The Fourth Church Pulpit

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

May 14, 1995

John M. Buchanan

People forget Jesus had a father as well as a mother, and he was a carpenter. J told my friend
Gerry that Jesus’ dad was a carpenter, and he said no, God is Jesus’ father. We argued. Our
minister said we're both right: Jesus had two fathers, one in heaven and one here! That's not
bad! I know a lot of kids, they don’t have any. I mean their parents have split. I wonder why
God chose that kind of family for Him. He must have had a reason, right! That's how I see it.
He must have thought to Himself: Why, I want my Son to be down there with just plain
people, nothing fancy. (Charlie, age, 10}

Robert Coles
The Spiritual Life of Children

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH

A LIGHT IN THE CITY

126 East Chestnut Street Chicago IL 60611-2094
Phone: (312) 787-4576
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

at

Scripture
Revelation 21:1-6
Luke 18:15-17

“Let the little children come to me ... for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
Luke 18:16 (NRSV)

Perhaps you didn’t notice that Rachel is my granddaughter. She is. I like being her grandfather a lot. It is all pure
enjoyment and not much work. She is also an angel, an agent of grace. She causes me to have status I neither earn
nor deserve. Simply by being born, she makes me, at least in relationship to her, grand.

Now, I know that this is a terrible abuse of the power of the pulpit. There is an unspoken covenant among
grandparents. It is that we’ll extend equal time and equal opportunity to brag, gush, “ooh and ahh” about one
another's grandchildren. “I’ll look at your pictures if you look at mine.” There are, among my colleagues, several
fairly zealous grandparents and I know that this abuse on my part puts me way ahead. So, Morgan and Mary, Jan,
John, Karen, and David (soon), I promise, I'll look at your pictures and tell you what you want to hear.

Rachel’s parents called me mid-week and asked if I had a sermon title yet. I said, “No, not yet.” “Why don’t you
just call your sermon ‘Rachel’ this week,” they suggested.

That’s a bit much, even for me. And yet there is truth here. This is actually about Rachel and me and you, and
about Connor and Brett and Liam and Alexander and John who were also baptized this morning: all of us, because if
we know anything it is that “It Takes A Village to Raise a Child.”

It's an old African proverb. It is also the title of a wonderful children’s book by Jane Cowen Fletcher.

The setting is Africa. Everyone in the village is going to market, carrying produce, pottery, cloth to sell and trade.
Yemi, a little girl, is given the important task, for the first time, of caring for her baby brother.

Yemi feels grown up and important bearing with pride the sole responsibility for her brother's well-being.

At the market, Kokou wanders off. Yemi is beside herself, He will be lost, she thinks; hungry, thirsty, hot, tired
and in danger. No such thing happens, of course. The little boy wanders from market stall to stall and is cared for at
each by other men and women from the village; given food, drink, water to cool him, a mat to nap on, pats and
smiles, and at the end of the day, when the mat vendor returns him to his family, Yemi has learned the lesson her
mother and the other people already know: “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child.”

Margaret Mead said that the nuclear family — mother, father and children living apart from extended family — is
a recent invention and not a very good one. It takes a village ...

You know the story about Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to Jerusalem when he was twelve and discovering on the
way home that he is lost, apparently. The point of the story has to do with Jesus conversing with the learned teachers
of the law in the Temple but in the middle of the narration there is a bit of ancient Jewish wisdom. Luke 2:44 reads,

“Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day's journey. They started to
look for him among their relatives and friends.”

It is a description of a cultural norm, extended family and friends, a village, caring for a child.

J. Randolph Taylor, former President of San Francisco Theological Seminary, tells about his early life as a child in
China. His parents were missionaries and when he was three his mother died tragically. His father gathered his five
sons, carried them across the Pacific and across the continent until they settled in North Carolina at a place called

~ Montreat where there were homes for retired missionaries and missionaries on furlough. There, Randy Taylor
remembers,

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“He put us out and we ran freely on the hills in part because of the knowledge of family and
kin, and missionary kin who would take care of

That is part of what is going on when we baptize babies. There is theological affirmation to be sure. God's
amazing goodness and grace is nowhere more eloquently expressed than in the gift of life, given to these parents, but
given to all of us, over and over. God's love is nowhere more eloquently proclaimed than in the affirmation that these

babies, before they know about God, before they have faith, before they have done anything are all objects of God's
infinite love.

