Sermon 80 - Babies
Exodus 2:6
She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said.
Luke 18:15
People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them.
Deuteronomy 30:19
This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live
Micah 2:9
You drive the women of my people from their pleasant homes. You take away my blessing from their children forever.
Those of you who may follow my catalogue of sermons might be relieved at this one. I very often talk about grief and death and pain. I talk about some pretty deep and heavy and dark subjects. Today I am delighted and I hope that you will be relieved that I want to talk about babies.
I love babies.
I go around to all twenty-one churches in town. I visit different churches. I do have a favorite. It's not because of the sermons: quite frankly the sermons aren't anything to write home about. It's not because of the music: the praise team is enthusiastic and chooses their songs with some care, but that's not unusual. It's not because of the fellowship: quite frankly this is one of the churches where it's hard to get anybody to speak to you at all. The reason that I like this church more than any other is because of the children.
To be honest they haven't got an awful lot of competition. There are, after all, only four churches in town that have any significant population of children. Port Alberni is a pretty elderly community and that goes in spades for the churches. But this church does have a higher number of children per capita than any other church in town.
It is absolutely delightful to have this many children in church. It's great that there are babies and infants and toddlers and preschoolers and just generally all kinds of kids at all kinds of ages every week in every service.
A word to the mothers. Yes, I know that you are distressed when your baby starts to fuss or cry. I know that you think that other people around you are thinking that you are a bad parent if your baby fusses or cries. After all, we have had millions of years of evolution to get us to respond immediately and pay attention to babies when they cry. You pay attention to the baby when it's fussing, and the people in the service pay attention to the baby when it's fussing.
Please don't worry about the fussing baby on my account. Babies are so delightful that I don't care if they're fussing. Of course I *care* if they're fussing. I will try and do anything that I can to help the situation if a baby is in any kind of distress. But I am not worried for myself. If your baby is fussing and you think that I might be disturbed by it, I'm not. You can stay in the service, and even if the baby is fussing right beside me, I am not going to think any the less of you as a parent. It is inherently impossible to know all the possible reasons that a baby might start fussing in the middle of a service. If I'm sitting next to you and your baby starts to fuss, I do not have a problem with it. I guarantee you, mothers, even if your baby starts fussing right now while I am preaching this sermon, I am not going to take any kind of offence. Babies are just that important.
And so are you as a mother.
I am the eldest of six. My sister was born when I was three years and four months old. That's when I started to learn how to take care of babies. I believe the statement that babies are God's opinion that life should go on.
I am a teacher. I believe in the statement that children are messages we send to a time when we will no longer be here.
You will notice that I haven't been particularly careful about talking about children or about babies. I don't make an awful lot of distinction. Babies, newborns, preschoolers, toddlers, infants: I really like kids before they get to school. I like kids after they get to school too; after all I'm a teacher. But I really like babies and the younger the better.
Gloria always insisted that, at every possible opportunity, we pay attention to children, particularly young children, to see how they see the world. She said that this would be the only way in which we could get a new perspective on the world, a new viewpoint. This is an absolutely salient position to take with regard to something as advanced as artificial intelligence.
When you pay attention to it, the way that children learn is nothing short of miraculous. Some of us like learning: I do. A great many of the human species do not enjoy learning. We make every possible excuse to continue to do what we have been doing, without changing either what we do, or the way we do it. A great many of us try to avoid learning at all costs.
Babies are learning all the time.
Human babies, interestingly, are born with a number of capabilities, which they very quickly lose. If you have access to a newborn child, you can verify this for yourself. A newborn human infant has, almost immediately, a grasping response. If you put your finger in a newborn babies hand, it will grasp your finger. It will grasp it hard enough that you can lift the child using only your finger. (I must warn you that, should you make this experiment in order to verify what I have said, that you do so extremely carefully, and make sure that you have the full and informed permission of the parent, particularly the mother, of the child. I am not responsible for any injuries you may incur if you fail to follow this advice.) This grasping response is found in other primates, but in humans it usually disappears after a day or so.
