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“Divine Parenting”
Jeremiah 23:1-6
Pastor Ryan Landino
Calvin Presbyterian Church
Reign of Christ Sunday
11/21/10
Jeremiah 23:1-6
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Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD. 2Therefore thus says the
LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock,
and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the
LORD. 3Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will
bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4I will raise up shepherds over them who will
shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the LORD.
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The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign
as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6In his days Judah will be saved and
Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness."
Happy Thanksgiving (almost)! Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on all God has blessed us with.
One of those things to reflect upon is how we have been blessed with our families over the years,
in whatever form those blessings are. So let’s talk about family.
If you are a parent, what should you do when you notice that one of your children is being led
astray? Do you let her go entirely, trusting that she will learn from the mistakes she’ll make and
she will be able to find her own way? Do you catch him right away and lay down the law before
he has the chance to fail? What should you do?
I once came upon some research about raising children that I wish I could cite but I don’t
remember where it’s from. It basically outlines three different styles for raising a child.
The first is the “eh, they’ll figure it out” style: children are naturally good and moral, and they
need the freedom to figure things out for themselves. Trade structure and restraint, for love and
support. This is one style. One of the problems is that with no guidance or restraint of any
kind…there is NO guidance or restraint of any kind! I knew someone who went to a Christian
camp as a kid, and the attitude of the leaders was that they kids didn’t need any structure. Well,
the kids had a great weekend—all the canoes and kayaks were at the bottom of the lake, and all
the deserts had been eaten by Saturday afternoon.
The second parenting style is the “lay down the law” style: Children, according to this style, need
laws, rules, guidelines. Children are NOT innocent; there are too many other messages from
peers, the media, and the internet that kids are pushed and pulled in so many different directions
that they need clear, unwavering moral guidelines. There are some children of this group that are
probably the easiest to recognize their first year of college. I don’t think I need to describe what
happens to those who, only understand morality has coming from strict rules, what happens
when they suddenly experience “freedom” for the first time, where those rules aren’t strictly
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enforced. For those of us who went to college, we can probably name who this person was—if it
wasn’t you.
But there is a third way, and let’s call this the “show me how it’s done” style of parenting. Often,
children know what do to when they’re told, but they may not understand why they are doing it.
For example, they could live by the rule of “go to church because that’s the rule.” But the “show
me how it’s done style” convinces children to go to church so they can “see God today, and look
Mommy and daddy are doing it too!” We become moral by practicing morality. “Show me how
it’s done, let me practice it so I can do it on my own.”
Now if you are a parent, you may be sitting there thinking what style you use on your own
children. If you are, please know that I am not here to judge, that though the research does have a
specific conclusion about which is healthier, I am going to ask you to consider, of these three
parenting styles, the “eh, they’ll figure it out” style, the “lay down the law” style, and the “show
me how it’s down” style, I’m going to ask you what kind of child you are, which style did your
parents use to raise you into the person you are today? Whatever style used, it obviously worked
somehow to some extent because you are in fact here so we can read Scripture in God’s house
today.
Parenting is pretty easy work, right? [no, it’s not] No matter which style you use, as you parents
know, you have to be steadfast and patient with children. I don’t know from experience, but I
know the patience my parents showed (and sometimes didn’t show) me as one of six kids. Most
likely as a child you may have experienced a bunch of different parenting styles, probably until
mom or dad found one that worked!
If we can reflect on what kind of parents our earthly parents are, then maybe this will help us
understand what kind of heavenly parents we have. We know Jesus referred to God not only as
father, but as a word that can be translated from the original Aramaic as “Daddy.” If God is our
parent, and we are children of God, then God also must have a very specific parenting style. In
fact, because God has had so many children across so many years of human existence, we can
see in our Biblical witness a couple of different parenting styles.
I mentioned three different parenting styles. Let’s see. Is God a permissive parent? Letting us go
without restraint so we can figure it out on our own. Well, we have free will. We can see in the
Garden of Eden, that God gave Adam and Eve more lee-way than they could handle. Even today,
we consider how murderers continue killing and we question what kind of loving God let’s his
children kill themselves. Why wouldn’t God stop that? Is this the kind of parent God is? If this is
the way we see God as our parent, then we may wrongly convince ourselves that we have an
uncaring God…
Well, let’s look at the second style. God could be better described as a “lay down the law” kind
of parent. A stern-handed God might be a familiar image, and we don’t have to look very far in
the Bible to see God telling us exactly what to do. Many of us are comfortable understanding
God in this way—some of us are the kind of children that need God to spell out specific rules
and beliefs to structure us. But if this is the only way we see God as our parent, what happens
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when people interpret God’s rules differently then we do? Could that change our view of God
our parent, or might it affect how we view each other as fellow children of God?
