pilgrim people

A few weeks ago, a parishioner of Christ URC commented to me how the sermon on Exodus 13.1-16 caused her to think about her children a little differently. In that sermon, we heard how, through the act of consecrating the firstborn son, God was (among other things) claiming covenant children as his own. By paying the redemption price of five shekels of silver so that the firstborn son, as a representative of his siblings, would (symbolically) escape a sacrifical death, Israelite parents were made to understand that their children really did not belong to them, but to the Lord.

In the sermon, we heard how, as parents in the new covenant, we learn this same lesson through baptism. When we present our children for baptism, we acknowledge our complete dependence on God's mercy and grace for our children's salvation. When the minister hands our children back into our arms, it is not because we are the owners of those children, but because we have been entrusted as stewards of these children upon whom God has laid claim.

I pointed out in the sermon that we need to allow that fact to grip us and give shape to the way we view our children. Baptized children belong to the Lord by virtue of his covenant. God has called parents to be caretakers and trainers of his possession, raising his covenant children in his ways. Our children to not exist for our benefit. Nor do they do not exist in order that we can live our lives through them. Rather, they exist for his glory. 

A few days after I preached that sermon (which you can hear in its entirety here), I began reading The Letters of Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661) as bedtime devotional reading. The second letter in that massive collection is one written on April 23, 1628, to a Christian woman whose daughter had recently died. Among his gracious and comforting words to her, were these sentences:

"Remember of what age your daughter was, and that just so long was your lease of her. If she was eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, I know not; but sure I am, seeing her term was come, and your lease run out, ye can no more justly quarrel your great Superior for taking His own at His just term day, than a poor farmer can complain that his master taketh a portion of his own land to himself when his lease is expired."

Rutherford put this fact about our children belonging to the Lord in language common to his native Scotland in the seventeenth-century. He used the analogy of a farmer leasing a piece of land. This analogy is helpful when considering the parental responsibility of family worship, catechesis, and raising children in the Lord. Like the farmer leasing a piece of land from his master, parents have care of thier children only for a limited period of time. Just as a farmer must work diligently during the limited time he has on the lease, so too must parents work diligently if they hope to see a harvest.

Using this analogy, though, Rutherford in no way minimized the real grief that this poor woman felt. He was well familiar with the enemy death, and knew personally the heartache it brings. After pointing her to the Resurrection (as every faithful Christian minister must do in those times) and reminding her that we do not grieve as those without hope, he told her this:

"But this is not a challenge on my part. I do speak this only fearing your weakness; for your daughter was a part of yourself; and, therefore, nature in you, being as it were cut and halved, will be grieved. But ye have to rejoice, that when a part of you is on earth, a great part of you is glorified in heaven...Your daughter is plucked out of the fire, and she is resting from her labours; and your Lord, in that, is trying you, and casting you in the fire. Go through all fires to your rest; and now remember that the eye of God is upon the bush burning and not consumed...Prepare yourself; you are nearer your daughter this day than you were yesterday...Run your race with patience."

Most Christian parents I know would die a thousand deaths and more for their own children. In the common realm, there is no greater gift to a married couple. But let us remember that, while our children are indeed pieces of ourselves, they ultimately belong to the Lord by virtue of his covenant. Though they are of our own flesh and blood, they have been entrusted to us for a designated period of time. May God give us grace to use that time wisely, and be faitfhful stewards of his possession.