Sunday, November 13, 1977
WHY AREN’T THEY LIKE US? (No. 2 in a Series: How are Christians to be Different in our Kind of World?)
Matthew 7:24-29; Romans 12:1-2
How are Christians to be different in our kind of world? Let me tell you a story!
When Bob Brown was six weeks old, his parents took him to church and had him baptized. He was a darling baby with wide blue eyes. He was the third generation baptized in that church in that family. His mother, Sue, could never remember afterwards just what they had promised, but she never forgot the lump which came into her throat while the choir sang, “Let the little ones come unto me.” They had a pleasant dinner after the service. Her parents and her husband Tom’s parents were there and a college friend of Tom’s jokingly referred to as the baby’s godfather.
The grandparents went home early. More friends of their own set dropped in during the afternoon to help them celebrate and the party became one to remember. The honorary godfather bubbled over the champagne and was really a scream. The baby upstairs slept through it all like an angel.
About 18 months later, a daughter was born to Tom and Sue Brown. They named her Ann. However, Sue’s mother died that spring, and her father was breaking up his home to move in with a bachelor brother in another city. So, with one thing and another this baby was not baptized. “I’m really too busy now,” Sue told the minister. She thought him rather cruel to press the matter. After all, she was confused and unhappy enough without being bothered about unimportant things.
The years passed and little Bob started Sunday School at age five. A neighbor picked him up and took him. in her car and. if Tom his father felt like it, he went down after the child. When Tom had a golf date or wanted to sleep late, Bob could not go to Sunday School unless the neighbor was willing to miss church in order to bring him home. Fortunately, the neighbor belonged to the church where Bob had been baptized, for both Tom and Sue wanted him to attend that church’s Sunday School. After all, Sue’s parents had belonged to that church and so had Tom’s!
But Bob himself was not too fond of Sunday school. Nothing in his early life had prepared him for the swarms of strange children he was supposed to call friends. However, experiences in the kindergarten in the public school helped to reconcile Bob to the other youngsters.
Sue had been a high school teacher herself and she was very much interested in education. She joined the PTA and became very active in raising money for a milk fund. Tom spent one spare evening with other fathers of kindergarten pupils, repairing little chairs. He had great fun. Once after collecting Bob and Ann from the church school, he remarked that the beginner’s room there was certainly shabby.
Bob and Ann were both in the primary department when the family moved. Tom’s business was prospering and the new house on the other side of town was more in keeping with their position in the community. But it was too far for the children to walk to the o1d church and neither Tom nor Sue had time to take them very often. Their old neighbor lived too far away. Gradually, as they made friends in the new neighborhood, the children started going to a Sunday School nearer their new home.
Tom and Sue went to the Christmas pageant. The little church was rather sweet, and Ann made a darling angel. She thought her daughter’s teacher was not too suitable, but Tom pronounced the blond teacher a knockout.
The minister of the little church called twice before he found Sue home one afternoon. She apologized for her absence. “I’m so busy with the PTA,” she said. We’re getting ready for a puppet show now. The proceeds will be used to buy glasses for children whose parents can’t afford them. She had hoped to sell him a ticket, but he already had one.
“I’m glad you’re so interested in education,” the minister said, “we need church schoolteachers badly.” But Sue said that she could not think of taking on the responsibilities of a class while the children were small. Perhaps later. She was relieved that he had not asked her about Ann’s baptism.
The children went to Sunday School quite regularly for the next two years. And the parent attended the church for the annual Christmas pageant and children “s program. The Christmas pageant was very pretty, and Sue was sometimes moved to tears by the innocent beauty of little Mary.
On Easter Sunday the whole family went to the old church where Bob had been baptized. The faces of the people they had known, however, were becoming fewer, and although they had never transferred their membership, they began to feel it was no longer their church.
A few years later on Easter when Bob was 10 years old, they attended the church near their home and that August, Sue received a visit from the Church School Superintendent. “I came to ask you to teach a Sunday School class,” she said. Her eyes roamed over the shelves filled with the latest books. “You’ve read all these books, why not the Bible.” Sue gave a small deprecating laugh. “It’s so dull, don’t you think.” She served tea and cookies, hoping none of her friends would drop in for cocktails until the woman from the church school left. “Really,” she said, “I can’t take a class I couldn’t keep discipline.” “My husband, Tom?” “O mercy no! He’s not interested in religion.”
During the coming years, Tom’s business prospered. He began to make real money. Before Bob had entered his teens, they had bought a summer place and built a cabin so they might extend the season over the weekends until the snow came.
In February of that year, the teacher who had taken Bob’s church school class called on Sue. She told her all the young people in the class had decided to join the cl1urch together at Easter and that Bob had decided to join with them. However, he must first attend the pastor’s class for six weeks and after the first week, he had not shown up. “I’ll speak to him,” Sue promised, “But I don’t know, he has so many activities and he belongs to a little club which meets on Saturday mornings.” “It’s only for six weeks,” the teacher answered. “And it’s really important for them to understand what they are getting into.”
