Loved into Being--December 12, 2024

Loved into Being--December 12, 2024

(Zechariah said:) "And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
     for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
 to give knowledge of salvation to his people
     by the forgiveness of their sins." (Luke 1:76-77)

Fred Rogers (of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and cardigan sweater fame) once gave a commencement address in which he asked all the graduates about to receive their diplomas to stop for a moment and think of the people who "have loved you into being."  He invited them to think of parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, teachers and mentors, and the like, all of whom helped to shepherd these students through childhood, into maturity, and now to a moment on stage with gowns and mortarboards.  

I have always loved that phrase of Mister Rogers--about "the people who have loved you into being"--because it feels very much like Christian hope.  We constantly find ourselves "loved into being" in Christ, nurtured into maturity by the Spirit, and pulled into God's good future.  Mister Rogers' phrasing speaks of a present reality that makes a new future possible--that sounds very much like what this Advent waiting season is all about.  We are becoming--like a seed sprouting into a new plant, like a dark sky beginning to turn colors in the east before the dawn of a new day, like the birth of a long-awaited child.

And I find myself hearing Mister Rogers, too, when I hear these words from Zechariah's song over his son, John, whom we have come to know as The Baptizer, the one who prepares the way for the Messiah, Jesus.  At this moment in the new father's song, he pauses his praise of God to turn to his infant son, and he speaks words that love him into being. "You, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High," he says. Zechariah is daring to trust what God has told him about his boy.  He is beginning to believe that God really is about to do something new in history, and that he and his son are perched right at the edge of hope to see it happen.  Zechariah's role in all this grand drama is to love his son into being--to encourage and nurture him into becoming what God is calling him to be.

Now, it feels important at this juncture to clarify the difference between what Zechariah does here and the strong temptation many parents face in grooming their children to be what they, the parents, want them to become, rather than enabling children to be who and what they need to become.  The dad who was a starting quarterback on the football team has to acknowledge the impulse to make his son try out for the football team, too, even if his son has no interest in the game and would rather play in the marching band.  The mom who was homecoming queen has to remember that her job is not to get her daughter to win the same prize.  The family that has lived on the farm for generations has to learn to be OK with a child who is drawn to the big city, and the household full of high-power urban professionals has to learn to be OK with the child who feels drawn to the soil.  Our job as parents and grandparents is never to force our children into some cookie cutter mold with a spouse, 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog.  Our calling, I think Zechariah and Fred would tell us, is to love our children into being--and to remember that God reserves the right to work through our nurture (and also in spite of us!) to bring our children to where God calls them to be.  I don't get to set my son or daughter's life-course based on what I want or wish them to become--I get to pour as much good into them and give them as many tools for their toolboxes as I can, and then I trust that God will guide them into become what they need to become.  That is hard to do, even in the best of times, but that is the nature of living by hope.

And that means, too, that for us who are ever in Zechariah's sandals, a recognition that it is not in our power to prevent any and all difficult things from ever happening to our kids, but rather than we prepare them as well as we can for life in a world where rotten things happen.  Zechariah's job is not to shelter baby John from anything rough or difficult, nor to hide him away from the meanness of a world of violence and greed.  But rather, Zechariah's calling is to equip John to be the voice the world will need that can speak up against the rottenness and cruelty, a voice that can offer a new beginning for people who have messed up and want to start over, a voice that can speak God's forgiveness and salvation to broken hearts who need to hear it.  Zechariah might not know it at this moment, but we know that John's story doesn't have a fairy tale ending, but leads to a prison cell and a silver platter, for the sake of being a prophetic voice that spoke up against a decadent and corrupt regime.  The fact that John eventually gets beheaded by the crooked king Herod doesn't mean that Zechariah has failed as a father, but rather that he has succeeded in helping to become the voice of truth and courage that God called John to be.  

I am reminded, then, of a beautiful but poignant line from Marilyn Robinson's gorgeous novel Gilead, in which her narrator, a late-in-life father, says this:

"Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."  

This is what Zechariah does for his infant son John.  This is what Fred Rogers reminded a class of graduates had been done for them.  This is our calling as well, not just for our own children and grandchildren, but for all whom we are charged with loving into being as well--as guides, as mentors, as older voices of faith, as Sunday School teachers, as reliable friends who can listen over coffee. This is part of how we find our place within God's grand design of setting things right in the world and making all things new.  

It may not be our job to be the voice in the wilderness, like John.  It is definitely not our job to be the savior of the world (that's Jesus' job, and we are not here to play Messiah).  But it might be our job to be Zechariah, loving into being the lives God brings into our own, so that God's new thing can unfold.

Lord God, enable us to love into being the people you want us to nurture, and to live at the edge of hope watching what you will do through them, and through us.