What do our children need of us really, as adults, as parents, and as the community of faith called the church? I found myself asking that question when the newborn infants of this congregation were brought before us and both the parents and our Sunday school teachers were gathered here at the front. The children looked so tiny — none of them able to walk or feed themselves or do hardly anything. If they are to become fully functioning human beings, obviously many things are going to have to be done for them and with them. What are they? I am sure there are many answers that could be given to such a question, but let me sum up my own thinking on the subject in two words; namely, acceptance and challenge.

What do I mean by these? Well, first of all, by the use of the word acceptance, I am referring to that crucial task of communicating to each child that his or her very existence in this world is something of enormous value. I think it is fair to surmise that the moment a child comes out of the womb and enters the realm of time and space, the little one begins to send out all kinds of questions into this environment. The infant wants to know: What kind of realm is this? What about my needs? Will I be provided for as well as I was back in the womb? And what about my presence here? Am I welcomed or resented? Am I regarded with esteem and delight, or looked down upon as an intruder or a burden?

Now, to be sure, I do not claim the newborn infant comes into this world framing these very words intellectually, but the little organism has its own ways of sending out these probing inquiries, and according to the way "the big people" proceed to relate to this one, certain answers begin to be formed at the deepest level of consciousness. The way a tiny infant is held and spoken to and cared for in those earliest days is tremendously important, but the process continues in one form or another all during our life journey. We never really stop asking the primal questions, such as: What is the world like? Is it well that I be here? And this underlines the importance of the relational feedback that we get from others. I agree with Myron Madden — nothing is more creative to the formation of a positive self-image than to have someone "to sparkle on you"; that is, to see a twinkle in another's eye when you come around that conveys: "Hey, I am glad you exist! That you are, what you are — the whole kit-and-caboodle that constitutes your individuality — is a value I celebrate."

Erik Erikson says the first developmental challenge in any relationship is deciding between trust and mistrust, and nothing is more helpful here than a delight-giver, be that person a biological parent or aunt or uncle or Sunday school teacher or whomever.

Let me tell you how the term "delight" came to be so meaningful in my thinking at this point. I learned it from a motivational speaker, Sam Keen, and what he said to his own father as his father lay dying. Sam had flown out to be with his father at this time, and one afternoon just the two of them were together in the hospital room. Sam said, "I don't know how you feel about everything you have done with your life, but I want you to know that as a parent, I think you have been a huge success. As far back as I can remember," Sam continued, "you never once let any of us children down at a crucial junction of our lives, and what is more, you did the finest single thing a parent can do for his child: namely, you took delight in us. You always made us feel that you were glad that we had been born, that you were delighted that we had come into your world, and for that one gift, I shall be forever in your debt."

Sam is right, I think. Delight is the finest single gift we can bequeath to any human being and while I am not sure about a lot of things in this area, of this I am confident — the little children you see here and all the children of the world need our acceptance and sheer delight that they exist in this world at all.

But, important as that is, acceptance is not all they need. In addition, these same children also need an authentic sense of challenge that they were put into this world for a purpose, that part of the value of their "being here" is what they can contribute to the ongoing drama of creation. The writer of the book of Ephesians says that we are "God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works" (Ephesians 2:10). The Greek word here for "workmanship" could also be translated "poem"; that is, we are poetic creations; there is a rhyme and reason for the structure of our particular being. I am a key that has been fashioned to fit certain locks, which means that in addition to my being of value in this world, I can also give value to the very processes that have birthed me. We need, I think, to underline this aspect of humanness just now, for the great emphasis seems to be on what one can get rather than what one could give. Jurgen Moultmann said that Narcissus rather than Prometheus was the god of the decade of the '70s, and this represents a "falling short of the glory" of what our species was meant to be.

Back in the early days of this century, Albert Schweitzer shocked all of his academic contemporaries by resigning his professional post to enter medical school with the thought in mind of going to be a missionary in Africa. When asked why he was doing this, he replied, simply, that he had received so much from Western civilization that it was unthinkable he not give back into the stream that had so nourished him. Thus began one of the most influential careers of the twentieth century. As much as our children need a sense of acceptance, they also need this understanding of their reason for being here. According to the Bible, creation is not finished yet. We humans, who were not in on the ultimate beginning of things, have been given the privilege of participating with God in the completion of his great venture, and not to know that and recognize our identities as co-creators with God is to miss an important aspect of our human uniqueness.

I am saying, then, that our children need both of these things from us — acceptance and challenge, and let me acknowledge that it is genuinely difficult to keep a proper balance between these two. It is far easier to emphasize one to the exclusion of the other; in fact, this seems to me to be the problem Jesus began to experience in today's passage. He was twelve years old at the time, which means he was not regarded as "a son of the law," and thus was eligible to go up with the other pilgrims to the Feast of the Passover in Jerusalem. How exciting this must have been to a peasant lad who had never traveled more than a few miles from home before! And to get to see Jerusalem for himself for the first time! The experience was actually so enthralling that Jesus lost all track of time, and when the people from Nazareth started home, he was not with them.