“Well, I don’t believe in forcing them,” Sue replied. “It’s a free country after all, and children should pick out their own religion if they want one. I believe in letting them choose.”
“If you really believed that, wouldn’t you go with them to every church in the city so that they might have a real choice?” asked the teacher quietly. “Your present attitude is the same as if you let your children pick the foods which they would eat and then prepared nothing for them.”
Sue was rather hurt. The teacher was single and couldn’t know very much about children anyway, and she was obviously a religious fanatic. By great effort of courtesy, she managed to keep the rest of the conversation off controversial themes and the teacher soon left.
Bob never did join the church. He missed Sunday School most of the time that year because of going to their cabin, and the next year he didn’t like his new teacher. “She doesn’t know anything,” he complained. Tom, his father, said that boys usually lost interest in religion when they entered high school. He had! Sue said that it was a shame the church could not get better teachers.
Bob attended the youth group whenever he was home and Ann went with him. He had a crush on a girl in the group. Ann was approaching the age when all boys interested her.
Bob and Ann’s attendance with the youth group lasted about a year. Bob’s girl moved away. Ann joined a high school sorority, and her interests were confined to the activities of her friends. Her church school attendance became more and more irregular. Saturday was her night for dates, and she was very popular. On Sunday mornings she was really too tired to move from her pretty bed. Sue said she knew how Ann felt. She too, had dropped out of church activities at that age.
The family continued to attend church on Christmas and Easter if they were in town. Sue always went to the children’s programs. She liked to see the little ones in their pretty clothes.
The Vietnam war brought changes to the Brown family. Bob was drafted and was sent to Vietnam. Ann, still in college, eloped with a boy she met there, and he, too, soon entered the Armed Forces. Six months later, Tom and Sue were grandparents. Sue opened her heart and home to her daughter and granddaughter. Ann’s husband visited them when on leave and both Tom and Sue liked him very much. He was a spirited young man and very much in love with Ann, and a good sport.
Bob wrote from Vietnam that he, too, was in love. She was perfect, he said, an oriental beauty.
When the war ended there were more changes for the Brown family. Bob had married the young woman and brought her and their baby home. He had a fine job lined up. They loved their new daughter-in-law. Their only disappointment was in the fact she was a member of an oriental religion, and their son Bob was attending also.
Why, asked his father one night while his wife was putting the baby to bed? Well, said Bob, it’s simpler. I figured what my wife and daughter were going to be I might as well be too. And it answers a lot of my questions about religion.
“Couldn’t your questions have been answered in your own church,” asked his mother. “What church?” asked Bob?
Bob and his wife are very happy. They have two children now and there is another on the way. Sue goes over to stay with the babies sometimes while their parents are out. Their house makes Sue vaguely uncomfortable. There is no Bible on the living room table, and she misses that.
Ann’s problems, however, are a greater burden. For Ann is not happy. Her marriage was based on “love,” the fierce, passionate kind, and Ann’s husband discovered exactly the same kind of love for a young woman in Hawaii. Ann is divorced now and living in New York. Her daughter is in a nursery school there so Ann can work. She seldom pays a visit to her old home.
Perhaps it’s just as well, for Ann has turned from a gentle, sensitive person into a brittle cynical one. She is bitter and has become a violently outspoken atheist. Sometimes when she is at home, she embarrasses her mother by the things she rep｢lies to the perfectly innocent remarks of her friends.
Sue is neither happy nor secure. She tells herself it is just middle age settling in. After all, she is a grandｭmother. But on nights when Tom is at the club or bowling to keep his waistline down, and on the weekends when he and his friends are at the cabin, Sue is left home alone, and she frequently finds herself becoming rather depressed. In spite of her volunteer work and her many social activities, she is beginning to feel that her life has been rather wasted. After all, her life is deadly routine, she tells herself, except for her children and she is disappointed in both of them.
Tom is disappointed in them too. He voiced his regrets on a rare evening at home this fall, and Sue agreed with him. “I can’t understand it,” said Tom, “with all the advantages of a good home and a Christian community, why didn’t they grow up to be good, decent Protestants like you and me?”
Tom is also finding his life has less and less meaning. He has no framework or faith for understanding what is happening to him and he worries more and more about the future.
That’s the end of the story.
Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a sensible man who builds his house on the rock. Down came the rain and up came the floods, while the winds blew and roared upon that house — and it did not fall because its foundations were on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not follow them can be compared with a foolish man who built his house on the sand. Down came the rain and up came the floods, while the winds blew and battered that house till it collapsed and fell with a great crash.”
And the Apostle Paul wrote: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves toward the goal of true maturity.” Amen.