by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this morning

To rest for a moment in time,

And claim for ourselves

Awareness and gratitude;

To accept ourselves for who we are

And to open to whom we might become.

Come now, and let us worship together!

What do our children ask of us?  What do our children really need of us?  It’s way beyond Cocoa-Cocoa Puffs and Nike tennis shoes, way more than a TV for their room, or a car upon graduation from high school.  I will never forget the day I was just out for a walk and I came upon a distraught mother pushing a baby carriage, and speaking to a child, who must have been 7 or 8 years old, who was dragging along behind.  The mother said to this child, to her daughter, “I wish you had never been born!”  How would the little girl have heard that message?  Would she have heard, “You are not worthy of life”?  Would she have heard, “Nobody wants you”?  And how long will the child remember those words?  All day?  All month?  The rest of her life? 

I’m going to say something now that seems patently obvious, but which we need to remember: children are vulnerable.  They do not have the same defenses that adults do.  They are vulnerable physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.  They are developing.  They are learning who they are.  They learn by what we say to them and even more by what we do.  These lessons will be internalized and will become a part of who they are.  And of course as children grow older, the cultural milieu in which they live carries more and more weight. They learn the ways of the world, and they learn what the world demands of them.  This is not an easy journey.

I believe that our children need three things from us along the way.  First, they need to feel safe.  Physically safe, yes, but also emotionally safe—loved and wanted and protected from harm.  They need the presence of genuinely caring adults who listen, who soothe their hurts, who look at them as if to say, “Wow!  You’re so beautiful!”  Second, children need to grow up believing in values that give meaning to their lives.  Young people are idealistic—they need heroes and heroines.  They need parents who actually live by what they say they believe.  And they need to feel proud of their school, their church, their city, their state, and their country.  They need to believe that the institutions that support the principles of law and of goodness and fairness are sound and sure.  And third, they need to feel hope.  Children need to know through their very flesh—not just by what we say—but by who we are, that life is good, that joy is possible, that they can laugh and love and make a positive contribution during their time on this earth.  These three things.  Is it too much to ask?  To feel safe.  To find meaning in life.  And to be able to hope.

And yet by so many measures this society is not doing so well.  Our children here in the church are so well protected compared to many, and yet we all live within a cultural context, and cannot be separated from the whole.  There are some societal trends that are disturbing to me:

--A recent article in Time magazine concerned the aggressive behavior of kindergartners and first-graders.  “We’re talking about profanity, biting, kicking and hitting adults, and we’re seeing it in 5-year-olds,” says Michael Parker, program director of psychological services at the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves 80,000 students.  Violence is occurring at younger and younger ages—at first, it was in high schools, then middle schools.  Now it’s in elementary schools.

--The use of Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs has steadily increased over the years among school age children—and often with good outcomes—but are they being overused?  Dr. Peter Breggin, director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, testified at a hearing on the subject and said, “It’s a tremendous mistake to subdue the behavior of children instead of tending to their needs.  We’re drugging them into submission.”

--Obesity is a growing health problem for adults, but also for children.  The number of obese children and youth has doubled in the past 5 years. One-third of the babies born in 2,000 are expected to have Type 2 diabetes by the time they are 40.

--Each night an estimated 100,000 children go to sleep in parks, under bridges, or in homeless shelters.  8.5 million children have no health insurance.

--And college students.  According to a study done at the counseling center at Kansas State University, the largest of its kind ever done, from 1989 to 2001, the percentage of students treated for depression doubled.  So did the percentage of suicidal students.  More than twice the percentage of students were taking some type of psychiatric medication. 

Our children—and I say “our children,” because I think all children are our children—it seems to me, are increasingly feeling unsafe, are feeling that no one is there for them, are feeling that life maybe doesn’t hold that much meaning, are wondering where to find values they can believe in, and they are responding to their abandonment in one of two ways.  They are turning their feelings inward on themselves in depression, or they are acting out aggressively, in anger.  Both are symptomatic of a lot of pain in our children. 

The causes of the pain?  Let’s start with the way we live.  A true story from the Oregonian:  “It’s 5 a.m., the coffee’s on, and Liz Hersh is padding around her home in fuzzy slippers and polar-bear-print PJs, fueling herself with caffeine for what she calls ‘the first shift.’  In the next 3 1/2 hours she unloads the dishwasher, recycles cans, starts dinner, pays bills, tidies the house, rousts her children (ages 8 and 4) from bed, packs lunches, checks homework . . . hustles her husband out the door, sends e-mails, gets dressed, and walks the dog.”  She has completed the first shift of a three-shift day.  At 8:30 she heads off for work.  When she gets home, the third shift begins, with dinner and the bedtime routine.  Surveys suggest that about 30% of women and 40% of men are up before 6:00 a.m., with an early work shift like this, or a long commute.  It seems that working parents are trying to stuff a double life into a single day.  There is no personal time.  There is not time enough for the children, nor to nurture the marriage, nor to be a responsible citizen.  Is this the way we want to live?  Is this the way we have to live?

