Transcript of “Holding On” by Dr. James Barnette
Introduction
Sermon four was originally presented on Sunday, November 15, 2009, at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church. The title of this message is “Holding On,” and it’s based on the biblical story of Hannah that you can find in the book of First Samuel, chapter one, verses 4 through 20.
Infertility and Hope
Now, this is not a text about how to have babies if you haven’t. The whole struggle of infertility for so many people is a… is a hidden one. It is painful, and it’s not really the focus of this story. In fact, what it is about is our being able to bear in hope in the midst of difficult things.
Hannah’s story is not a template for anyone else. A great theologian, Miroslav Volf, and his wife tried for nine years to have a baby, and finally, they adopted two children. And he said all of those years that we went through that experience were for us continuing to abide in hope until we could get to the children that God had for us to love.
No, this story is about what we do with the most despairing places in our lives, and it is about what we will do in forming the next generation after us. For we have two people with children here. We have old Eli the priest. He is a man in a position. He’s the head of what equates to the local church. His children have been raised there; they have every advantage. And they are two lousy boys.
The Next Generation
They are stealing from the offerings, they are sleeping with the women who come to the tent of meeting, and when little Samuel will get his call, the call is not a wonderful bit of good news, but rather it’s a terrible word of judgment that is coming upon the house of Eli. So painful that when his sons pass on under the judgment of God, he falls and breaks his neck and dies. It’s not good news, and that is the troubled calling that little Samuel will have to bring.
Hannah has this child and then immediately she must give him up. That’s really always true of our children; they are not really ours to keep. We give them up. We get blues wanting them, we get blues after they get here, and we get blues when they’re gone.
I really upset Katie when I told her that we had been really sad after our nest was finally emptied. It took us nearly two weeks to feel better. It has to change; it’s always changing. The question never is how do I keep from getting the blues, but where will I take my blues when they come? When the prayer isn’t answered, when my life doesn’t work out the way I want it to, where do I take my blues?
The Power of Ritual and Structure
The other night, Beth gave us a wonderful presentation on what the church can learn from the blues, and one of them was about being honest in bringing them there in the first place. Learning to be more honest with our lives, our spiritual lives, more truthful with the struggles we are going through, the very real things that are happening in real lives every day. And another she said was structure, and she was talking more about the music itself, that it was a kind of ritual form by which blues typically are put together.
But I thought of it a little larger than that later and thought, you know, really, we do this with ritual all the time. We take unspeakable things, a death of a loved one, and we turn it into a ritual called a funeral, and it takes us through something that is absolutely unbearable. But somehow, through all that eating of food and having services and meeting with people and talking, we help pass through something that is beyond bearing.
So it can be very helpful. We dedicate a child to grow up in the Lord as we did today when truthfully none of us know what is in that child’s life to come, or our own for that matter. But structure and ritual are a way that we can take our blues to God.
Spiritual Longing vs. Self-Destruction
The blues, unfortunately, can send us into self-destruction, and the history of all the blues performers is a pretty good example. It can send you into addictions, it can send you into depression, self-destruction, self-indulgence, anger, all kinds of things. Because there is that restless feeling inside that we want to be somewhere else, we want to somehow move to a different place and space in life, and if we could just get there we could be happy. And that restlessness sent Robert Johnson traveling around all of his life, so much so that sometimes in the middle of a session he would just wander off and they would not see him again. That restlessness really is that longing, I think, spiritually for God. The greatest thing we can do with our blues is to take them to God and to the church.
Now, that honesty can be very difficult. If we are to have a kind of discipleship that has room for even the blues, it’s going to be a different kind of discipleship. It means that we don’t come and have victory all the time in our lives, that those places of brokenness and sadness and heartache and trouble and temptation and even sin are part of the journey that we are going through.
A Lesson in Honesty
Many years ago in my second pastorate, I was still a young pastor—and I’m not a young pastor, I can’t say that about myself anymore, but I was then—and one of the ladies in my church came to me one day and she said, “I’ve got a real problem, Pastor.” I said, “What is it?” She said, “Well, I’ve fallen in love with my best friend’s husband, and he’s fallen in love with me.” I said, “Well, that’s not good. I said, “Have you prayed about that?” And she said, “Oh, I could never tell God about that.”
I said, “You don’t think God knows?” She said, “I hadn’t thought about that.” I said, “You ought to think about that.”