But part of baptism, as well, is about community, the village. That truth transcends denominational differences and
even language and culture. Two years ago a group of us were traveling in Greece. “In the Footsteps of Saint Paul.” We
were on the island of Santorini (where Paul never visited but probably wished he had). We were walking up a steep,
winding road between shining white buildings, beneath the bluest sky I have ever seen. We passed a small church.
Several of us stepped inside. When our eyes adjusted to the darkness we saw a baptism, a lange group of people, standing,
mostly dressed in black, in the middle an elaborately attired priest and a baby, quite bare. Not wanting to intrude, we
began to back out the door but by this time we were noticed, all eyes on us. We gave a friendly wave and continued our
exit. They, on the other hand, were pleased. “Stay,” they indicated. “Come close. Join us.” So, in Reeboks, bermuda
shorts, and polo shirts, we joined in a Greek Orthodox baptism. The baby was immersed in the font and his response was
immediate. It was apparently cold water. Then placed in a towel while the priest chanted and sang, he was handed
around to a lot of people, family and friends, [assumed. As we left, a woman greeted us, in difficult English and told us
that because we had participated in the baptism, we were now part of their family and community and then gave us a tiny
little ribbon with a medallion of a baby's head to wear as a mark of our new status. Several of us have them, still.

It takes a village ...

In a Presbyterian baptism one question is asked of the congregation. In fact, Presbyterian baptisms happen in the
context of regular public worship precisely because the community has an important part to play.

“Do you, the people of the church, promise to tell these children the good news of the gospel,
to help them know all that Christianity commands, and by your fellowship to strengthen their
ties to the household of God?”

The minister lets the people see the newly-baptized, symbolizing that what is happening is not only the
affirmation of a mysterious and wonderful truth about God and the child, but also about the community of faith, the
church — the village — in which she or he is now a member in good standing.

“Remind us of the promises given in our own baptism ... ,” we pray in unison. And I am reminded. I know,
although I do not actually remember, the people who were present at my baptism that made promises and kept them.
I tell this to every parent who brings a child here to be baptized. I tell them about Mrs. Evans, a tiny, white-haired
wife of a retired dentist, a lady whose mission in life was, I think, to be the “Hound of Heaven” for surly, unruly,
uncooperative, and generally unpleasant adolescent Presbyterian boys. She was our Sunday School teacher. How
she did it week after week, I'll never know. We were not a group of eager students. Quite to the contrary. We were
not happy to be there. And when we graduated and went off to college or the service she continued sending us
letters and little devotional guides that I used to hide in my desk drawer. I’ve concluded that part of the reason I am
a minister is that I couldn’t get away from Mrs. Evans, and I’ve concluded that she must have been in her pew when I
was baptized and she simply made good on her promise.

I tell every parent that and I'd better now confess what I tell those parents about you. I tell them that the people in
this congregation take that question very seriously; that they fully intend to be the church for you and your child;
that they, on behalf of other Christians, in other places where you may end up living, fully intend to keep their
promise and will be church school teachers, advisers, sponsors, counselors, mentors and friends for you and your
child in all the days ahead.

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And baptism points to the truth beyond our small community of faith; that children are in trust for the future with

us; that the village it takes to raise a child is sometimes the City of Chicago, the State of Illinois, the United States of
‘America. oe

At that level this topic becomes difficult. I'm wearing a ribbon today — it is not from the Santorini baptism. It
was given to me by Presbyterian ministers in Oklahoma, where I was leading a seminar one week after the explosion
in Oklahoma City. Blue and gold, Oklahoma state colors, in memory of the victims, the babies in a government day
care center.

If it really does take a village to raise a child, our village isn't doing so well. The lasting tragedy of Oklahoma City
is the assault on our sense of community, of security and safety and caring. Community, any community, the

sociologists know, is built on trust, and the loss of that, for which we often don't have words, is what affects every
one of us.

Cynthia Campbell, new President of McCormick Seminary, was right when she observed a faw days after the
bombing that the flags at half staff both remind us of the victims and also call us to community.

“There is,” she says, “something about disaster that shocks us out of the everyday
‘me-and-mine’ of life. We wish that it could be otherwise. That we could experience
community like this all the time; that we didn’t have to wait for disaster or tragedy to draw us
together.”

