Baby on board
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
December 3, 2023
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| Screenshot from Combatants for Peace Instagram account. NY Times article: "Five Miles and a World Apart, Younger Activists Dream of a New Peace Process: A younger generation of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers want to be part of the dialogue about the 'day after' the war, when Israelis and Palestinians must grapple again with how to live side by side." Photo of a young woman walking in between a small building and broken concrete and dirt under a blue sky. |
Wherever there is instability, conflict, and violence, children, youth, and young adults suffer the most. We speak of children and young people being the future, but what future is there if we do not provide safety, stability, acceptance, and wholeness today?
Across college campuses in the United States, students on all sides of the Israel-Hamas war are experiencing ever-widening cracks in campus life because of the fierce arguments and protests that have arisen in the past few months. No one feels heard or taken seriously, especially by school administrations. Some feel pressured to take a side and if they don’t, they are excoriated for being silent. Some students feel they don’t know enough about a conflict that may or may not affect them personally. Universities that are usually a place of learning and sharing multiple points of view are becoming fraught with distrust and disorder.
For many of us but especially children and young people, this war triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response. This on top of increased housing and healthcare costs, inflation, underpaid work and long hours, the climate crisis, an already contentious presidential campaign, and living with Covid-19 and its attendant grief and fear for the past four years. Legislation that makes it legal for children to work in auto factories and meat packing plants or makes it illegal for trans children and youth to get healthcare or play a sport or use a public bathroom. We’re all anxious, on edge, and our children and young people are carrying the brunt of it.
You may be thinking this is pretty depressing, this isn’t why you came to church today, but it’s much like the grief and sadness, the fear and anger of those who heard Isaiah’s words. In chapter 10, Isaiah cries, “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.” Imagine if this prophet was speaking through the voices of children. O God, would that you tear open the heavens and come down and stop the bombs, the killing, and liberate all who are being held against their will. If only you would come down and comfort the cries of children who only want to live in peace. If only you would tear open our hearts and come down and knock some sense and compassion into adults.
If only. Isaiah knows that God is not going to tear open the heavens and come down. When it all comes crashing down, we shake our fists at the heavens: “How could you allow this to happen?” And the question echoes back to us: “How could you allow this to happen?” Poet Ellen Bass in her poem “Pray for Peace” wrote this startling line: “Fold a photo of a dead child around your Visa card”. Heck, fold a photo of a very much alive child around your Visa card. What if that was our human shield? What if every decision we made was informed by its effect on children and youth? What if every decision we made was informed by its effect on the earth and its creatures?
Humanity lives as though God is not looking, that God has turned away from us, that there is no God and so we think we can do what we want. Who now sounds like children? Lately it feels like people don’t care one way or another the effect they have on the world, but I wonder if it’s more like, it feels like it doesn’t matter if we’re kind, if we drive slower and more carefully as if there’s a baby on board not just our car but every vehicle. It doesn’t matter if we take time grieve, feel all the difficult feelings. It doesn’t matter if we try to hold onto hope, the world is just going to steamroll over us anyway. And we wonder how good people allowed fascism to take root right under their feet.
One of the rabbis I follow on Twitter wrote this on Friday before sundown: “Praying for a Shabbes of radical peace and well-being for Jews, Palestinians, and every creature on this planet” and he posted it with a photo of his two children. For the most part, we all want the same things for our children: a life of abundance and justice and free from violence. We will not get there with more violence, more animosity, more vitriol.
We begin Advent with hope because even on our best days we need to be shaped by the mystery that created us. One of the reasons I think hope drives us nuts is because hope asks us to surrender. Surrender our need for control and our fear of change, surrender our striving so hard to be good and righteous and enlightened and better than, surrender our notions about how and when the holy should break into the daily, surrender our dread, our desperation, our despair.
Hope is what led to the civil rights movement, to marriage equality, to the end of apartheid, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hope was and is the main course at this Table: hope that death and violence and injustice do not have the last word. A Child of God is the host at this Table and invites us all to come to this Table as children, as ones in need of love and forgiveness, acceptance and wholeness. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Benediction
With an everlasting love I’ll love you
All through trials I will be beside you
Still there’s nothing that can hurt or move you
And the high place I’ll bring down
When you go and lose your way I’ll lead you
On the produce of the land I’ll feed you
And a home within my heart I’ll deed you
And the high place I’ll bring down
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