Newborns do have other capabilities, which they, generally, very quickly lose. I was able to see one grandson within a few hours after he was born. At that point, I was able, allowing his hands to grasp my fingers, to have him stand upright, with me really only providing balance, and not lifting force. He was also, at that point, able to hold his head erect, and to turn his face to different sounds in the room. Once again, this capability disappeared within a couple of days.
Newborn infants are unable to focus their eyes. They seem to be drawn to the shape of a face, even if they can't fully focus that image. Within weeks, newborn infants learn what focus is, and how to focus, and then start to focus on objects in their field of vision, moving their eyes, and eventually their head, to focus on, and study, certain objects within their visual field.
How do they do that? How do they learn to do that? Even knowing what focus was, knowing what optics were, knowing the importance of vision in identifying objects, it has taken us more than seven decades to figure out how to get computers to do it. It still takes up an enormous amount of computing power, and we can't yet do it anything like as usefully, or as reliably, as any human child learns to do it, without assistance, in about six months. That's not the only reason that I like babies, but I am absolutely fascinated by how babies learn.
Children are a delight and a blessing but also a responsibility. We are stewards of children, not their owners.
Once God has given you a baby, you have to provide it with food, shelter, clothing, socialization, learning experiences, information, the model of your own Christian life and faith in God, the stories of Scripture. You are not responsible for whether or not your child actually decides to love and follow God. But you are responsible for providing information and guidance.
If you watch children you can learn an awful lot, yourself. You can learn things about management. You can learn things about social engineering. You can learn things about learning. You can learn things about teaching. You can learn things about socialization. You can learn things about what people inherently consider worthwhile and satisfactory.
You can learn all of these things if only you will pay attention to children. God has provided children as a blessing and a delight and they are. They are a delight to play with, and they are a delight to observe even when they don't seem to be doing anything in particular. If you watch their interactions with each other and also with adults on occasion, you can learn so much in areas that we would consider highly academic and to be pursued only by professionals. Mothers get this front row seat on the universe for free.
Babies are therapeutic. Holding a baby is incredibly therapeutic. For one thing you cannot hold a baby without calming yourself. If you do not calm yourself, you will upset the baby that you are holding. You must steady and smooth your movements. You must steady and smooth your breathing. Doing this automatically calms you and it calms the baby as well.
They sent me to teach in Nigeria. Twice. I think they were trying to kill me. I have lots of stories from my first trip to Nigeria since all kinds of things went wrong. On the second trip to Nigeria, I was prepared for the fact that there was going to be a delay in boarding since nobody heading for that flight boards by row numbers. Everyone just crowds at the gate as soon as it opens and attempts to jam themselves onto the airplane. Since I knew this would happen, I just stood out of the way and waited for the crowd to settle down. There was a young mother with a baby and the mother was frantically packing and repacking the bags necessary to take with you, with a baby on a long flight. In order to assist the mother, I was making faces at the baby in order to entertain her and prevent her from fussing. The mother, noticing this, picked the baby up and just handed it to me.
I can't remember a single thing that went wrong on the second trip to Nigeria. I credit the fact that I had held a baby for forty-five minutes before boarding the airplane with the fact that everything went smoothly for the entire duration of the course.
Babies are a wonderful gift from God. Not unalloyed of course. Babies poop and barf on you and are upset at the strangest things at the most inconvenient times.
But I love babies. Babies are wonderful. Everyone told me that had they but known that grandchildren were this much fun, they'd have had them first.
So, I did.
When I was looking for Bible passages to support this sermon, I just typed in "babies." I didn't expect anything would come out. I was surprised when it did. I was even more surprised at the passage in Luke about bringing children to Jesus. It specifically states that the children were babies. When Jesus was saying that you had to be like a little child, he meant a *really* little child. And that fits. Babies are completely dependent and have an innate faith in the person who is holding them. Isn't that who is going to get into the Kingdom of God?
(See also: Sermon 60 - Ella, I'm going to get you!
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