, and tremble at the miracle of human birth — to love and
laugh and cry because this thing is so beautiful and so good that the child
in us can do not other. ‘t+ the birth of Jesus Christ reactions were unre~
strained. Angels sang! Shepherds ran! Wise Men saddled up and rode! Herod
raged!* [ E. Campbell, The Protestant Hour] So it is still - for the child
in us.

Te be childlike is to be free and spontaneous and unselfconscious. It
is also to trust. I've read and thought a lot about what it means to trust:
I've thought about why we have such trouble trusting each other and how that
May be the reason why we have trouble perceiving faith in God as a kind of
ultimate, all-out trusting. But I don't think I really knew what trust meant
until a child taught me, namely my own four year old son. It's a personal
story. We were taking the children for polio shots, trying to discuss it
in a way that would let them know what was coming, yet without frightening
them. We were oblivious to the fact that the four year old had not had an
injection since infancy, and not only wasn't understanding what we meant by
a shot, but had an entirely different and frightening definition of the word.
I did notice that he was unusually quiet in the ear, that he stayed very close
to me, that instead of running ahead with the others he insisted on holding
my hand, that his grip tightened as we stood in line waiting. He survived
the injection with a few tears and I still didn't know what was happening.

He was still quiet - and on the way home it came out. He asked me simply ~—
tAm I going to be with God now?"

To him, “shot" meant a rifle and pain and dying — which images are not
too precise in his mind, but there nevertheless. And so a routine injection
was, for him, a walk into the jaws of death. 4nd he did so holding my hand,
that is to say, trusting.

That taught me what Jesus meant when he brought a child into their midst

and suggested that entrance into the Kingdom depended on their being like that

the educational task.*

Sadly, wistfully, growing up does that to us. Becoming an adult, more
often than not, means getting the i's and. the o's correct, at the expense of
responding with joy and curiosity and affection to the beauty right outside
the window.

Children have the beautiful capacity - put there by the Creator ~ to live
in the immediate moment alone: to experience the now: to respond to the
experiences of the moment - the people of the moment with whatever feelings
are being felt - without fear, without self consciousness. Adults lose that
capacity, living partially in the past - partially in the future, weighing
all the repercussions of one's responses — and very little in the present.
There is nothing so honest and authentic as the prayer of a child. Or a
expression of immediate affection in the energetic hug of a three year old.
But adults — and we can't seem to help it - listen to themselves as they pray,
and celoulate the effect their words are having on those who are listening,
and try desparately not to project an image that is too pious, or too oynscal
— but just right. And adults, as they love, stand apart, and observe their
loving end measure the effect what they do will have on the loved one, and
on their ow self-image, and most of all on those who happen to be witnessing.
How long has it been since you embraced your wife or husband simply because
you felt like doing it? Or do you wait for the right moment, when no one ig
looking - certainly not when the children are around.

ind along come Christmas, and it wears a little thin because we cantt
seem to handle the feelings it wants to evoke in us. In the simple images
of Bethlehem — new born baby, mother, manger, shepherds ~ it addresses us
on a deep level that we have learned to ignore. Ind so tears of joy are not
shed, end the laughter gets smothered by the frantic rushing about, and the
carols get sung as if it really didn't matter much.

Christmas addresses the child in us - the latent, well hidden ability

ary <= f a al = ye Sparc aaiabsts re. » = ES aad = 5 ade

child. That taught me what faith in God as a trustworthy Father really means.
Jesus meant that we should trust God - in the same way a child trusts his
father.

Christmas addresses the Child in us. The love of God come down in a
manger baby confronts us on that level of trust. It says that the King of
the Universe, the Almighty Creator is like a trustworthy father: that because
of what he has done, we are free to trust ultimately in his love. That's the
simple, childlike message of Christmas.

Christmas really is for children, and for the child in everyone of us.

I would share with you several sentences written by Dag Hammaskjold in
his diary (Markings) dated Christmas Eve, 1957. They catch the spirit of
what I have been trying to say for twenty minutes.

“In thy wind ~ in thy light

How insignificant is everything else,
how small are we -
and how happy in that which

alone is great.”
Amen.

Our Father, reawaken the child in us. As we repeat the familiar carols,
and listen to the familiar stories - grant us to respond in the joy and love
and happiness of childlikeness. Open us to the beauty of the birth — and

the wonder of your coming among us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

fmen.