Sermons for the Month
DATE: October 19, 1998
SERVICE: Pentecost XX
TEXT: Luke 18:1-8
Sermons for the Month
The Difficult Child
DATE: October 19, 1998
SERVICE: Pentecost XX
TEXT: Luke 18:1-8"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN "Look! Look!" shouted the bear cubs. "Little rubber cats that stick out their tongues when you squeeze them!" "Cubs," said Mama, "that will be quite enough! I don't want to hear another word ...." "Oh please!" they shouted. "May we have them? Please! Please! Please!" Papa decided it was time to put a stop to all the fussing .... "Of all the outrageous, disgraceful, EMBARRASSING behavior I have ever seen," he roared .... "Brother and Sister have the worst case of the galloping greedy gimmies I've ever seen!" How many of you can guess the source of this little story? If you have been involved in the raising of children or grandchildren in the past 10 years, you have probably run across it. It's from The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies (New York: Random House, 1988), one in a series of popular picture books by Stan and Jan Berenstain. The Berenstain Bears are shaping the adults of the 21st century as surely as The Cat in the Hat shaped the lives of their parents. In each of these tales, a thorny family issue is handled by a family of bears -- Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, Gramps and Gran -- and by the end of the story, some measure of peace is restored to their big treehouse in Bear Country. In this particular book, Gran and Gramps come up with a plan to help selfish Brother and Sister Bear get rid of a bad case of the "galloping greedy gimmies." Wouldn't it be nice if childish behavior could be eliminated by a single story? We wish that such books would solve behavior problems, but of course they can't. Not by themselves, anyway. Kids are tough, and child-rearing is one of the greatest challenges any of us ever face. Children can be self-absorbed, defiant, inattentive, greedy, overly aggressive and downright difficult to handle. A whole industry has grown up around parenting issues, with specialists offering a variety of books and videos to parents of difficult children. If you kid has the "galloping greedy gimmies," it should not take you long to find advice on limit-setting, problem-solving and improving your parenting patterns. But there is a positive side to the difficult child, one that should not be forgotten. In his book The Challenging Child, child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan actually identifies five different types of "difficult" children. One, the defiant child, is a boy or girl who is unusually stubborn, negative and controlling, but at the same time, the owner of such positive traits as energy and persistence. If you have such a child in your house, you know how maddening and yet how oddly admirable such behavior can be. Many defiant children are unusually clever, writes Greenspan, able to figure out ways to defeat your most sophisticated arguments. They can also be extraordinarily well-organized and methodical, as well as deliberate and purposeful. "The key challenge for parents and teachers is helping the defiant youngster use these various assets in a constructive way so that, as he gets older, he can use his talents for such pursuits as science, mathematics, philosophy, law or any other field where persistence and organization are an asset" (Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D., The Challenging Child [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995], 125). In our gospel text for this morning, Jesus tells the story of an adult who may well have been one of those "difficult children" in her youth—a widow who refuses to give up. She approaches a judge again and again, asking him to grant her justice against her opponent. The judge refuses at first but finally decides to give her what she wants, since he fears that she will wear him out with her persistence. Jesus makes the point that God, like the judge, will "grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night," and he encourages his followers to be like the widow, praying persistently and faithfully. Two lessons emerge from this story of a difficult child: 1. Persistent prayer is the way to pray. Jesus does not want us to be casual about prayer, but serious, intentional, determined and disciplined. According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather funny to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when the child asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how all the more will God be with HIS children? ... (Matthew 7:9-11). The ancient spiritual writer Julian of Norwich says prayer "is yearning, beseeching and beholding" -- an activity which involves desiring, begging, imploring ... and finally seeing God, face to face. While it is doubtful that Jesus wants us to pester God, he most certainly wants us to be diligent in our lifting of requests to the Lord. It is in our prayers that we grow closer to the One who is the source of every good and perfect gift. There is nothing wrong with being dependent on God, and full of desire for the gifts of God that give us abundant life. "We are made for God," writes South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, "we yearn to be filled with the fullness of God, and so we come asking the One who is always eager to give. We place ourselves in his hands as suppliants, in the attitude of those who know they have nothing that they have not received, before the One who is ever the gracious one ready to give beyond our asking and our deserving. We are like a parched land thirsty for the gift of rain -- yearning, beseeching, waiting and asking and assured that we will be heard and that we will be given. For Jesus taught his disciples to pray, 'Give us this day our daily bread'" (An African Prayer Book [New York: Doubleday, 1995], 78). If we are persistent in prayer, we will see God more clearly and will receive the gifts that are part of life abundant. In addition, we will discover that: 2. Persistent prayer is faith-inspired prayer. A difficult child will only make demands on a parent who loves her and who will provide for her. She knows that if she asks her father for bread, he will not give her a stone; if she asks for a fish, he will not give her a snake (Matthew 7:9-10). In the same way, those who pray persistently to God are people who have faith that God will answer them. They trust that the Lord will help them, granting them justice and mercy, fullness of life and everlasting salvation. Perhaps more than anything else, such difficult children long for God's love and God's presence. They yearn to behold the Lord, to see him face to face. "Prayer is essentially the expression of our heart longing for love," writes Jeffrey D. Imbach. "It is not so much the listing of our requests but the breathing of our own deepest request, to be united with God as fully as possible" (The Recovery of Love [New York: Crossroads, 1991]). Just as a persistent child really wants the attention of a parent more than he wants a little rubber cat toy, a persistent child of God really craves the presence of the Lord more than any particular gift. Lutheran theologian Frederick Buechner writes "The God you call upon will finally come, promising that even if he does not bring you the answer you want, he will bring you himself. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayers, that is what we are really praying for" ("Prayer," Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC [San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, (1973), 1993], 87). Persistent prayer is not a sign of the "galloping greedy gimmies"; it is a sign of intense desire for God's presence, God's power and God's peace. And if we act like difficult children in this behavior, we are in good company. The Lord we worship is nothing less than a persistent God: eternal, everlasting, the Rock of Ages, a Mighty Fortress, the source of steadfast love knocking at our doors, praying that we will let him in. Difficult children -- difficult adults – difficult gods -- are persistent -- as we all should be in prayer. God grants justice to his chosen ones "who cry to him day and night," and Jesus commends the faith of people who pray always and do not lose heart. There are many positive qualities associated with being a difficult child -- energy, organization, determination and persistence -- and all can be an asset to the life of faith, helping us to maintain a lively, ongoing relationship with our Lord. The challenge is to keep a focus on God and the abundant life he offers, and not fall victim to the galloping greedy gimmies.
AMEN