In the past 25 years, the amount of time that parents spend with children has dropped 40%.  Many families never sit down together for a single meal.  It’s often easier to catch fast food on the run.  (Speaking of fast food, there’s a documentary now showing called “Super Size Me!” which I highly recommend.  The filmmaker decides to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for one whole month, and you get to watch what happens to his system day by ruinous day.  At one point in the film, he asks 4 or 5 first-graders to identify some pictures—they are uncertain about George Washington (is he the one who freed the slaves?); and then the next picture they can’t identify at all—one takes a guess and says George Bush, but it’s actually a picture of Jesus; of course everyone knows the final picture—Ronald MacDonald.  The film is very engrossing—and if you see it, I can almost guarantee that you’ll never eat fast food again.)

So where is our responsibility as grown-ups?  We are the ones who are the decision-makers.  We can make choices for our families that do not mirror the values of the larger society, and I know that many of you do. We can control the amount of TV our kids watch.  We can insist that our kids are home for dinner, and that we eat nutritious meals together.  We can try to adjust our lives so that our children get the time with us that they deserve.

And we can work for changes in the larger society:  the food industry and its unregulated advertising to children—kids see an average of 40,000 ads for candy, cereal, soda, and fast food each year; the unfair tax structure that leaves so many working people still poor; the lack of state and federal support for a schools; workplace policies that don’t allow parental leave for sick children.  All these things can be changed.  And many of us in this congregation are working to change them.

These changes are the kinds of changes that would address the physical, the educational, and the psychological needs of children.  But what about the spiritual needs?  What about the need that children have to find meaning in their lives, to find values that can be worthy of them? 

One thing that has been weighing on all our hearts and minds this week is the Abu Ghraib prison abuse.  One of the most devastating things about this scandal is the message it must be sending to our children.  As one writer said, “The most difficult part about the abuse for me is what to tell my children.  What could I say to my little girl when she asked me, ‘Daddy, why does that man on TV have wires coming out of his head?’”  Our young people need to believe that our leaders, our institutions, are holding fast to principles that are righteous and just.  We ask them to pledge allegiance to the flag.  What can this mean, in the light of what has been revealed?  “My country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty . . . Of thee I sing.”

On the one hand, one might say this is the face of war that we have seen.  Atrocities have always been committed in the duress of war.  But sexually humiliating helpless prisoners?   Our soldiers did that?  Young soldiers from the Mid-west who grew up going to baseball games and singing the Star Spangled Banner.  Women soldiers as well as men.  What could explain this behavior?  Are these truly, “just a few bad apples,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would have us believe? 

No, I don’t think so.  The International Red Cross and Amnesty International repeatedly complained during the past year about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.  This is not new information for the Bush Administration.  According to an article by Seymour Hersh in the May 17 New Yorker, the army commanders knew for a long time what was going on, and they ignored complaints until they found out on January 13 that images were being swapped around from computer to computer throughout the 320^th Battalion.  Then they understood they had a problem—not a moral problem, mind you, but a public relations problem.  Rumsfeld learned of the images on January 16, and at some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush.  A secret investigation was begun, and the nature of the abuse was kept secret from even senior Pentagon officials—until, of course, 60 Minutes got the images and decided to show them.

How could the abuses have been allowed?  Ever since 9/11, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as waging a war against evildoers, a war in which the old rules do not apply.  So they justified a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, though there were no weapons of mass destruction; and we held prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely, without their being charged and without their being able to see a lawyer; Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions; and the decision was made that Army prisons would be geared first and foremost for the gathering of intelligence; and specifically, at Abu Ghraib prison not military police but military intelligence officers were put in charge.  The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into several sprawling investigations, including inquiries into 25 suspicious deaths.  Throw out the rules, and anything can happen—only the end is important: rooting out the evildoers.  And who would they be?

We have been shamed before the world.  We have betrayed the principles we said we were fighting for.  Our young people know this.  I hope they also know that there were people who refused to engage in these acts, in spite of the pressure from above—one who refused to turn dogs on prisoners, another who refused to take pictures, still another who refused to order his untrained soldiers to keep prisoners awake for days at a time—as he said, his 18-year-olds would begin to get creative.  And then there is the Red Cross and Amnesty International and the other human rights groups that have been working to stop this abuse. 

Why do we have rules, why do we have laws, and principles?  Because human beings are imperfect, and in times of stress, we are tempted to do wrong, and so we need the rule of law to guide us.  We dare not throw rules and principles out the window.  For any reason.  This is why institutions exist.  To keep us civil, to remind us of our best selves when we would be led astray.  This is why our church exists.  I want to remind all of us of our First Principle:  “We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people.”  That is why we support this church.  So that principle will not die—so that it will not die in the lives of our children and in the society in which they live. 

In this church we are teaching a principle: we are saying, “We know each child is a child of God, and we will do our best that all might have what they need.”  We will do our best to set our state and our country right.  And in that striving our children will come to have values they can believe in; even in the hardest of life’s trials, they will feel hope, for they will be the children of honorable parents who know what is good and hold fast to that good, and are unshakable in that holding.  You are those kind of people.  I know it, and in this world of daily news that rattles and disturbs, I am so thankful for you, for your lives and for your witness.  May it continue to be so.  Amen.

PRAYER

Father God, Mother God, make us more aware of the needs of the children—the children who did not ask to come into this world, but must make their way in it.  May we give as we are able to give, and may we be forgiven when we fail those little ones who depend on us.  In our busy lives, help us to use our energies to love those close at hand and to create a world that is safe and secure for all.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

And now, as you leave this place, go with the innocence and openness of the child and the strength and determination of the adult—go and help to heal a broken world.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.