I have always thought there was a measure of neglect here on the part of his parents. How could you leave and walk for a whole day and not notice that your twelve-year-old was not with you? However, this is probably an unfair criticism. I read recently that because they walk more slowly, women pilgrims often left several hours before the men with some designated place to rendezvous at night. It is possible, then, that Mary assumed that Jesus was with Joseph and Joseph assumed that Jesus was with Mary, and so it was not until they got together that they realized that he was not there at all.

At any rate, when they retraced their steps and got back to Jerusalem, there they found him, unharmed, sitting in the temple enthralled by the discussion of the Law that went on there all the time. Mary could not contain her frustration. She spoke harshly to Jesus, out of that side of her maternal love that wanted to protect him from all harm. After all, Mary had paid a dear price in terms of shame and reputation to bring Jesus into the world, and there was much in her that was anxious to surround this special one from God with total protectiveness. However, when she spoke as she did, Jesus answered very earnestly, "Why did you even have to wonder where I was? Did you not realize that I must be about my Father's business?"

Here was the first inkling that Jesus felt a calling in himself that even his mother was not going to be able to understand. Already stirring within him was that sense of mission that would one day sweep him out of the carpenter's shop and into places and experiences that were utterly beyond Mary's peasant expectations. The working out of his own special destiny under God is what one sees beginning here in Jesus' experience, and this was not to be the only time he would be caught between the protectiveness of his mother's love and the calling of his Father's business.

What is at work here, of course, are these primal realities of acceptance and challenge and these do, at times, seem to pull in opposite directions. Mary, both here and later on, seemed willing to sacrifice to the challenge Jesus was feeling in order to maintain the security where she could continue to lavish delight on Jesus. By the same token, Jesus was tempted by the devil to throw caution to the wind and attempt to accomplish his Father's business by jumping off the pinnacle of the temple and that would have been equally disastrous. The truth is — both mother's love and Father's business have a legitimate place, and what our children need from us most is the wisdom to recognize this fact and then somehow learn to balance these two appropriately without either absorbing or excluding the other.

We all have seen what happens when children get nothing but acceptance and no challenge. They grow up to be spoiled, flabby, and largely unproductive human beings. Paul Tournier has pointed out that, ironically, the overly protective parent winds up doing the very opposite of what he or she intends; namely, bringing harm to the life of the child. He says that the overly protected and pampered child goes into the world defenseless. The way a person builds up immunities of any kind is through some kind of exposure. If a child is hermetically sealed off from any kind of suffering or challenge, he or she never develops the strength to cope with those realities and because a parent is unable to remain with the child always, there eventually are encounters which the child cannot handle, and what is worse, what strengths that child possesses are never put to work in the task of finishing creation. We do not do our children, or the whole of creation, a favor when we meet all their challenges for them. Acceptance without challenge is demoralizing indeed.

By the same token, challenge without acceptance can hurt people just as well. All too often, I fear, the acceptance that is so crucial to self-esteem is made a conditional thing, tied to the accomplishment of a certain goal. I once knew a person whose parents were extraordinarily ambitious for him. In fact, his whole existence was a pressure cooker of challenge. He brought home a report card one day and his mother flew into rage and said: "Get one thing straight, young man — C's are not acceptable in this household. Get this grade up or else." Needless to say, such challenge had a terrifying impact on his emerging psyche. He was also told something by his father that must have been a common saying of the day, because I have heard it repeated in many other places. It was this: "Should you ever think that you have succeeded, realize that you have set your goals too low."

Talk about a formula that dooms one to non-fulfillment — that is it, if I have ever heard one! How could you ever come to feel a sense of satisfaction about anything if that was the kind of expectation that was laid upon you? What I am suggesting is that while acceptance without challenge leads to a flabby, underdeveloped kind of person, challenge without acceptance tends to crush a person unmercifully. This man about whom I spoke wound up an alcoholic and finally took his own life in despair. That, too, is "falling short of the glory" that we were meant to attain.

I come back then to where this all started. What do children need of us, as adults, as parents, as members of the community of faith called the church? To be sure, they need many things and we must never fall into the illusion that we will perform the raising task perfectly. But for me, two words — acceptance and challenge — sum up our task. By acceptance, I mean communication to these little ones that their very presence here is a great value, that they do belong, that they are the objects of our delight. To accept is "to sparkle on another" with the twinkling of the eye. That is so important, but just as crucial, I think, is the sense of challenge that helps the child see that he or she is here for a purpose — they really are "God's workmanship — his poems, created in Christ Jesus unto good works." It is never easy to balance properly both of these tasks, as the life of Jesus so clearly illustrates. But it is necessary.

Thus, to that task — awesome as it may be, I invite you all just now "to sparkle on our children" and to help them sense the part of the Father's business that is their business — this is our challenge as adults. Our text says: "Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor of God and man." My prayer is: "So may our children grow ... please?"

— Tom M. Garrison