We cherish the idea that we cherish children in America. And perhaps we do, individually. But as a community?
Marian Wright Edelman writes:

“Things happen to children here that don’t happen elsewhere. Every day three children die
from abuse, nine are murdered, thirteen die from guns.”

A recent report published by the Council on Families in America revealed that in every measurable category from
health to SAT scores the quality of life for America’s children is deteriorating. Rates of delinquency, crime, drug and
alcohol abuse, suicide, depression, poverty ...

The matter is complex. It will not reduce to the ideological mantras of too much government or tco little
government: too much money — not enough money. But there are basic issues we ought to be able to agree on as a
village. The first is that it takes a village. All of the children, in some way, belong to us. Parents are not in this
alone. Another is surely that it is not a good idea for weapons designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible
to be available to our children. It may be constitutionally correct but may I suggest that it is insanity to put the full

weight of government on the side of the right of a gun dealer and to sell weapons beside a public school. That is a
village that has lost its heart and its mind.

There are things we can agree upon, while we are disagreeing and discussing specific political strategies. For
instance, that it is a wise and conservative use of our resources to care for pregnant mothers: to do everything
humanly possible to sustain their health. Spending on children is a bargain. TIME magazine says,

“One dollar spent in prenatal care for pregnant women saves three dollars in individual care
during the first year of the infant’s life. We can provide nine months of full drug treatment to
a pregnant woman who is addicted for $5,000; or we can pay $30,000 to care for the addicted
baby she is going to bear for twenty days.”

Or, as some are proposing, we can do nothing in order to teach responsibility, in the process sacrificing a
generation of poor, mostly minority children who will, we know, make this beautiful culture and nation a nightmare
‘or our children to resolve after we have made our point about responsibility.

Robert Bellah has written an important book, The Good Society. He writes about religion and people of faith as

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custodians of vision and creators of community.

“If we are fortunate enough to have the gift of faith through which we see ourselves as
members of the universal community we bear a special responsibility. We can be...
ambassadors of trust-it a fearful world.” [See Cynthia Campbell One Baptism, One Body,
One Community, a’Sermon, April 26, 1995]

and so we baptize Rachel, and Connor, Brett, Liam, Alexander, John; and it is our attempt to say something about
the precious gift of community, to do more than say it, to be a community of faith in the midst of a fearful world, to
show an alternative to life lived in isolation and fear and distrust, to show — as we hold these babies close — a
picture of the human community as God intends it. To show in this ritual, and also in the programs we offer: A Day
School, A Tutoring Program, A Summer Day Program ...

* Sunday Church School
* Center For Whole Life
* Vacation Church School

And a new Day Care facility being constructed just a few feet from here to show, in tangible, strong, and visible
images that it takes a village.

Rachel and her friends need the Church, the community of faith. No more, however, than we need her. “Let the
children come to me,” Jesus said. “For it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”

He was, at that moment, talking to adults who were working very hard and intensely on being religious. It’s a
hectic scene. Crowds of people are showing up wherever he is. They are clamoring for his attention. They are
bringing their elderly and sick and blind and crippled. They come to him at all hours: from first dawn, through the
heat of midday, to evening. They come without food and get hungry. They come without provisions for lodging.
The crowd is growing. In the midst of it all, there are learned scholars from Jerusalem asking difficult questions:
“Why did you say that? Why did you say this? Don’t you know it’s against the law?”

And here come the babies. His friends intercede, “Not now: can’t you see how busy he is? It’s late. We’re all
tired and hungry. Come back some other time.”

And Jesus says:

“Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the
kingdom of God belongs.”

And this ...

“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never
enter it.”

“Why doesn’t anyone see God nowadays,” someone asked. A wise rabbi answers that people are not willing to
look that low.

“The fingerprints of God are not difficult to spot once you've found the proper angle of
vision.” [William and Barbara Myers, Engaging In Transcendence: The Church's Ministry and
Covenant with Small Children, p.1]

Rachel and her friends need the community of faith, all of us: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, friends,
and the many of us who don’t know them at all. They need all of us — because it really does take a village. And we
need every one of them — to remind us of God’s wonderful gift of life, Gad’s amazing grace, God’s gracious presence, ~
God's love in Jesus Christ ... the One who welcomes the children, who opens his arms to us all. The one in whom
Rachel — and all of us are loved and cared for and forever safe. All praise to Him. Amen.

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