But I mentioned before there was a third parenting style. This is the “show me how it’s done”
style. This is when the parent comes and walks amongst us, leading by example, helping us to
walk down sure paths so that the righteous life is embedded in our bones. Is God this kind of
parent, who shows us how to do it ourselves, by asking us to be like him, to take in his attitude
into ourselves so that we could be like God? If we understand God as this kind of parent, the one
who instead of letting us figure it out on our own, and instead of simply telling us how to do it,
instead shows us how to be his children---if we understand God as THIS kind of parent, then we
may be able to see more clearly how Jesus Christ came to show us what kind of God he is.
Let’s see if we can see what God is doing as our parent in our passage today. God as a parent has
seen his children lead each other astray. History is unfolding as we are lost and being scattered in
the upcoming tragedy of the exile into Babylon. In the book of Jeremiah, the kings are failing us,
the priests are failing us, and we are like sheep completely lost. The text describes how the
“shepherds” who were in charge of keeping the flock together did a terrible job. This would be
the modern equivalent of our presidents, and our pastors, failing to keep us on track.
So God has to decide as a parent what to do. Let’s consider up until this point in the Biblical
narrative how patient God has been. God tells Adam, “I will give you everything you need as
long as you don’t eat from that tree.” Well, we mess that up. So God says, “okay, you messed up,
I’ll give you the land, but now you have to work for it.” Then we as humans mess up again—we
don’t work for the land. So God tells Noah, “I have to destroy this land and start over, but
afterwards I’ll never curse the earth again so long as you are fruitful and multiply, and follow my
law.” But we are such disobedient children that we can’t remember the law, so God “writes the
law on our hearts, and turns our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh” (Hosea, Jeremiah, and
Ezekiel), so that way the law is impossible to forget.
Which is where we come to now. Even, after we have failed to be responsible with a Garden of
Eden that had everything given to us, even after we didn’t work the land, even after it is
completely clear that we cannot keep our part of any bargain with God, even, after God puts the
law in our hearts so we don’t have to memorize it, we still can’t keep ourselves together. We still
cannot keep ourselves from being scattered, afraid, and dismayed.
But look at what God does as our parent. God doesn’t leave us alone to figure it out. Because
otherwise we’d still be scattered. We would be like lost sheep, with no idea where to turn for our
survival.
But God also doesn’t just scold us and lay down the law. Because God knows that all the laws
and prophets shouting at us to tell us to get our acts straight, that none of it will work to get us
back on track with God because we are physically incapable of listening.
No, God is the kind of parent who knows exactly how to reach us. God knows exactly what we
need as children. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to just show us how to do it.
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We need God himself to come down and show us. We need to witness for ourselves what it
means to walk in the light. And so in this passage, God promises that he will give us a King, a
lord who will deal with us in wisdom, justice and righteousness. God promises that this will be
an actual lord, an actual person, coming at an actual point in history. And yes I am talking about
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas, which God is promising through Jeremiah.
Next week is the first week of Advent. The word advent means coming. Now, we can understand
“this coming” in two ways 1) Christmas is coming, the birth of Christ, is coming, which isn’t
really something that’s coming because it already came, and we celebrate that each year.
But though Christ’s first coming has brought us together, we are still scattered like sheep. Pick
up any newspaper and you will see just how lost we still are. We are still in need of our heavenly
parents to set us straight. Which is why we bring Jeremiah’s prophecy that the Lord is coming
into Advent with both the praise that Christ has come, but also with the knowledge that Christ is
coming again. Then on the second coming, we will finally all be united with God. We have no
clue what that will look like, but we do have specific instructions about how to prepare. Advent
is a time of preparation for the future, but we do this by looking at the past---and Christmas is a
celebration of that past. We look with excitement towards the coming of Christmas, because if
we have this double understanding of Advent, as both the coming of Christmas AND the coming
of the Lord a second time, then we approach the second coming with Christmas day fresh on our
minds. If the first Christmas is THIS good, then what will the 2nd Christmas look like????
We sit right here at this moment, a broken scattered people having received the best parenting in
the universe, celebrating the upcoming birth of Jesus while we look to the final collecting of all
lost sheep into one flock at the second coming of Christ.
As we consider what we are thankful for as we enter the week of thanksgiving, we are thankful
for a divine parent who is here to raise us right. We are thankful that every time God came to us
to draw us closer to God, we have been so greatly enriched as to think that it can’t get any better
than it can now. And this is our gospel: that the best has come and is coming again to be even
better. We are thankful for an advent season ahead that will show us how to prepare for that
coming of Christ into our hearts and into our world.
This is the Word of the Lord.