But beyond honesty and beyond having a place to structure these things, I want to come to the third point that Beth made the other day, and it is that the blues invite us into community and communion. That honesty with ourselves is not enough; it has to be lived out in a kind of accountable way and in community with others.
Parenting and Spiritual Foundations
And that is true of what we are trying to teach our children. If we want them to be these kinds of people, if we want them to have a kind of spiritual honesty, if we want them to have depth as they face the difficult things of life, we have two choices. And one is that we can just leave it up to them to find it on their own, or we can, in fact, give them a foundation from which they can draw as they go through those things.
There really are two truths here about our children that I’d like to talk about for a few moments this morning that seem to contradict each other. One of them is that we can’t afford to leave the next generation’s spiritual journey to them. There are many parents in our society today, and if you go some places you will not see churches dotting every corner as they do here in the South.
And even here, appearances can be deceiving. In terms of that spirituality dominating our lives, in terms of our discipleship being the central focus of all that we do, it can be an appearance and not a reality. I think that’s what it was with old Eli. He was a part of the religious cult, he was a part of the group. His sons had grown up in it, but there was something missing there.
Guidance and Free Will
We cannot leave it up to our kids to find their own way, and yet the other one is we cannot guarantee that their journey is going to turn out the way we want it to. That’s an interesting thing to put together. We have to trust the Lord with them and we also have to give them everything we can so that they will have the resources they will need when the time comes that they have to draw on it.
I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that Eli was very serious about his faith, but I wonder whether these boys were raised right. That’s what we would say down here; they just weren’t raised right. They were raised among religious things, but they used the religious life as a career advancement. And in a place where everybody asks, “Where do you go to church?”, being a part of the religious community can be just part of your resume. It has to be more than that. It has to be a motivating center of our lives.
These guys were in worship every week, but they were louts, egomaniacs; they were not pleasing to God. So raising them in the religious community doesn’t protect our children and the next generation from its responsibility to choose for itself. Even if they had been raised right, they may have made choices; we can’t guarantee that.
Starting Early
But on the other hand, there are too many young parents today who, perhaps reacting to something in their own lives, become indifferent or uninterested in church and decide to leave it up to their own kids. It’s hard. It’s hard.
It’s like that little boy who was crying in the backseat on the way home from the dedication of his little sister one day and Daddy turned around and said, “Son, what’s wrong?” He said, “It’s what the preacher said this morning.” He said, “Well, what was that?” He said, “He said he wanted little sister to be raised in a Christian home, and I want to stay with you guys.”
We know we’re not perfect, they know we’re not perfect; they see it all the time. Their lives are not our lives. God doesn’t give us children for any purpose that we can completely know in advance. And yet we carry this huge responsibility to give them every foundation that we can because when the blues come—and they will—it is that which we draw on that will carry us through.
And sometimes as parents, and you young parents I speak specifically to you, you can’t wait until they’re 13 or 15 or 17 to get concerned about their spiritual life. You’re going to be working really hard. It’s got to start at the very beginnings of life.
A Community of Substance
I think if we’re going to be intentionally a community where people can bring their blues, we have to be a place that is giving something substantive in their lives. And that means teaching them to listen to the call of God. Little Samuel began his life with a mama that had prayed for him before he was born and who gave him up to God the day he got there.
And so Hannah’s plight is set in the context of a larger problem. The spiritual life is that place of learning to take the hardest parts of our lives to God and know that God is at work in that place. So as life goes along, you realize you do need a village after all. You need all these people.
And suddenly young parents, who could have cared less about involvement in the church beyond a certain point, come trooping back in again because they realize, “I can’t do this by myself.” And as life goes along, if you’re mature, you begin to think beyond yourself. You begin to think how you need all these other things.
The Importance of the “Village”
And God is in all of that. God is calling us into this community we call church. And a church that is a culture of calling is one that is always nudging its children and each other into more depth in this life. God is up to something in that.
I read a story about a grandmother who came and told her minister one day that she was riding with her grandson and he said, “That’s my church, Grandmother.” And she said, “Oh, that’s pretty. Is it nice inside?” And he looked absolutely clueless. She saw her daughter cut her eyes at the child as though to say, “That’s enough.”
