Prayers for the Children
David Orendorff · Luke 12:32-34 · August 12th, 2007
In “Les Miserable”, Jean Valjean is on the run from the policeman Javert for breaking the terms of his parole. In his running Valjean learns that his life is in fact not his at all, for he can never escape his past. Valjean has an adopted daughter, Cosette, who loves a young rebel named Marius. Marius has taken up arms against the French empire and now stands guarding a barricade that will certainly fall in the morning. Because of Cosette’s love for Marius, and Valjean’s own growing love for Marius, Valjean goes to the barricade to persuade Marius to leave. But Marius will not leave. In the night, when all lay asleep before tomorrow’s battle, Jean Valjean sings his prayer for Marius.
God on high, hear my prayer. In my need You have always been there.
He is young, he’s afraid. Let him rest, heaven blessed.
Bring him home, bring him home, bring him home.
He’s like the son I might have known if God had granted me a son.
The summers die one by one. How soon they fly on and on.
And I am old and will be gone.
Bring him peace, bring him joy. He is young, he is only a boy.
You can take, You can give. Let him be, let him live.
If I die, let me die, let him live.
Bring him home, bring him home.
Valjean’s prayer is our prayer for our children, for our world and for ourselves. When we have finally given up on our own power to end life’s current suffering, we turn to God. Often in desperation we pray and surrender what we didn’t really control, and turn to the only place left, God’s mercy.
It is in answer to this deep prayer that Jesus speaks in today’s scripture, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” There is a life time of wisdom in this one little sentence. If only, when we pray in fear of the present or future, might we remember that it is God’s “good pleasure” to “give” us the “kingdom.”
We want our children to rest peacefully in their sleep, to be brought safely home from every danger. And we want this not only in the time of our living, but we want shalom for our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren long after our dying.
So profoundly do we want this shalom for our children that we are ready to suffer, even die, that they might have it. What parent has not been willing to lay down their life for their child? Who of us in the face of a child’s illness has not said, “God give me this sickness that my child might be well.” Such love only deepens with time. I once watched as 90 year old Ruth Berquist cared for her dying 70 year old daughter with no less suffering than a mother with her newborn. All of us have loved someone so dearly that if we must die that they might live, we are ready.
By such strong love we are often likely to want to direct and protect our children. But just as his history and the terror of the world was bigger than Jean Valjean, so it is bigger and more terrible than our small strength and resource. Sooner or later we will have to turn to God in prayer and say, “God on high, hear my prayer. In my need You have always been there. He is young, he’s afraid. Let him rest, heaven blessed.”
Jesus responds to this most sacred of prayers telling us to be not afraid. It is a call to trust God not only with our lives, but with the lives of our children.
I remember a pastor friend of mine whose daughter at 15 decided to rebel in the strongest ways. She started hanging out with some pretty rough folk, got heavily into alcohol and drug abuse. She was picked up for shop lifting and then breaking and entering. On probation she ran away from home.
My friend and his wife were at their wits end. They had tried family counseling and treatment centers. They had prayed and talked with anyone who might have wisdom, and yet things seemed to be getting worse in spite of all their efforts.
My friend finally found some relief, he told me, when driving the back roads of Montana at dusk, weeping for his daughter; he stopped his car and shouted to the hills. At first he told God of his anger and pain; his anger because God wasn’t doing anything and his pain because he, the father of a suffering daughter, couldn’t do anything. And then he said he fell to his knees and gave his daughter to God. This was not a sign, he said, that he would stop loving or desert his daughter, but that he would simply let God provide the care, and he the father would just be there to love his daughter as best he could. In essence he prayed, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Suddenly, he said, the great weight of his daughter was taken from him. He could see her as the little girl she was, fighting to be a woman. And from that moment on a healing began between them. They quit fighting each other. She returned to school and taking her GED graduated from High School and went on to nursing school where she was succeeding in making a caring life for herself.
My friend taught me just how true it is that “it is the father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom.” It is not by our small efforts, as important as those may be, that the kingdom of shalom comes to us, but by the pleasure of the father to grant us peace. It is not by our puny efforts that love is made for all creation, but by the abundant generosity of our “good father.”
Marvin Shaw has written what for me has become an increasingly important book, The Paradox of Intention. In his studies of Christianity (and he is a Christian), Taoism, Buddhism and the ancient Greeks, he has come to a simple idea; "that of reaching a goal by giving up the attempt to reach it."1 Marvin Shaw, The Paradox of Intention, (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press,1988), 1. He calls this “the paradox of intention.” He illustrates his point with a story of his youth.
When I was thirteen, I went with a friend who was a year younger to an amusement park. We had ridden on streetcars for nearly two hours to travel the thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach. The first ride we saw on entering the amusement zone was a new attraction imported from Germany, and in our eagerness to get right into the adventure, we paid fifty cents and entered. We were led up an incline to a circular gallery looking down into a drum about twenty feet in diameter with its axis perpendicular to the ground. As we looked down on the people in the drum it began to turn faster and faster, and when they were pinned against the sides of the drum by centrifugal force, the floor dropped out. Through loudspeakers, an accented voice told us we could stay and watch, leave, or enter the drum for a ride when it stopped. My fear diminished as I decided that I would watch for a while and then leave, but when I looked at my friend we shrugged and went down from the gallery to enter the drum. Inside, I knew I had made a mistake, but the door closed and I was trapped. As we began to move my terror increased, and the screams of others multiplied it. As we reached what seemed an incredible speed, the floor dropped away without a sound and I was suspended against the wall. I had never felt such intense panic and helplessness. But then it occurred to me that regardless of what I did, everything would be the same. There was nothing to do but relax and trust to the spinning centrifuge. This was not a process of reasoning, but an event in which I suddenly became calm. Then I found delight in the feeling of motion and of being pinned to the wall. I laughed, rolled over, and drew up my knees while I pushed away from the wall with my arms, and found I could crawl up and down the wall. I was the only one doing this and wondered why no one else was playing with their plight. The drum slowed, and as the centrifugal force diminished, I jumped to the floor. I rode again and even attempted for the first time a roller coaster ride which had always terrified me.2 ibid., 79.
Two lines of Shaw’s particularly strike me:
- “There was nothing to do but relax and trust...” Much of the time we live under the illusion of our being in control. Only when we are at the end of all our power to change things, and most often this is in a time of crisis, do we really admit that there is nothing else we can do, that we are in fact not in final control of our lives and that perhaps we should relax and trust.
- Shaw also wrote, “I wondered why no one else was playing with their plight.” It is usual that we do not play, but stay stuck in the panic mode of screaming or in its more common, low key forms, such as anxiety, depression or whining. To discover that in our terror is also a chance to play with the forces that manipulate us is to trust that God is taking care of us.
And it is to our fear, to our prayers for the shalom of ourselves and our children, that Jesus so simply says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” So relax, play in and with your fate, and receive the kingdom which is gracefully given to you.
Shalom and Amen.