Its for the kids.

You heard that one before.

We are doing it for the kids.

We are going to Disneyland this year.

We are doing it for the kids.

We put a pool in the backyard this year. We are doing it for the kids.

We enrolled the kids in hockey, soccer, band, piano, horsebacking riding and yoga lessons

Cause it’s all about the kids.

And when it comes to church, a family will show up in a church one Sunday with little children, and the dad tells the minister…

“Well the children are old enough to go to Sunday School, so we thought it would be good for them if they had a little church and Sunday School.

Never hurts right. I went to Sunday school when I was a boy.”

And the assumption is that church is for children,

For kids..

Now that the parents are grown up, they don’t need church…

But a little for their kids is OKAY.

And that is what is happening to Christmas too…

It’s all about the kids…

It’s all about the presents…

It’s all for them…

People call up and ask sometimes…

Are you having a children’s service?

I am not against children’s Christmas Service. We teach our children here about Christmas…

But it is this assumption that the birth of Jesus is this nice little cuddly and fuzzy story for children just misses the mark.

The problem with this world is not that we don’t do enough for out kids…

The problem with this world is that adults don’t know how to be adults. Adults don’t know how to be human. Adults aren’t mature enough.

It’s the adults who need church.

It is the adults who need Christmas…

It’s the adults who need to hear the story of Jesus and let it change them.

Why is that?

Because we are losing adults in this world at an alarming rate and by that I mean, adults are no longer being adults.

They are being kids…

In 1969, there was an end to one era and the beginning of another era.

Woodstock happened.

And it sort of signaled an end of an era.

It is hard to name that era, but maybe we could say it was the end of Parental and Institutional Tyranny,

Where the repressive “Father knows Best” and “What is Good for GM is good for North America” and “Big Brother is watching us” came to an end; and by that I mean the government, the church and other institutions finally were not the final say.

Now what drove society now, was not fear, not repression, not shaming, not workaholism, but free choice…

The feeling young men and women had was that they were free…free to choose their destiny, their future, what to do with their bodies, how to worship or whether they should worship….

Where our institutions reeked of the bald, the severe, the icebound, the cramped the bad, the tame….

Now people talked about the grandiose, the lofty, the radical, the free spirited, the bountiful, the unconditional, the cut loose, the free- wheeling, the free-speaking, the footloose and the escaped…

The new slogans were

“I can be who I want to be”

“I can do what I want to do”
“nothing is wrong as long as I don’t hurt anybody”

and it all felt good.

But the problem was in setting the children free… is that they didn’t want to grow up.

Today we have 40 year olds who still are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives.

We have parents who most desperate wish is for their children to love them,  so much so that they they let their kids get away with anything.

We have parents who want to be loved, but don’t know how to love their children, alternating between indulging them or abusing them.

We have people married for thirty years deciding its about time they did their own thing.

A number of years ago we had the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and the father, played by Robin Williams throws this huge birthday party for his children with animals like a pony and loud music and dancing on the beds and trashing his own house.

He loves his kids he says, but is it more about him being cool and loved. He is so over the top that his wife divorces him, and yet the movie kind of makes her out to be the bad one.

Imagine that, You are bad if you are responsible.

I talk to teachers who tell me that the students run the schools. The students don’t do homework, the parents don’t support the teachers.

A teacher I know routinely says that in her grade 10 math class, as many as a quarter of them could not subtract 59 from 87.

And when she flunked a quarter of the class, because they wouldn’t do any work, the parents were up in arms, the principal came and gave her a quiet reprimand.

Push them through, the school Board can’t afford financially or politically to flunk children or youth and keep them in school.

And it was interesting to note that one survey a few years ago found that the parents of teenagers were less moral than their teenagers.

They took as many drugs if not more than their teenagers. They engaged in extra-marital affairs more than their teens were engaging in premarital affairs.

They were drunk more than the teenagers.

They stole from their companies and cheated on income tax more than their kids stole or cheated.

We have gone from a repressive world. A world where we believed that basically everybody was bad, and every desire had to be repressed and beaten down, because we were just beasts waiting to get out…

To a world where we thought everybody was good… and should be completely free…

…but we didn’t get a world of free adults…we got a world where adults don’t want to be grown up, don’t want to be looked to for wisdom…just want to do their own thing no matter how immature.

We are in a world of immature adults who want to be young forever.

I know the feeling…

So what has all this got to do with Christmas, with this baby born in a manger.

Just this.

The Christmas story was not written for little children with nice illustrations.

It was written for adults who lived in a tough and demanding and even cruel world.

When Jesus was born, it wasn’t nice and cutsie. The little lambies and sheep didn’t cuddle with Jesus in the manger.

Seriously, I ask any mother here tonight if they would like to give birth to their first child in a barn in the winter, without any heating, without any sanitation, without a midwife or doctor….

And who shows up at the door first, the dirtiest smelliest people in the kingdom, shepherds. They don’t even know how to wash.

And then who shows up next. Kings from far away countries, who are foreigners; who are considered unclean.

Gentiles are not allowed in a Jew’s house in those days. Yuck. Do you know what they eat? Would make you vomit.

And then the baby is hardly a few days old, the King sends soldiers to kill him. And when they don’t find him they kill all the babies in Bethlehem.

This is not a children’s story.

Jesus was born into a world much like ours. A world where a lot of people didn’t know how to love, to care, to treat each other with respect.

It too was a strange divided world

A world of emperors and kings who didn’t want to grow up and considered themselves gods and immortals and indulged all their wishes and fantasies.

The rich were so fantastical rich that they were like little children eating and drinking and playing around.

The servants did all the work.

Yet it was also a world of repressive instutions and abuse and violence and stifling free speech and freedom in general.

And it is into this world this Christ Child is born.

And he is born to show us that there is a way to live. A way to grow up and mature and be fully human.

A way to be a man or a woman that is both responsible and free.

That is both serious and fun.

That is both playful and yet hardworking.

That there was a way to live in this world that was childlike and yet not childish.

That there was a way to be peaceful in this world yet fight for justice.

There was a way to care for people but not take away their freedom.

A way to truly be free but still have boundaries.

A way to live with others and still maintain your independence.

In the last 100 years or so we adults have killed over 100 million people. In wars and conflicts.

We have seen even greater disparities between rich and poor.

We have seen more money spent on weapons or minor and mass destruction than would feed the world many times over.

We see governments in so many countries ripping off their people and plundering the government treasury.

In our society we have seen a world where family breakup in the norm not the exception

And millions of children grow up without a parent, especially fathers.

Fathers who are physically absent and emotionally absent.

May I suggest to you that it is the adults who need to hear the Christmas story.

To hear that God is born in human form…

Which is to say that God comes to us humans.

Jesus can come to you…

Jesus can be born in you and make a difference.

Jesus can enter your life.

Show you how to live, help you how to live, give you power to be fully human.

May I be so bold as to suggest that he can help us all to grow up and mature and change this world for the better.

May I be so bold as to suggest that it is he who truly shows us how to love and what real love entails.

And so I invite you to think tonight seriously about your faith, your relationship with Christ and not neglect it.

We adults need Christ more than ever.

This world needs to know how to be truly human.

Because if we really want to do something for our children…

…then getting serious with God and letting him help us be the humans we know we can be, would be the best Christmas present we could give our children.

Amen.

Givers or Takers?

But imagine that you changed the question.

The question no longer is what do I need?

The question is: What could I give to myself?

How could I give to myself?

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