She realized later when she and the mother talked that that wasn’t their church, but his friend had a church and so she told him, “Well, that’s our church right there,” so that he would be satisfied with that. The grandmother was crying. She said, “I don’t know what we did that was so terrible. My daughter acts like we’re the Spanish Inquisition if I just ask if they’re going to church with us while they’re here. I just want him to have, you know…” and her voice quivered, “all the stories and the songs and the Christmas pageant, all the things she loved when she was a girl.” She loved that stuff; she wanted to be the Virgin Mary all the way through elementary school in the pageant. And in sixth grade she was, and I never saw anybody so happy. What happened to her?
Facing the Future
Parents think their children want to fight the same battles they fought, and they don’t. It’s not 1968, it’s not 1978, it’s not even 1998; it’s today. And the things your children are going to face, you don’t have a clue about. It’s not the same. They don’t have your same hang-ups with the church, they don’t react to the same things in the culture that you did, they don’t even know most of the people that you thought about in that time.
This is their journey. They aren’t born into our ancient problems with our parents or the parochial schools we might have attended or didn’t like, or our problems with authority or our suspicions of everything that we didn’t invent ourselves in the ’60s and ’70s.
You see, kids are smart. And whatever you give them, they’re going to find their own way because that’s the way God made ’em. It doesn’t matter whether you give them nothing or give them everything that you’ve got; they’re still going to find their own way because that’s the way God made ’em.
Final Thoughts
So life in a community of faith is not about following crazy stuff; it is about giving them everything they can possibly have while there’s time and while they’re still listening. Anne Lamott wrote an essay in her book Traveling Mercies called “Why I Make Sam Go to Church.” She said the main reason is to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by.
And she talks to her son about God and they pray together every night, but she says, “I know one day he’ll probably leave the church, but I believe he’ll certainly come back too, because life will do what life does, which is to be incredibly hard and confusing. And there will be losses he barely survives and at some point someone will say, ‘Do you want to come to this funny little church I’ve found?’ And back he’ll come.”
I was at a meeting with Amy Dean, who used to live here in Birmingham and she and her husband Russ co-pastor a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. And they called a bright young man to be their youth minister and she said to me at that meeting, she said, “We know he’s going to be great because we knew him when he was growing up and he was in a church that we were a part of and we knew, as we say in the South, he’d been raised right.” There was a foundation there that could not be taken away.
Conclusion
And so I want the call of God to be the most important thing in our children’s lives. So when the blues come, they have something to draw on. I’ve met a lot of little kids down through the years and I haven’t found one yet that I didn’t love. When they got a little older, some of them I didn’t love as much, but when they’re little, you just can’t help but love them. They’re great. I mean, even the ornery ones.
In my second pastorate, I had these two little brothers named Luke and Justin. And Luke and Justin were just… the only way I can describe them is they were kinetic little boys. Kinetic means motion, you know, energy. They were just always moving. They were just always moving. They had to be jumping or kicking or scratching or throwing or hitting or bouncing.
One day we kept them; their mother had been out of church a long time. Somehow, inexplicably years ago, she’d come forward in a revival or camp meeting or something and she’d given her heart to Christ, but she’d never been baptized. And then she quit coming to church after she married a man who didn’t care about those kinds of things because there were the more important things like hunting and fishing, and he was gone all the time and never had time to take his little boys to church.
So, got to know her. She started coming; at first she started sitting in the very back of the church and she listened for a couple years before she talked to me. And then we baptized her and she started coming all the time.
These little boys were in the daycare that I would go to every now and then; we had a member of the church that ran this little daycare, it was just called Miss Henrietta’s. And I went down to Miss Henrietta’s one day and the little boys came home, Justin and Luke—I don’t know which one said it—but they ran home and said, “Mama, guess what? God came to see us at Miss Henrietta’s today!” Well, that’s about the highest compliment I’ve ever gotten.
We kept them sometimes for her to go do things, and they stayed with us one day and they really, really were bad that day. They first thing they… they got out on my car, they decided to see if you could sort of do a car like a trampoline. They got up on the hood and just started jumping. And they found out, “No, you can’t treat a car like a trampoline because because God comes out and yells at you.”
But then they really transgressed; they took Katie’s pacifier away from her. And this was sacred, and this is our youngest child. And so they kept taking it away and she’d start crying, and finally they took it one time and she didn’t cry, she just went… and they were so frightened they gave it back.
I think about those boys, and you know so many little boys like that all over this country, all over this world, just needing some adult, some RA leader, some Sunday school teacher, some uncle, some grandfather, take them fishing with you, take them to church, teach them what’s right. Just be interested. Care.
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